"I am the Sheik Amut Ben Butler!"

The name conveyed nothing to her.

She had never heard of Ben Butler.

He turned the full force of his fifty-two candle power pa.s.sionut glance upon her.

"The notion of this game is," he said in his deep, devilish voice, "'Give and Take.' You give or I take!"

Verbeena immediately gave a shriek!

And she'd never done anything like that before in her life!

"Did you hear that?" she demanded tensely.

"And that!" and shrieked again.

"That's what you look like to me! A Shriek, Amut Ben Butler--it's what you are too! And a pretty loud and silly one!

"You let me right out of here! When my big brother hears of this, he'll be out this way and kick the fol de rols out of you! That's what'll happen. The nerve of you with your banana-skinned face and black licorice whiskers! Stand back, miscreant, I would pa.s.s!"

"May Allah bust eggs on my turban!" hissed the Sheik Amut Ben Butler, "but this is a saucy baggage!"

With that he threw off his magnificent, flowing white cloak and he hopped her.

He had her in a mad, palpitant chancery but Verbeena put up some great infighting. She gave it to him good--right and left into the _kish-kish_ (ringside and Yiddish for breadbasket) and now and again sought the point of the chin with a left uppercut that had hitherto always served her well. It had beautifully in that fight with the policeman.

But in all the many other bouts in which Verbeena had been engaged, kissing was strictly foul. It was sometimes permitted at the ringsides, she had observed, at the end of a fight, but never in the mix-ups.

Unsportsmanlike brute!

For as she let go a wild, desperate uppercut it shot harmlessly past an adroitly lowered chin and the next instant he had smacked her full upon the mouth.

A terrific, scorching smack!

It knocked Verbeena wuffy.

She could almost hear a referee, a misty, intangible wraith-like referee, giving her the full count, for the hot mouth pressed against hers was superlatively soporific, nicotinically, garliciously narcotic.

"First fall!" grinned the Sheik Amut Ben Butler the while he chucked the giddy girl through some heavy curtains upon a stack of soft yellow, pink, red (dark and light) gold, silver green and mauve cushions.

Yet Verbeena, remember, had verve!

Besides, she well knew the ha-ha the world ever handed a fallen champ or lady who claimed to have been drugged.

Realizing she was up against a losing fight, yet she arose for more trouble. Yep, up she came defiant if saggy. n.o.body had ever put her in such a bait before! She would go on with it--on--on--on with it!

She'd get him yet!

Yet only too well she knew that one more fragrant kiss like that which she had just put over and she must go whiff-whaff.

It had been a soul-numbing smack. And she felt her knees knockier than she ever had known them.

Also she seemed to have had just then a glimpse of her moral stamina and the vision was as of the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a high wind.

Her face ached, her left ear ached and more awfully than either her peculiar temperament ached.

Her face showed pain in every lineament.

"I ask you," said the Sheik Amut in his slow, awful drawl, twirling the ta.s.sel of his magenta sash, "what's the idea of kicking up all this shindy? Aw--take off your necktie! Do you expect me to be your valet as well as lover?"

"You----" she began in crashing opposition to any tomfoolery of a dark, questionable nature.

"_Spaghetti!_" snapped the Sheik.

She observed that he looked over her shoulder. She turned. She saw then a little fat man behind her just as he was answering reverently:

"Aye--aye, Monseigneur!"

"The----," the Sheik nodded fiercely at the little man.

She hadn't a chance. She knew it.

She saw the arm of Spaghetti only as it was descending. The hand held a canvas jacket of the size and shapely proportions of a corpulent bologna. And it was stuffed with Sahara.

"See here!" cried Verbeena. "This is rotten. It's not cricket. I----"

"Not cricket perhaps, but quite clubby," said Amut Ben Butler with his brutal smile.

The blow fell.

Verbeena vertigoed.

CHAPTER VI

When Verbeena came to she was the only one present. Outside she could hear the Sheik's horses whinnying among their oats and the incessant chaffing of his men. They swarmed outside there. And inside were other swarms. These were of flies and sandfleas. She was more or less grateful to them. They kept her for some little time from thinking of anything else.

But, of course, eventually she had to begin to draw a few conclusions.

The design of these proved cubistic and the coloring all to the palpitant pink, Gaugin green and yammering yellow.

She sought pushing herself around on the divan trying to get away from herself, but always returned.

Finally she sat up with her chin between her knees and her arms around her ears in a posture known to her blithesome boyish days as the "caterpillar crouch."

But by no mental arrangement could she devise for herself a dittology regarding the cataclysmic cropper attendant upon her career and felt herself, therefore, thoroughly unmanned as well as fatally deladyized.