Just then the dark eyes shining out from behind the veil gave her a sharp, penetrating look. In her shock Mary stumbled and nearly fell.

“Can she be the woman who asked me questions in that eating place, way back there in the little city by the sea?” she asked herself. And then, “How could it be?”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, stopping short. “I can’t go with you boys. I must not!”

“Aw, come on!” a boy from Texas begged. “You’ll never see a thing like it again.”

“We won’t be gone an hour.”

“Sure! Sure! You must come!”

They were such nice boys and she knew so well what it must mean to be escorting a real American girl in such a place, that she yielded and came along.

“And yet, I shouldn’t do it,” she told herself.

Before they were gone she received a second shock. Just as they were all piling into the car, a small man and a camel came shambling down the road.

“Can he be the little man I saw at the port?” she asked herself. It gave her a shock to think that this little man and the woman in black had somehow made their way here before them. This thought, as far as the little man was concerned, was short-lived. When he had come closer she saw that he was shorter than the other man, that his face was rounder, and there was a scar across his left cheek. She heaved a sigh on making this discovery, but her relief was not to be of long duration.

And so they rattled away, nine boys and a lady, the first they had seen in many a day.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Mary whispered to herself once again. Had she but known it, she was to be thinking that very thought hours later, and with regrets.

Darkness had come. Switching on the lights, they went bumping over the sand ridges.

“Rides just like that big ship of yours, doesn’t it?” said the boy from Kentucky.

“Exactly,” said Mary, giggling like a kid. She was happy but some sprite seemed to whisper, “Not for long.”

After rattling along for a while with the lights on, they snapped the lights off, but rattled straight on.

A dark bulk loomed up before them. Shutting off the gas, they, all but the driver, piled out and began to push.

 Prev. P 38/132 next