Free Reply Paid by H. F. Heard Page A

my nurse used to call getting out of the wrong side of the bed—though the “bed” I had slept on, the broad ledge round the edge of the cave wall, had of course only one side for alighting and I had slept well enough. It was the strain of yesterday. I wasn’t fit to trail treasure with corpses as ambiguous signposts. I should stick to cross-word puzzles. Yet, with natural perversity, when Mr. Mycroft said, “Yes, we’re going back,” that too offended me.
    â€œBack when we’ve found nothing!” Then I paused. While we drove back the evening before nothing had been said to Kerson about our find. It was hardly to be called a treasure, but it was certainly a discovery. Had Mr. Mycroft told the trader? Caution did not overcome my irritation, but it switched it to more open issues. “Without breakfast?” I queried in a challenging tone. I was hungry and needed food. Yesterday had been very heavy going for me. Kerson looked round in an offensive way. I knew he thought I was a tenderfoot or greenhorn or whatever barbarous term he would use for a nature more sensitive than his own.
    Without turning from his baggage wrapping Mr. Mycroft said, “If we are to catch the late afternoon train we have time if we start in the next ten minutes. It does not stop where we got off coming up.”
    I bundled myself out and pulled on my outer clothes. I had slept the last two nights in my underthings. I hate doing this, indeed, had hardly ever before in my life done such a thing. And now there wouldn’t be time even to shave. My mood was, then, hardly communicative when we climbed into the car. I would not, even to satisfy my curiosity, ask why all the luggage was not on board. For a moment I cherished the unfriendly hope—so vexed had I become by all these repeated scratches—that they had forgotten part of their stuff (a silly illusion, as far as Mr. Mycroft was concerned). But in any case I was not going to unbend. I felt stiff with unfriendliness and the futility of our desert escapade. I wanted to be free of the whole thing and back in my own neat office with my neat work neatly served by my neat secretary. Nor did the long drive in the blinding glare of heat supple my mood. It grew more crusted. Under the high sun all color and relief went out of the interminable landscape. It was simply a tumbledown furnace—everything crumbled away by repeated calcining. How could I have ever found anything beautiful in it at any time of the day! Mr. Mycroft read my mood and in silence handed me some cold coffee—of course it spilled as we jerked over some stones. I swallowed a little, but the rest dribbled onto my clothes, staining them. The next offering—a sandwich of stale bread with pieces of perspiring cheese as the middle term—after a nibble, it so disgusted me that I frankly threw it out of the car. One of those poor little infested rodents could have one last good meal!
    I spent the next few hours expecting we should miss the train and the hour after that—for we did arrive in ample time and the train was forty-five minutes late—in wishing we had not jolted along without more than five minutes’ pause in the whole run. Certainly, my temper had deteriorated through the day and, disobeying the Proverbial advice, I let the sun go down—which it did when we had settled ourselves for some time in silence in the soot-covered train—on my wrath. We had no sleepers engaged. We jostled on through the night. When the dawn and the city appeared together I had made a resolve—no more desert detection for me!
    I gathered my last stale, desiccated crust of courtesy and said to Mr. Mycroft as we stood together on the platform, “Thank you for a remarkable trip. I think, though, you realize now that I am hardly cut out for real life-and-death detection. I am glad to have been of use in setting you on your way and I am sure that you will not need my small