That, as he had believed, had settled their argument! But two days before this, she had appeared adorned with the best that Wertheimer, the Paris arbiter of the world’s fashions, could devise in the way of a realization of his “picture-frame” sarcasm; and the row that resulted had, this time, been hectic on both sides—with her scoring the final “point” by throwing her engagement ring at his feet.
Then, through the great “Electro-visional” dial attached to his general radio outfit, he had watched her “take off” from the roof in her runabout monoplane, had noted the reckless speed with which she drove it through the air, had chuckled when an aerial speed-cop took her license number and “tagged” her by shooting the citation into the rear of her machine, had seen her land on her own roof and, a moment later, had watched her “take off” again in her large touring biplane and rapidly grow into a tiny speck in the western sky. Evidently his Esmeralda was a high-strung thoroughbred, who meant business when her dander was up!
For a brief moment Algernon made a profound effort to solve the problem as to just how long he should keep her waiting before he answered her “call.” The nice adjustment of time to the particular individuality of the person concerned under the correlated circumstances enumerated, was a matter of supreme importance! Then, suddenly, the idea occurred that she might have met with an accident. Instantly he acted!
Touching a spring on the golden radio-receptacle on his vest pocket, he caught the released framework in his hand, slipped the catch that allowed it to snap into shape, and quickly adjusted it to his face. Then, choosing his words carefully and sparingly, he spoke into the pendant microphone with an attempted precision to conceal his thick tongue, asking:
“This you, Esm’alda?”
“Yes, this is me!” she snapped back promptly. “Who did you suppose it was? Have you been giving away any more of these ‘special’ radio sets to any other female? If I catch you playing any tricks on me with any other huzzy, I’ll make you wish that you had never been born! If—”
Patiently, and speaking more clearly than before, Algernon stopped the flow of words by interjecting another query.
“Want an’thin’ p’ticular?” he asked.
“Yes! I want help quick—right this minute,” she answered. “My leg is broken and I can’t move, and there is a nasty big tiger on the ledge right over my head just ready to spring on me and eat me up! I was flying west in my big ’plane, and I was out of our district where everybody knows me and papa has them all ‘fixed,’ and I was away out here where nobody knows me, and one of those beastly ‘Purity League’ sleuths caught me powdering my nose, and he chased me, and I ‘stepped on the gas’ and hit the two-hundred-miles-an-hour clip, and I thought of that new ‘Electric Spark-screen Broadcaster’ you had attached to the ’plane, and I turned that loose, and then I circled behind the screen, and that brute must have chased me into the ocean, for I ran straight into this mountain before I could see where I was going, and I fell a thousand feet or more, and I broke my leg so I can’t move, and that horrid tiger—”
Algernon’s stoppage of the verbal torrent was decidedly impatient this time.