A heroic smile answered him. A joke, that!
“We are all ready,” she cried. “Mrs. Hatfield and Mr. Rickard can not come.” Not for worlds would she give in to her desire to call the whole grim affair off; let them think she was disappointed, not she. Though the world blew away, she would go.
She found herself distributing slips of mangled quotations. The white slips went to the women; the green bits of pasteboard to the men. She held a certain green card in her glove: “Leads on to fortune.” Rickard might come dashing in at the last moment, the ideal man’s way; a special, perhaps; it did not seem credible that he would deliberately stay away without sending her word.
“I’ve drawn my own wife!” cried Blinn, with exaggerated ruefulness.
Youngberg was moving through the groups. He could not find his half-quotation. “Who has the rest of this?” he was demanding.
Gerty read it over his shoulder. “Gang aft a-gley. Oh, the best laid schemes. That’s Miss Wilson.”
In a burst of laughter, the company discovered then that the guest of honor was also absent. Mrs. Hardin hurried them out to the waiting buggies.
When she had seated the chattering crowd, Gerty discovered that Tom had drawn Mrs. Hatfield, and was planning a desertion. Blankly, they faced each other. “Well, let’s get it over.” His words sounded brutal to his wife, whose nerves were flayed by the day’s vexations. Drearily, they drove together down the flying street. The wind was at their backs, but it tore at their hats, pulled at their tempers. Their eyes were full of street dust. Through the gloom, they could see the two finished words gleaming from the plate-glass windows of the bank: “The Desert.” Even dull imaginations could get that prophecy—the town blotted out by flying sand; The Desert come again into its own.
A flash of light as they were leaving town brightened the thick dust-clouds. “What was that?” cried Gerty. She was ready for any calamity now. “Not lightning?” Again, the queer light flashed across the obscured sky. Tom roused himself to growl that he hadn’t seen anything. And the dreary farce went on.
Innes’ partner was young Sutcliffe, the English zanjero. He was in the quicksand of a comparison between English and American women, Innes mischievously coaxing him into deeper waters, when there was a blockade of buggies ahead of them.