“The Sheik of Baalbec!” she repeated. “I have heard so much of him, but have never seen him. That is just the thing!”
“You shall try your skill with him,” I said. “You shall meet him face to face, look into his evil glassy eyes, watch his brown fingers move on mechanical levers, see his lungs and heart of geared wheels and little pulleys and—”
“And what?” she cried.
“Battle with him—wit against wit—skill against skill—and win!”
“You seem to bear the Sheik a grudge,” she said, and as we went up the steps of the old Natural History Building, where romping children of the tenements scattered banana peels and papers, she repeated the remark.
“I’ve taken a dislike to the automaton,” I said. “It is an uncanny creature. It gives me the impression of an evil soul attached to a lot of metallic gears. Personally I should be glad to have the opportunity of tearing it to pieces and seeing it scattered on the ground—a heap of red cotton rags, hair stuffing, and broken levers.”
My earnestness, however, only caused her to tilt her rounded chin in air and laugh as only she can laugh. Having persuaded the girl at the ticket office that the dog with us would do no harm, we had already entered and were passing through the exhibit of figures.
“Possibly you feel the same way toward this waxy Bismarck who looks so much more like a brewer than a general,” said she, “or toward this Catherine of Russia who, I understand, was not a very refined queen, and who here shows it by wearing a ruff that should have gone to the laundry a year ago or more.”
“No,” I replied. “If they let me alone, it matters not to me when they are melted down for candles. My enemy is the fellow in the corner there with the group of country persons around him. Perhaps we shall not have a chance to play a game with him this afternoon.”
Fortunately, however, just as we came up toward the gloomy corner, there was a shout of bantering laughter from those whom, offhand, I should have called Aunt Lou, Cousin Becky, Brother Bob, and Milly Snagg, and we saw that the automaton had just dispatched his opponent—the fifth member of the party, a well-bronzed countryman, with a shaved neck and prominent ears. The mechanical eye had drawn down its brown lid in a hideous wink, much to the discomfiture of the champion of some rural village.