ng the Abyss!"--at the Kolossal!

"What's that?" Lily asked herself.

And she was thunderstruck when she learned that this was Jimmy's new
trick! She had no doubt left when, looking into a bookseller's window, she
saw Jimmy's portrait in _Die Illustrirte Zeitung_, the popular illustrated
paper in Berlin.

Her arms fell to her sides! What, she thought, already? All this
advertisement for that Jimmy? She had lost the Kolossal because of him.
Already Jimmy was taking the bread out of her mouth! She could have wrung
his neck!

Never had the New Zealanders, or the Hauptmanns, or the Pawnees, or any
one, or anybody known such advertising as that, except the great breakneck
performers, Laurence, the Loopers, the Motor Girl; and even then the girl
was packed up in her machine like a sausage. But "Bridging the Abyss," the
papers said, required art: everything depended on the exact impetus, the
faultless balance. The press was filled with clever puffs, biographies,
descriptions of the apparatus, the cool daring which it needed to try that
without a rope, to risk the performer's life six times in six seconds.
London and Paris were both said to have wanted the attraction; and Berlin
was to have it first; and _hoch_ for the Kolossal!

Trampy also was flabbergasted, when he read about this:

"But ... but ... but it's my apparatus and nothing else! Why, I patented
it in America! Do you understand now," he asked, without, however,
entering into technical explanations, "do you understand now, when I
wanted you to help me? It wasn't a question of the rusty bike! You've made
me miss fame and fortune! And to think that I have an apparatus rotting
away in London, in a warehouse, and that, if you'd listened to me, I
should have been at the Kolossal now ... and covering you with diamonds!"

"I like your style!" said Lily. "You'd have made me break my back in your
stead! I know you!"

"Oh, but I shan't swallow that," said Trampy, in his exasperation. "We
shall see! I have my rights. I shall enforce them!"

"Don't make a fool of yourself," said Lily. "When a thing has to be done,
it gets done without all that talk: look at Jimmy!"

"Hang your Jimmy!"

"It's not a question of _my_ Jimmy," retorted Lily, "but of _my_ money. I
should simply have flung it away! You, do a thing like that! You risk your
skin! Rot!"

Trampy, in his rage, would have boxed Lily's ears, had it not been for her
nails, which she held ready to scratch his face