all without a ticket; but it
wasn't built for circulatin' 'round New York in.

"Piffle! Piffle!" says I to the Boss. "They'll think we've pinched her
out of a Kiralfy ballet. Hadn't we better send for yer lady-fren's
trunk?"

The Boss grinned, but he looked her over as satisfied as if she'd been
dressed accordin' to his own water color sketches. She was something of
a star, yes, yes! If you were lookin' for figure and condition, she had
'em. And when it came to the color scheme--well, no grease paint
manipulator ever mixed caffy-o-lay and raspb'ry pink the way it grew on
her. For a made-in-It'ly girl she was the real meringue.

"We'll see about clothes later," says the Boss, and ordered up seventeen
kinds of sckeezedsky, to be served in relays.

She brought her appetite with her, all right, even if she had mislaid
her suit case. And, while she was pitchin' into what passes for grub on
Second Avenue, she told the Boss the story of her life. Leastways,
that's what it sounded like to me.

The way I gets it from the Boss was like this: Her father, the old
brigand pantanta, couldn't get over the way we'd bansheed his bunch of
third rate kidnappers with our tin armor play. He accumulated a sort of
ingrowin' grouch and soured on the whole push because they wouldn't turn
state's evidence as to who had given us the dope to do 'em.

The Lady Brigandess she had stood that for a while, until one day she
gets her Irish up, tells the old man how she tipped us off herself, and
then makes tracks out of the country. One way and another she'd heard a
lot about America. So she takes out yellow tickets on a few spare
sparks and buys a steerage berth for New York.

Well, she hadn't more'n got past Sandy Hook before a Malabisto runner
spotted her. So did the advance man of another gang. They sized up the
gold hoops in her ears, her real money necklace and some of the other
furniture she sported, and they invited her home to tea. Just how the
scrap began or what it was all about she didn't know, so the story by
rounds hasn't been told. The next thing she knew though, they'd hustled
her into the Bend and bottled her up in that back room, but not before
she'd done a little extemporaneous carvin' on her own account. I
gathered that three or four of the Malabistos needed some plain sewin'
done on 'em after the bell rang, and that the rest wasn't so anxious for
her society as at first. She'd been cooped up for two days when she
managed to