hands and six drinks of
water that he had.

"You'll be damp enough to need wringin' out, if you keep that up," says
I.

"Keep what up?" says he. Honest, he was so rattled he didn't know
whether he was usin' the roller towel or runnin' over the ticker tape.
Half an hour before lunchtime he skips out and leaves word with me that
maybe he'll be back late.

"All right," says I. "If the boss calls for you I'll tell him he'll have
to shut down the shop until you blow in again."

Maybe you've seen symptoms like that in a hired man. It gen'rally means
that there's somethin' doin' in ponies or margins, and that next payday
is goin' to seem a long ways off. If I'd been asked to give a guess, I
should have put it as about two hundred bucks that Piddie had thrown
into the market. Anyway, it wa'n't enough to knock the props out of
call-money quotations; so I was lettin' Piddie do all the worryin'.

He didn't show back at twelve-thirty, nor at twelve-forty-five. Some one
else did, though. She was a nice little lady, one of the smooth-haired,
big-eyed kind, as soft talkin' and as gentle actin' as the heroine in
"No Weddin' Cake for Her'n," just before she gets to the weepy scenes.
You could see by the punky mill'nery and the last season's drygoods that
she'd just drifted in from Mortgagehurst, New Jersey. The little snoozer
she has by the hand was a cute one, though. When he gets a glimpse of my
sunset top piece he sings out:

"O-o-o-o, mama! Burny, burn!"

"Why, Hemmingway!" says she. "I am surprised. Naughty, naughty!"

"Don't worry, lady," says I. "The kid's got it dead right--it's one of
them kind."

Then I wets my finger and shows him how it'll go "S-z-z!" when I touch
it off. That gets a laugh out of little Hemmingway, and in a minute
we're all good friends.

She's Mrs. Piddie, of course, and she's a brick. Say, how is it these
two-by-fours can pull out such good ones so often? Why, if she'd been
got up accordin' to this year's models, and could have thrown the front
she ought to, she'd have been fit for a first-tier box at the grand
op'ra.

"Chee!" thinks I. "Did she pick Piddie in the dark?"

She'd come in to drag him out shoppin' and hypnotize him into loosenin'
up. It was a case of gettin' things for little Hemmingway.

"Me, I go have new s'oes, an' new coat wif pockets too," says he.

Say, they wins me, kids like that do. There's some I ain't got any use
for, the kind brought up in hotels and boardin' hous