a, Samp?"

"The--ah--the tattooed woman? Yes, very well, indeed."

"Ha, you sly Samp! I spik about da leetle ploompa gal--da Mug."

"Oh! Muggie? Castellani's daughter?"

"Ha."

"Well, I don't know her so very well."

"You don' know da Mugga?" Bat's look was becoming dangerously fierce.
He straightened himself up from his lounging posture, and his big
muscles swelled. "You don' know da Mugga! You tink I no see. You loafa
da Mugga! You wanta marry her! You tink 'er reecha, pooty. You miseraba
sneaka!" Here Bat, who had worked himself into a fury, swore an
eloquent Italian oath.

Sampey's time had come. The two men were alone,--Bat furious and
desperate with jealousy; Sampey fearful, but determined; brutality
against wit, strength against cunning, fury against patience, a bulldog
matched with a mink, a game-cock pitted against an owl.

Sampey pretended to have dropped something accidentally. He stooped to
pick it up, and some seconds elapsed before he pretended to have found
it. While he was searching for it he approached nearer to Bat, and when
he straightened up he brought his face very close to Bat's, and
suddenly raised his eyes and stared steadily into those of the Wild Man
of Milo.

Bat meanwhile had kept up an insulting tirade, his evident purpose
being to force the gentle writer into a fight. But when Sampey raised
his eyes and fixed them in a peculiar stare, Bat regarded him a moment
in speechless wonder, and then sprang back with a livid face, and in
terror cried out:

"Santa Maria!"

For half a minute he gazed, horrified, at the sight which confronted
him, his mouth open, his eyes staring--fascinated, terror-stricken, and
aghast. Sampey, the gentle, usually dove-eyed, was now transformed.
Those were not the accustomed gray eyes with which Bat was familiar,
nor yet the limpid, amber eyes which had set poor Zoe's heart bounding;
Sampey gazed upon his victim with eyes that were a fierce and
insurrectionary scarlet!

Bat, contumelious now no longer, dashed wildly away. He spread his
wonderful tale. Castellani, whom it finally reached, frowned, thinking
that Bat was drunk. The Tattooed Lady laughed outright. Zoe wondered
and was troubled; but that night, just before the curtain of her gilt
booth was drawn at the close of the exhibition, there stood her hero
Sampey, gazing tenderly at her with eyes of a soft, pale, limpid amber.
And she slept soundly after that.

When Sampey visited the museum next d