Felt my senses just
growing numb all the while with the tragedy of the thing, the thought of
this coarse monster's touch defiling the dainty, gossamer garment that
had shrouded her sacred what-you-call-'ems--Oh, it was _awful_!

I wondered if the housekeeper could be looking still from her tower,
like Sister Anne in the story of what's-his-name! Perhaps, if I could, I
would better hold out just--

"Um--_ah_, I see! It _was_, then!"--he was nodding with an air of
understanding, pausing in the struggle with the refractory cigar. His
strained and reddened face shaped sympathetically. "Just what _I_
thought and told 'em!" he bobbed with satisfaction. "_I_ understand! You
ain't got no need to make no explanations to _me_!" and he lifted his
fat hand to restrain them. "Why, my wife's own grandmother had a club
foot, and to her last day if she got outer bed on the wrong side, the
old lady went a header sure--oh, _I_ know!"

A moment before, I had thought that so far as the mere matter of jolly
misery was concerned, I had sounded the what-you-call-'ems; but now my
dashed brain was reeling before this new horror! To think that _she_
was--but oh, it _couldn't_ be! And yet I recalled ominously that most of
the time I had known her, I had only seen her sitting!

Mr. O'Keefe exerted another vain pull at his cigar and poised it
critically between his fingers. "I don't seem to make this piece of rope
go," he remarked superfluously, and I thought his eye cut me with a mild
reproach. There was nothing to do but take the hint and produce my
case--just refilled in my room with Paloma perfectos. Oh, I was glad to
do it, by Jove!--glad to be able to do it--devilish glad to find I
wasn't paralyzed, I mean!

"Why, thanks!" His fingers only removed three cigars, but I just made
him take them all! _Oh_, yes, for the case would _have_ to be refilled
now, anyhow, dash it!

"By-y-y the way, sir!" He closed one eye at me as he carved from the
brown beauty a half inch of its waxy bud, using for the maltreatment a
perfectly brutal knife. "That was a neat try-on you made to copper the
thief yourself--a _leetle_ irregular, you know," he shook his head at
me, "but, as the captain said, we ain't making no point about that with
a gent like _you_--sure not!"--another imperishable line of beauty upon
the receptive stone, and he puffed inhalations of joy. "But I knew you
never could get him to the station--I could have told you."

"Oh!" I remarked,