"That"s lovely," says I, "for anyone that"s dead gone on the life here."

"I"m not," says he. "I can"t get out of here too quick, now."

"Oh, ho!" says I, meaning not much of anything.

Being kept awake some by their racket that night, I got to thinking how we could give that gang of grafters the double cross. There wasn"t any use making a back-alley dash for it, as we didn"t know the lay of the land and they were between us and New York. But most of the fancy thinking I"ve ever done has been along that line--how to get back to Broadway. Along toward morning I throws five aces at a flip--turns up an idee that had been at the bottom of the deck. "It"s a winner!" says I, and goes to sleep happy.

After breakfast I digs through my steamer trunk and hauls out a four-ounce can of aluminum paint that the intelligent Mr. "Ankins had mistook for shavin" soap and put in before we left home. Then I picks out a couple of suits of that tin armor in the hall, a medium-sized one, and a short-legged, forty-fat outfit, and I gets busy with my brush.

"What"s up?" says the Boss, seeing me slinging on the aluminum paint.

"Been readin" a piece on "How to Beautify the House" in the "Ladies"

Home Companion,"" says I. "Got any burnt-orange ribbon about you?"

It was a three-hour job, but when I was through I"d renovated up that cast-off toggery so that it looked as good as if it had been just picked from the bargain counter. Then I waited for things to turn up. The brigands opened the ball as soon as it was dark. They"d rigged up a battering-ram and allowed they meant to smash in our front door. The Boss laughed.

"That gate looks as if it had stood a lot of that kind of boy"s play, and I guess it"s good for a lot more," says he. "Now, if they were not hopelessly medieval they would try a stick of dynamite."

We could have poured hot water down on them, or dropped a few bricks, but we didn"t. We just let them skin their knuckles and strain their backs on the battering-ram. About moonrise I sprung my scheme.

"What do you say to throwing a scare into that bunch of back numbers?"

says I.

"How?" says the Boss.

I led him down to the court, where I"d laid out the plated tinware to dry.

"Think you can fit yourself into some of that boiler plate?" says I.

That hit the Boss in the short ribs. We tackled the job off-hand, me strappin" a section on him, and he clampin" another on me. It was like dressing for a masquerade in the dark, neither of us ever having worn steel boots or Harveyized vests before. Some of the joints didn"t seem to fit any too close, and a lot of it I suppose we got on hindside front and upside down, but in the course of half an hour we were harnessed for fair, including a conning tower apiece on our heads. Then we did the march past just to see how we looked.

"With a little white muslin you"d do to go on as the ghost in "Hamlet,""

says the Boss, through his front bars.

"You sound like a junk wagon comin" down the street," says I, "and you"re a fair imitation of a tinshop on parade. Shall we go for a midnight stroll?"

"I"m ready," says the Boss.

Grabbing up a couple of two-handed skull splitters that I"d laid out to finish our costumes, we swung open the gate and sa.s.shayed out, calm and dignified, into the middle of that bunch of brigands.

It wasn"t hardly a square deal, of course, they being brought up on a steady diet of ghost stories; and I reckon there was a spooky look about us that sent a frappe wireless up and down those dago spines. But, after all, it was the banana oil the aluminum paint was mixed with that turned the trick. Smelled it, haven"t you? If there"s any perfume fitter for a lost soul than attar of banana oil, it hasn"t been discovered. First they went bug-eyed. Next they sniffed. At the second sniff one big duffer, with rings in his ears and a fine a.s.sortment of second-hand pepper-boxes in his sash, digs up a scared yell that would have done credit to one of these Wuxtre-e-e! Wuxtre-e-e! boys, and then he skiddoos into the rocks like some one had tied a can to him. That set "em all off, same"s when you light the green cracker at the end of the bunch. Some yelled, some groaned, and some made no remarks. But they faded. Inside of two minutes by the clock we had the front yard to ourselves.

"Curtain!" says I to the Boss. "This is where we do a little disappearing ourselves, before they get curious and come back."

We hustled into the castle, pried ourselves out of our tin roofing, chucked our dunnage into old Blue Beak"s best carryall, hitched a couple of auction-house steppers, and lit out on the town trail without so much as stopping to shake a da-da to old Vincenzo.

I didn"t breathe real deep, though, until we"d fetched sight of a little place where the mountain left off and the dago police were supposed to begin. Just before we got to the first house we sees something up on a rock at one side of the road. Day was comin", red and sudden, and we saw who it was on the rock--the lady brigandess. Sure thing!

Now don"t tax me with how she got there. I"d quit trying to keep cases on her. But there she was waiting for us. As we got in line she glued her eyes on the Boss and tossed him a lip-thriller with a real Juliet-Roxane movement. And the Boss blew one back. Well, that suited me, all right, so far as it went. But as we made for a turn in the road the Boss reached out for the lines and pulled in our pair of skates.

Then he turns and looks back. So did I. She was still there, for a fact, and it kind of looked as if she was holding her arms out toward him.

"By G.o.d, Shorty," says the Boss, breathing quick and talking through his teeth, "I"m going back."

"Sure," says I, "to New York," and I had a half-Nelson on him before he knew it was coming. We went four miles that way, too, the horses finding the road, before I dared let him up. I looked for trouble then.

But it had been all over in a breath, just an open-and-shut piece of battiness, same as fellers have when they jump a bridge. He was meek enough the rest of the way, but sore. I couldn"t pry a word out of him anyway. Not until we got settled down in the smoking-room of a Mediterranean steamer headed for Sandy Hook did he shake his trance.

"Shorty," says he, givin" me the friendly palm, "I owe you a lot more than apologies."

"Well, I ain"t no collection agency," says I. "Sponge it off."

"I was looking for the Elixir," says he, "and--and I found it."

"I can get all the "Lixir I want," says I, "between the East River and the North, and I don"t need no cork-puller, either."

That"s me. I"ve been back a week now, and even the screech of the L trains sounds good. Everything looks good, and smells good, and feels good. You don"t have to pinch yourself to find out whether or not you"re alive. You know all the time that you"re in New York, where there"s somethin" doin" twenty hours in the day.

It"ly! Oh, yes, I want to go there again--when I get to be a mummy.

CHAPTER III

Say, you can"t always tell, can you? Here a couple of weeks back I thought I"d wiped It"ly off the map. We"d settled down in this little old burg, me and the Boss and Mister "Ankins, nice and comfortable, and not too far from Broadway. And we was havin" our four o"clock teas with the mitts, as reg"lar as if there was money comin" to us for each round, when this here Sherlock proposition turns up.

Mister "Ankins, he was the first to spot it, and he comes trottin" in where we was prancin" around the mat, his jaw loose, and his eyebrows propped up like Eddie Foy"s when he wears his salary face.

"Hit"s most hunnacountable, sir," says he.

"Time out!" says I, blockin" the Boss"s pet upper cut. "Mister "Ankins seems to have something on the place where his mind ought to be."

"Hankins," says the Boss, putting down his guard reluctant, "haven"t I told you never to----"

"Yes, sir; yes, sir," says Mister "Ankins, "but there"s that houtrageous thing fawst to the door and, Lor" "elp me, sir, Hi cawnt pull it hoff."

The Boss he looks at me, and I looks at the Boss, and then we both looks at Mister "Ankins. Seein" as how he couldn"t reveal much with that cheese pie face of his, we goes and takes a look at the door. It was the outside one, just as you gets off the elevator.

And there _was_ something there, too; the dizziest kind of a visitin"

card that was ever handed out, I suspicion, in those particular swell chambers for single gents. It was a cuff, just a plain, every day wrist chafer, pinned up with the wickedest little blood letter that ever came off the knife rack. Half an inch of the blade stuck through the panel, so the one who put it there must have meant that it shouldn"t blow away.

The Boss jerks it loose, sizes it up a minute, and says:

"Stiletto, eh? Made in Firenze--that"s Florence. Shorty, have you any friends from abroad that are in the habit of leaving their cutlery around promiscuous?"

"I know folks as far west as Hoboken, if that"s what you mean," says I, "but there ain"t none of them in the meat business."

Well, we takes the thing inside under the bunch light and has another squint.

"Here"s writin" in red ink," says I, and holds up the cuff.