Mr. Jenkins grunted and hesitated for a moment. He was too chivalrous at heart, however, to refuse to obey a lady’s behest no matter how much humiliation he might suffer. He grasped both sides of the pie-dish firmly, lifted it high in the air and began to turn. Jimmy was looking at him with ill-concealed delight. As he watched a look of intense agony spread over the dramatic editor’s face. The next instant that gentleman dropped the pie with a sharp cry of pain. “It’s hot,” he screamed, “red hot!” The dish smashed into a hundred pieces on the counter and the surrounding atmosphere was filled with flying fragments of pie. Jimmy felt something warm and sticky on his face and he noticed with dismay that the front of Miss Slosson’s silk dress was a sorry looking mess. Tom Wilson’s clothes were smeared with debris, too. E. Cartwright was wiping apple juice out of both eyes and uttering words that caused the pulse beats of Madame Stephano’s personal representative to diminish almost to the vanishing point. “A pair of damned fakirs,” he shouted. “Baked in Chicago, eh, and shipped on here by express! It hasn’t been out of the oven an hour. Thought they’d put one over on us again, did they? I know ’em. I know ’em.” The tragic climax of Jimmy’s little three act comedy came with such unexpected suddenness that he stood in the midst of the tumult and the shouting like one transfixed. It was a rout, an utter and complete defeat, the most disastrous and the most humiliating of his career. In a flash he pictured it becoming a classic anecdote that would be bandied to and fro by his professional brethren in Pullman smoking rooms and theatre offices for years without number. He looked up and about him. Enemies were surging toward him from all directions apparently bent on his destruction. And then he remembered Tom Wilson. He turned around. That worthy had departed as if on the wings of the morning. The dishevelled and distraught editor had apparently exhausted his vocabulary of vituperation and was approaching him with a savage look in his eye flanked on one side by a distinguished looking gentleman with a most authoritative manner who had rushed to the scene from a nearby office. Jimmy realized that it was no place or time for heroics. He turned and fled precipitately down an unencumbered aisle in the general direction of the open air. He caught up with Tom Wilson two blocks down the avenue. That gentleman was still going strong and seemed to need no pace-maker. “The first bet I ever overlooked, Tom,” he puffed as he swung alongside. “What’ll we do?” “What’ll we do?” facetiously echoed the other, gripping him firmly by the arm and dragging him along. “Where’ll we hide, you mean?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Chapter Twenty-One