"You'll bring up nothin'," says I, reachin' out with one hand and gettin' a grip on the collar of his silk jacket. "Now get busy, or off comes your kimono." With that he quits kiddin' and goes to work on Miriam's fingers, and in about a minute she gives a little jump, like she'd just heard the breakfast bell. "Why!" says she. "Where am I?" "Right where you landed five minutes ago," says I. Then she shudders all over and squeals: "Oh! A man! A man!" "Sure," says I, "you didn't take me for a Morris chair, did you?" Miriam didn't linger for any more. She lets loose a holler that near splits me ear open, slides down so fast that her bare tootsies hit the floor with a spat, grabs her what-d'ye-call-it up away from her ankles with both hands, and sprints down the hall as if she was makin' for the last car. "Say," says I, gettin' me neck out of crook, "I wish that thought had come to her sooner. I feel as if I'd been squeezed by a pair of ice-tongs. If she can hug like that in her sleep, what could she do when she was wide awake?" "Shorty," says Pinckney, with his face as solemn as a preacher's, "I'm pained and astonished at this." "Me, too," says I. "Don't jest," says he. "This looks to me like an attempt at kidnapping." "If you'd had that grip on you, I guess you'd have thought it was the real thing," says I. "But here's a little tip I want to pass on to you: Don't go spreadin' this josh business around the lot, or your show'll be minus a star act. I'll stand for all the private kiddin' you can hand out, but I've got my objections to playin' a public joke-book part. Now, will you quit?" He was mighty disappointed at havin' to do it, but he gave his word, and I makes tracks up stairs, glad enough to be let off so easy. "It was a queer kind of a faint, if that's what it was," says I to myself. "I'll bet I fights shy of anything more of the kind that I sees comin' my way. This is what I gets for strayin' so far from Broadway." But a little thing like that don't interfere with my sleepin', when slumber's on the card, and I proceeds to tear off what was due me on the eight-hour sched., and maybe a little more. I didn't get a sight of Miriam all day long. Not that I was strainin' my eyes any. There was somethin' better to look at--Sadie, for instance. 'Course Pinckney was bossin' the show, but she was bossin' him, and anyone else that was handy. They were goin' to pull off the racket in the ball-room, and Sadie found a lot to do to it. She's a hummer, Sadie is. Maybe she wa'n't brought up among bow-legged English butlers and a lot of Swedish maids, but she's learned the trick of gettin' 'em to break their necks for her whenever she says the word.