"Is it you?" says I. "If you're the Lady Brigandess own up sudden." "Ah-h-h!" says she, thankful like, as if she'd seen her horse win by a nose. Then she puts up the rib tickler and grabs me by the wrist. "Guess your lady friend's here," I sings out to the Boss. "Have you got her?" says he. "No," says I; "she's got me." But no sooner does she hear him than she lets go of me, shoves her head out of the window and calls up to him. The Boss says something back and for the next two minutes they swaps Dago talk to beat the cars. "How shall I pass her up?" says I. Just then she made a spring for that rope ladder of ours and overhands up like a trapeze star. An' me thinkin' we'd need a derrick or a bo's'n's chair! It wa'n't no time for reunions at that stage of the game, nor for hard luck stories, either. None of us was pining to hold any sociables with the Malabistos. We quit the chowder club on the jump, streaked up the hill into Mott street, and piled into one of those fuzzy two horse chariots that they keep hooked up for weddin's and funerals. "Where to?" says the bone thumper. "Head her for Buffalo and let loose to beat the Empire State express," says I, "but hunt for asphalt." That fetched us up Second Avenue, but there wasn't any conversin' done until we'd put fifty blocks behind us. Then I reckon the Boss asked the Lady Brigandess if she'd missed any meals lately. From the way he gave orders to steer for a food refinery she must have allowed that she had. Not having time to be particular, we hit a goulash emporium where they spell the meat card mostly with cz's. But they gave us a private room upstairs, which was what we wanted. And it wasn't until we got inside that we had a full length view of her. Say, I was glad we'd landed so far east of Broadway. Post me for a welcher if she wasn't rigged out in the same kind of a chorus costume that she wore when we saw her last, over there in It'ly! Only it was more so. It was the kind of costume that'd been all right on a cigarette card, or outside a Luna Park joint, and it would have let her into the Arion ball without a ticket; but it wasn't built for circulatin' 'round New York in. "Piffle! Piffle!" says I to the Boss. "They'll think we've pinched her out of a Kiralfy ballet. Hadn't we better send for yer lady-fren's trunk?" The Boss grinned, but he looked her over as satisfied as if she'd been dressed accordin' to his own water color sketches. She was something of a star, yes, yes! If you were lookin' for figure and condition, she had 'em. And when it came to the color scheme--well, no grease paint manipulator ever mixed caffy-o-lay and raspb'ry pink the way it grew on her. For a made-in-It'ly girl she was the real meringue. "We'll see about clothes later," says the Boss, and ordered up seventeen kinds of sckeezedsky, to be served in relays.