The wagon backed up to the morgue door. Louie had never visited the morgue before, though fated in the end to appear there officially. The plainclothes men, one at each shoulder, steered him inside. All was thick blackness; you couldn't have seen your own nose. Feeling their wordless way, the painstaking plain-clothes folk manhandled Louie into position. Then they flashed on a flood of electric light. There, within two feet of Louie, and squarely beneath his eyes, lay the dead Crazy Charlie, posed so as to show effectively that gruesome slash across the throat. Louie neither started nor exclaimed. Gazing down on the dead Charlie, he searched forth a cigarette and turned to one of his plain-clothes escorts for a match. “Do you see this?” demanded the plain-clothes man, slewing round the dead head until that throat-gash yawned like some horrid mouth. The plain-clothes man was wroth to think he should have worked so hard to achieve so little. “Yes,” retorted Louie, as cold as a wedge. “Also, I'll tell you bulls another thing. You think to rattle me. Say, for ten cents I'd sit on this stiff all night an' smoke a pipe.” Those plain-clothes artists gave Louie up. They turned him loose at the morgue door. The affair worked round, and helped Louie to a better position in the minds of all fair men. It fell in lucky, too, since it more than stood off a setback which overtook him about the same time. Louie had called upon the Irish Wop, at the latter's poolroom in Fourth Avenue. This emigrant from Mayo was thin and slight and sickly, and Louie argued that he might bully him out of a handful of money. Putting on a darkest frown, he demanded fifty dollars, and intimated that dire indeed would be the consequences of refusal. “Because,” said Louie, “when I go out for anything I get it, see?” The Wop coughed timidly and made a suggestion. “Come round in half an hour,” said he, “when the last race from New Orleans is in; I'll have the cush ready for yez.” Louie withdrew, and the Wop shoved the poker into the blazing big-bellied stove. An hour later, that New Orleans race having been run, Louie returned. The poker being by this time white-hot, the Wop drew it forth from the stove. There were no stage waits. Applying the poker to the shrinking rear of Louie, the Wop compelled that yearner after fifty dollars to leap screechingly from a second-storey window. “That's phwy I puts th' windy up,” explained the Wop; “I didn't want that chape skate to bre-a-ak th' glassh. Indian Louie! Spanish Louie!” he repeated with measureless contempt. “Let me tell youse ginks wan thing.” This to a circle who had beheld the flight of Louie. “If ever that bum shows up here ag'in, I'll put him out av business altogether. Does he think a two-cint Guinea from Sout' Ameriky can bluff a full-blown Mick?” Louie's flight through the Wop's window, as had his steadiness at the morgue, went the gossipy rounds. It didn't injure him as much as you might think.