Then Piddie'd look kind of foolish, and go off and call down some one good and hard, just to relieve his feelin's. First thing I knew, though, Piddie was havin' star-chamber sessions with a seedy-lookin' piker that wore an actor's overcoat and a brunette collar that looked like it had been wished onto his neck about last Thanksgivin'. They'd get together in a corner of the reception room and whisper away for half an hour on a stretch. If it hadn't been Piddie, I'd put it down for a hard-luck tale with a swift touch for a curtain; but no one that ever took a second look at Piddie would ever waste their time tryin' a touch on him. So I guessed the gent was a bucketshop tout who was tryin' to interest Piddie in some kind of a deal. Still, I couldn't get any picture of Piddie takin' a chance with real money. It wa'n't until I seen him walkin' around stary-eyed one day, and gettin' nervous by the minute, that I could believe he's really been rung in. He was goin' through all the motions, though, of a man that's shoved everything, win or lose, on the red, and it was a circus to keep tabs on him. He makes a bluff at bein' awful busy with the billbook; but he couldn't stay at the desk more'n three minutes at a spell. Inside of an hour I counted four times that he washed his hands and six drinks of water that he had. "You'll be damp enough to need wringin' out, if you keep that up," says I. "Keep what up?" says he. Honest, he was so rattled he didn't know whether he was usin' the roller towel or runnin' over the ticker tape. Half an hour before lunchtime he skips out and leaves word with me that maybe he'll be back late. "All right," says I. "If the boss calls for you I'll tell him he'll have to shut down the shop until you blow in again." Maybe you've seen symptoms like that in a hired man. It gen'rally means that there's somethin' doin' in ponies or margins, and that next payday is goin' to seem a long ways off. If I'd been asked to give a guess, I should have put it as about two hundred bucks that Piddie had thrown into the market. Anyway, it wa'n't enough to knock the props out of call-money quotations; so I was lettin' Piddie do all the worryin'. He didn't show back at twelve-thirty, nor at twelve-forty-five. Some one else did, though. She was a nice little lady, one of the smooth-haired, big-eyed kind, as soft talkin' and as gentle actin' as the heroine in "No Weddin' Cake for Her'n," just before she gets to the weepy scenes. You could see by the punky mill'nery and the last season's drygoods that she'd just drifted in from Mortgagehurst, New Jersey. The little snoozer she has by the hand was a cute one, though. When he gets a glimpse of my sunset top piece he sings out: "O-o-o-o, mama! Burny, burn!" "Why, Hemmingway!" says she. "I am surprised. Naughty, naughty!" "Don't worry, lady," says I. "The kid's got it dead right--it's one of them kind."