e you to refuse an offer
from the T. T. and sit hatching your schemes on your little old 'steen
dollars a week! ... It'll have to be twice 'steen, now, I suppose?"

"All right, just as you say," I laughed. "But why aren't you in the
Trust, Fred Obermuller?"

"Why aren't you in society, Nance?"

"Um!--well, because society's prejudiced against lifting, but the Trust
isn't. Do you know that's a great graft, Mr. Obermuller--lifting
wholesale? Why don't you get in?"

"Because a Trust is a lot of sailors on a raft who keep their places by
kicking off the drowning hands that clutch at it. Can you fancy a
fellow like Tausig stooping down to help me tenderly on board to divide
the pickings?"

"No, but I can fancy you grappling with him till he'd be glad to take
you on rather than be pulled off himself."

"You'd be in with the push, would you, Olden, if you were managing?" he
asked with a grin.

"I'd be at the top, wherever that was."

"Then why the deuce didn't you jump at Tausig's offer? Were you really
crafty enough--"

"I am artiste, Monsieur Obermuller," I gutturaled like Mademoiselle
Picotte, who dances on the wire. "I moost have about me those who
arre--who arre congeniale--"

"You monkey!" he laughed. "Then, when Tausig comes to buy your
contract--"

"We'll tell him to go to thunder."

He laughed. Say, Mag, that big fellow is like a boy when he's pleased.
I guess that's what makes it such fun to please him.

"And I, who admired your business sagacity in holding off, Nance!" he
said.

"I thought you admired my take-off! of Mademoiselle Picotte."

"Well?"

"Well, why don't you make use of it? Take me round to the theaters and
let me mimic all the swell actors and actresses. I've got more chance
with you than with that Trust gang. They wouldn't give me room to do
my own stunt; they'd make me fit into theirs. But you--"

"But me! You think you can wind me round your finger?"

"Not--yet."

He chuckled. I thought I had him going. I saw Nance Olden spending
her evenings at the big Broadway theaters, when, just at that minute,
Ginger, the call-boy, burst in with a note.

Say, Mag, I wouldn't like to get that man Obermuller hopping mad at me,
and Nancy Olden's no coward, either. But the way he gritted his teeth
at that note and the devil in his eyes when he lifted them from it,
made me wonder how I'd ever dared be facetious with him.

I got up to go. He'd forgotten me, but he looke