game of
talk. No, he hadn't seen no one. He had been watching their excellencies
in their little affair of honor. Still, he couldn't swear that _we_
hadn't seen some one. Folks did see things at the castle; he had seen
sights himself, though generally after dark. He remembered a song about
a beautiful young lady who, back in the seventeen hundred and something,
had--

But I shut him off there. This fairy might have seen seventeen summers,
or maybe eighteen, but she was no antique. I could kiss the Book on
that. She was a regular Casino broiler. I made a point of this. It
didn't feaze the old sinner, though. He went on perjuring himself as
cheerful as a paid witness, and he'd have broken the Ananias record if
he'd had time.

"That will do for now," says the Boss, in a kind of
"step-up-front-there" tone. "If you don't know who she was just now,
we'll let it go at that. But by to-morrow you'll know the whole story.
It'll be healthier for all hands if you do."

Vincenzo, though, didn't have a proper notion of what he was up against.
Next day he knew less than the day before. He was ready to swear the
whole outfit, by all the saints in the chapel, that there hadn't been a
girl on the premises.

"Bring him along, Shorty," says the Boss, starting downstairs. "There's
a hole in the sub-cellar that I want this old pirate to look through."

If that hole had been cut for an ash chute it was a dandy, for the
muzzle of it was a mile more or less from anything solider'n air. We
skewered Vincenzo's arms to the small of his back and let him down by
the heels until he had a bird's-eye view of three counties. Then we
pulled him up and tested his memory.

It worked all right. That upside-down movement had shook up his thought
works. He was as anxious to testify as the front benchers at a Bowery
mission on soup day. We loosened the cords a bit, set him where he could
see the chute plain, and told him to blaze away.

Lucky the Boss knows Eye-talyun, for old Vincenzo couldn't separate
himself from English fast enough. But they had me guessing what it was
all about. I couldn't make out why the old chap had to use up all the
dago words in the box just to tell who was the lady that had the private
view. Once in a while the Boss would jab in a question, and then old
Vincenzo would work his jaw all the faster. When it was all over the
Boss looks at me as pleased as though he'd got money from home, and
says:

"Shorty, how's your nerve?"