what's that?"

"How about them swell dames that used to go wild over you?" comes back
Skip.

Old Jones gazes up at Skip kind of mild and puzzled. Then he shakes his
head slow. "No," says he. "Not me. If--if they did I--I must have
forgot."

Which sets the bunch to howlin' at Skip. "There! Maybe that'll hold you,
eh?" someone remarks. And as they drift off Jonesey tackles a slice of
lunch-room pie placid.

It struck me as rather neat, comin' from the old boy. He must have
forgot! I had a chuckle over that all by myself. What could Jonesey have
to forget? They tell me he's been with the Corrugated twenty years or
more. Why, he must have been on the payroll before some of them young
sports was born. And for the last fifteen he's held the same old
job--assistant filin' clerk. Some life, eh?

About all we know of Old Jones is that he lives in a little back room
down on lower Sixth Avenue with a mangy green parrot nearly as old as he
is. They say he baches it there, cookin' his meals on a one-burner oil
stove, never reportin' sick, never takin' a vacation, and never gettin'
above Thirty-third Street or below Fourteenth.

Course, so far as the force is concerned, he's just so much dead wood.
Every shake-up we have somebody wants to fire him, or pension him off.
But Mr. Ellins won't have it. "No," says he. "Let him stay on." And you
bet Jonesey stays. He drills around, fussin' over the files, doing
things just the way he did twenty years ago, I suppose, but never
gettin' in anybody's way or pullin' any grouch. I've got so I don't
notice him any more than as if he was somebody's shadow passin' by. You
know, he's just a blank. And if it wasn't for them bond-room humorists
cuttin' loose at him once in a while I'd almost forget whether he was
still on the staff or not.

It was this same afternoon, along about 2:30, that I gets a call from
Old Hickory's private office and finds this picturesque lookin' bird
with the three piece white lip whiskers and the premature Panama lid
glarin' indignant at the boss.

"Torchy," says Mr. Ellins, glancin' at a card, "this is Senor Don Pedro
Cassaba y Tarragona."

"Oh, yes!" says I, just as though I wasn't surprised a bit.

"Senor Don Pedro and so on," adds Old Hickory, "is from Havana, and for
the last half hour he has been trying to tell me something very
important, I've no doubt, to him. As it happens I am rather busy on some
affairs of my own and I--er--Oh, for the love of soup,