Babe read Johnson’s note with a feeling of trepidation. She did not want to be mixed up with him again. She was perfectly contented with her present life. Still it might be advisable to see Johnson just once to close the episode. Besides, Pearl was persuasive. She had learned of Babe’s affair with Money Johnson, and she knew he could be desperate. It would be better for her mistress to go and see him and sort of let him down easy like.

“Ah knows yo’ don’ care ’bout Money Johnson, Mis’ Babe,” Pearl told her, “but he’d die fo’ yo’. Jus’ go an’ see him once—jus’ once anyway. Ah knows yo’ don’ care about him. But Ah knows how Ah’d feel ef Ah had a white man an’ he done lef’ me. But, good Lawd, Ah’s too ugly to have a white man. Hard enough fo’ me to git a colored man. Mis’ Babe, please go to him ef only fo’ a little while.”

It was early afternoon, and Babe decided that if she went to see Johnson she’d be back in time for dinner. Hurrying into her street clothes she called a taxi, and was driven to Johnson’s home on Strivers’ Row. Here she was met by two friends of Money’s who guided her to the apartment where the big negro had taken to cover.

This hideaway was a railroad flat in a four story tenement with two flats to each floor. The apartment Johnson occupied was on the second floor of this building to the right. Two bootlegger friends had turned it over to him. It was more comfortably furnished than any of the other flats in the house.

But Johnson would never have chosen this place as a hideaway, much less have invited Babe to come there, had he known that Big Ida, a negro stick-up woman, and one of his cast-off flames, lived in a flat on the top floor.

Ida had been Johnson’s sweetheart—that is, one of them—in his lean days. And though he had long ago discarded her, this gigantic wench believed that no one but the white woman, Babe Gordon, could have kept him from coming back to her.

She was sitting in her parlor window with the shutter partly open to get a breath of air, when, looking down, she saw a motor-car pull up in front of the building. Two men got out. Their faces were familiar to her; she knew them as Pinhead Pete and Liverlips Sam, henchmen of Money Johnson.

“Lawd!” Ida muttered to herself. “Whut’s dem niggers doin’ roun’ here? Dey looks respicious, too.”