“Wait. So, come night ’fore last, Fred and this Mr. Pike, who Fred just took up with, was back from they said they was fishin’, bein’ as neither one of ’em has got a job to his name, and we was all settin’ around in their room. So Mrs. Pike was settin’ there, readin’ a old Startling G-Man Tales that was mine, mind you, I’d bought it myself, and all of a sudden she jumps!—into the air—you’d ’a’ thought she’d set on a spider—an’ says, ‘Canfield—ain’t that silly, that’s Mr. Pike—‘Canfield, my God A’mighty,’ she says, ‘honey,’ she says, ‘we’re rich, and you won’t have to work.’ Not that he turned one hand anyway. Well, me and Fred rushes over to her, and Mr. Pike, too, and there she sets, pointin’ her finger at a photo in my copy of Startling G-Man. ‘See that man?’ yells Mrs. Pike. ‘Remember him, Canfield?’ ‘Never forget a face,’ says Mr. Pike. ‘It’s Mr. Petrie, that we stayed with him in the apartment next to ours in Toulouse Street in N.O. for six weeks. Mr. Petrie.’ ‘Well,’ says Mrs. Pike, like she can’t hold out one secont longer, ‘Mr. Petrie is wanted for five hundred dollars cash, for rapin’ four women in California, and I know where he is.’”

“Mercy!” said Mrs. Fletcher. “Where was he?”

At some time Leota had washed her hair and now she yanked her up by the back locks and sat her up.

“Know where he was?”

“I certainly don’t,” Mrs. Fletcher said. Her scalp hurt all over.

Leota flung a towel around the top of her customer’s head. “Nowhere else but in that freak show! I saw him just as plain as Mrs. Pike. He was the petrified man!”

“Who would ever have thought that!” cried Mrs. Fletcher sympathetically.

“So Mr. Pike says, ‘Well whatta you know about that,’ an’ he looks real hard at the photo and whistles. And she starts dancin’ and singin’ about their good luck. She meant our bad luck! I made a point of tellin’ that fortune-teller the next time I saw her. I said, ‘Listen, that magazine was layin’ around the house for a month, and there was the freak show runnin’ night an’ day, not two steps away from my own beauty parlor, with Mr. Petrie just settin’ there waitin’. An’ it had to be Mr. and Mrs. Pike, almost perfect strangers.’”

“What gall,” said Mrs. Fletcher. She was only sitting there, wrapped in a turban, but she did not mind.

“Fortune-tellers don’t care. And Mrs. Pike, she goes around actin’ like she thinks she was Mrs. God,” said Leota. “So they’re goin’ to leave tomorrow, Mr. and Mrs. Pike. And in the meantime I got to keep that mean, bad little ole kid here, gettin’ under my feet ever’ minute of the day an’ talkin’ back too.”