Miss Slosson untied the string and lifted out the pie which was tightly swathed in a piece of old linen. She undid the wrapping slowly while the interested spectators gathered close around her. The careful young woman in the bake shop had placed a piece of cardboard over the top of the deep china dish, and when this was removed Miss Slosson positively bubbled with delight as she caught sight of the golden brown crust of the wonderful pie.
“It looks perfectly heavenly,” she remarked. “Perfectly heavenly.”
“A masterpiece,” broken in the hitherto silent Mr. Wilson.
“I told you she’d bake one that would win in a walk,” was Jimmy’s contribution to the glad chorus of acclaim.
E. Cartwright didn’t have a word to say. He stood with his hands on his hips watching the two press agents with a look that still betrayed cynical distrust.
“Won’t you please put it over there on that little table all by itself, Mr. Jenkins,” said Miss Slosson. “It certainly deserves a place of honor.”
Mr. Jenkins grunted and hesitated for a moment. He was too chivalrous at heart, however, to refuse to obey a lady’s behest no matter how much humiliation he might suffer. He grasped both sides of the pie-dish firmly, lifted it high in the air and began to turn. Jimmy was looking at him with ill-concealed delight. As he watched a look of intense agony spread over the dramatic editor’s face. The next instant that gentleman dropped the pie with a sharp cry of pain.
“It’s hot,” he screamed, “red hot!”
The dish smashed into a hundred pieces on the counter and the surrounding atmosphere was filled with flying fragments of pie. Jimmy felt something warm and sticky on his face and he noticed with dismay that the front of Miss Slosson’s silk dress was a sorry looking mess. Tom Wilson’s clothes were smeared with debris, too. E. Cartwright was wiping apple juice out of both eyes and uttering words that caused the pulse beats of Madame Stephano’s personal representative to diminish almost to the vanishing point.
“A pair of damned fakirs,” he shouted. “Baked in Chicago, eh, and shipped on here by express! It hasn’t been out of the oven an hour. Thought they’d put one over on us again, did they? I know ’em. I know ’em.”