And it come, quick. "Yes, sahib," says he. "It is that there has been lost beyond finding the lord sahib's glorious eye."
"Sizzlin' sisters! Another pane gone!" says I. "This must be my eye retrievin' day, for sure."
But Pinckney takes it mighty serious. He says that the dinner at the club don't count for so much, but that the other affair can't be sidetracked so easy. It seems that the girl has lived through one throw down, when the feller skipped off to Europe just as the tie-up was to be posted, and it wouldn't do to give her a second scare of the same kind.
Rinkey was mighty reluctant about goin' into details, but we gets it out of him by degrees that the lord sahib has a habit, when he's locked up alone, of unscrewin' the fake lamp and puttin' it away in a box full of cotton battin'.
"Always in great secret," says Rinkey; "for the lord sahib would not disclose. But I have seen, which was an evil thing—oh, very evil! To-night it was done as before; but when it was time for the return, alas! the box was down side up on the floor and the glorious eye was not anywhere. Search! We look into everything, under all things. Then comes a great rage on the lord sahib, and I be sore from it in many places."
"That accounts for your restin' on your face, eh?" says I. "Well, Pinckney, what now?"
"Why," says he, "we've simply got to get a substitute eye. I'll wait here while you go out and buy another."
"Say, Pinckney," I says, "if you was goin' down Broadway at eight-thirty P. M., shoppin' for glass eyes, where'd you hit first? Would you try a china store, Or a gent's furnishin's place?"
"Don't they have them at drug stores?" says Pinckney.
"I never seen any glass eye counters in the ones I go to," says I. And then, right in the midst of our battin' our heads, I comes to.