Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 6).djvu/107
their place, and waited for next Monday morning to come round.
"Two women fainted away."
"Naturally it came round, and naturally the Frenchman was on hand at eleven o'clock to stencil the girl, so as to be ready for the afternoon exhibition. He never noticed any difference between the plates he had been using and the ones I had furnished, for besides not being able to read, he was so taken up with making love to the girl, that he never had no time to notice anything else. It was the same way with her. She supposed that the stencilling was going on all right, and she never so much as looked at the plates, knowing that the Frenchman always used them in regular order, beginning with the top of the pile.
"He always began with her back, and when he had used up six of the stencil plates, he had her shoulders and forehead stencilled, and then went to work on her neck. The plates he used for this part of his work were the regular ones, and as the girl couldn't see her forehead or her back, she supposed they were all right. Which they wasn't, as you will presently understand.
"After the tattooing was over, and the Frenchman had gone to dinner, I took the girl into my office and kept her there till the performance began, so that nobody should be able to see her. While the show was going on she had to sit in a chair on a raised platform, where everybody could see her, and when her turn came the chair was slowly twisted round, while the lecturer told the yarn about her having been captured by Indians, and explained her diagrams. She couldn't help noticing that people stared at her more than usual when they came in, and she supposed that the stencilling must have been done extra particular well.
"How they chaffed that poor girl!"
"What they were staring at, however, was her forehead, which was stencilled 'J. H. M.,' being my initials, and they naturally wondered how the Indians came to tattoo a girl with English letters. But it was when the lecturer began to explain her, and turned her chair round so as to show her back, that the fun began. Across the back of her neck was 'Keep Dry,' in big letters; a little farther down was 'Very Fragile' and 'Handle With Care.' One arm was marked was marked 'Strictly Private,' and the other 'This Side Up,' and, as good luck would have it, the Frenchman had not got a single plate upside down.
"Well, when the people saw it they first laughed themselves sick, and then got mad. They said they had been swindled, and that the girl had never been near no Indians. One fellow said that seeing as she wasn't a leopard she couldn't change her own spots,