At that moment a little cry just behind me from Louisa. Louisa had been packing with Irene—dark little, frail little Yiddish Louisa; big brawny bleached-blond Irene.
Wan little Louisa! She had been talking to Topsy, Fannie's helper. Her envelope had slipped out of her waist, and when she went to pick it up, lo! there was nothing there to pick—fourteen dollars gone! There was excitement for you. Fourteen dollars in Wing 13, Room 3, was equal to fourteen million dollars in Wall Street. Everybody pulled out boxes and searched, got down on hands and knees and poked, and the rest mauled Louisa from head to foot.
“Sure it ain't in your stocking? Well, look _again_.”
“What's this?”—jabbing Louisa's ribs—“this?”
Eight hands going over Louisa's person as if the anguished slip of a girl could not have felt that stiff envelope with fourteen dollars in it herself had it been there. She stood helpless, woebegone.
Ida rose Napoleon-like to the rescue. “I'll search everybody in the room!”
Whereat she made a grab at Topsy and removed her. “They” say Topsy was stripped to the breezes in Ida's fury, but no envelope.
Topsy, be it known, was already a suspicious character. That very week Fannie's purse had disappeared under circumstances pointing to Topsy. Which caused a strained relationship between the two. One day it broke—such relationship as existed.
Fannie up at her end of the boxes was heard to screech down the line to where Topsy was sorting chocolate rolls:
“I never. I called you nothin', you ole white nigger.”
“You stand lie to me like that and call me names?”
“Who say lie? I ain't no liar. You shut up; you ain't my boss. I'll call you anythin' I please, sassin' me that way!”
“I didn't sassed you. You called me names.”
“I don't care what I called you—I know what you _is_.” Here Topsy gathered all her strength and shouted up to Fannie, “You're a _heifer_, you is.”
Now there is much I do not know about the world, and maybe heifer is a word like some one or two others you are never supposed to set down in so many letters. If so, it is new to me and I apologize. The way Topsy called it, and the way Fannie acted on hearing herself called it, would lead one to believe it is a word never appearing in print.