Mamie clutched him by the arm and helped him into an armchair. "You just set right there, Reverend, and tell me what happened," she said.

He clutched his left side as though in great pain and croaked in a breathless voice, "I went into the bedroom to get a breath of fresh air, and while I was standing in the window watching a policeman chasing a thief, Chink Charlie sneaked up behind me and pushed me out of the window."

"My God!" Mamie exclaimed. "Then he was trying to kill you."

"Of course he was."

Alamena looked down at the twitching bony face of Reverend Short and said in a reassuring tone, "Mamie, he's just drunk."

"I'm not the least bit drunk," he denied. "I've never drunk a drop of intoxicating liquor in my life."

"Where's Chink?" Mamie asked, looking about. "Chink!" she called. "Somebody get Chink in here."

"He's gone," Alamena said. "He left while you and Dulcy were in the crapper."

"Your preacher's just making that up, Aunt Mamie," Dulcy said. "Just 'cause him and Chink had an argument 'bout the guests you got here."

Mamie looked from her to Reverend Short. "What's wrong with 'em?"

She intended the question for Reverend Short, but Dulcy answered. "He said there shouldn't be nobody here but church members and Big Joe's lodge brothers, and Chink told him he was forgetting that Big Joe was a gambler himself."

"I'm not saying that Big Joe didn't sin," Reverend Short said in his loud pulpit voice, forgetting for the moment he was an invalid. "But Big Joe was a dining-car cook on the Pennsylvania Railroad for more than twenty years, and he was a member of The First Holy Roller Church of Harlem, and that's how God sees him."

"But these folks here is all his friends," Mamie protested with a look of bewilderment. "Folks who worked with him and saw him all the time."