Ah me, Maggie, the miserable Nance that went away from that station! To have had your future in your grasp, like that one of the Fates with the string, and then to have it snatched from you by an impish breeze and blown away, goodness knows where!
I don't know just which way I turned after I left that station. I didn't care where I went. Nothing I could think of gave me any comfort. I tried to fancy myself coming home to you. I tried to see myself going down to tell the whole thing to Obermuller. But I couldn't do that. There was only one thing I wanted to say to Fred Obermuller, and that thing I couldn't say now.
But Nance Olden's not the girl to go round long like a molting hen. There was only one chance in a hundred, and that was the one I took, of course.
"Back to the Square where you found the baby, Nance!" I cried to myself. "There's the chance that that admirable dragon has had her suspicions aroused by your connection with the baby, which she hadn't known before, and has already dutifully notified the Sergeant. There's the chance that the baby is home by now, and the paper found by her mother will be turned over to her papa; and then it's good-by to your scheme. There's the chance that—"
But in the heart of me I didn't believe in any chance but one—the chance that I'd find that blessed baby and get my fingers just once more on that precious paper.
I blew in the A.D.'s nickel on a cross-town car and got back to the little Square. There was another organ-grinder there grinding out coon-songs, to which other piccaninnies danced. But nary a little white bundle of fluff caught hold of my hand. I walked that Square till my feet were sore. It was hot. My throat was parched. I was hungry. My head ached. I was hopeless. And yet I just couldn't give it up. I had asked so many children and nurse-maids whether they'd heard of the baby lost that morning and brought back by an officer, that they began to look at me as though I was not quite right in my mind. The maids grabbed the children if they started to come near me, and the children stared at me with big round eyes, as though they'd been told I was an ogre who might eat them.
I was hungry enough to. The little fruit-stand at the entrance had a fascination for me. I found myself there time and again, till I got afraid I might actually try to get of with a peach or a bunch of grapes. That thought haunted me. Fancy Nance Olden starved and blundering into the cheapest and most easily detected species of thieving!
I suppose great generals in their hour of defeat imagine themselves doing the feeblest, foolishest things. As I sat there on the bench, gazing before me, I saw the whole thing—Nancy Olden, after all her bragging, her skirmishing, her hairbreadth scapes and successes, arrested in broad daylight and before witnesses for having stolen a cool, wet bunch of grapes, worth a nickel, for her hot, dry, hungering throat! I saw the policeman that'd do it; he looked like that Sergeant Mulhill I met 'way, 'way back in Latimer's garden. I saw the officer that'd receive me; he had blue eyes like the detective that came for me to the Manhattan. I saw the woman jailer—oh, she was the A.D., all right, who'd receive me without the slightest emotion, show me to a cell and lock the door, as calm, as little triumphant or affected, as though I hadn't once outwitted that cleverest of creatures—and outwitted myself in forestalling her. I saw—
Mag, guess what I saw! No, truly; what I really saw? It made me jump to my feet and grab it with a squeal.
I saw my own purse lying on the gravel almost at my feet, near the little fruit-stand that had tempted me.
Blank empty it was, stripped clean, not a penny left in it, not a paper, not a stamp, not even my key. Just the same I was glad to have it. It linked me in a way to the place. The clever little girl that had stolen it had been here in this park, on this very spot. The thought of that cute young Nance Olden distracted my mind a minute from my worry—and, oh, Maggie darlin', I was worrying so!
I walked up to the fruit-stand with the purse in my hand. The old fellow who kept it looked up with an inviting smile. Lord knows, he needn't have encouraged me to buy if I'd had a penny.
"I want to ask you," I said, "if you remember selling a lot of good things to a little girl who had a purse this—this morning?"
I showed it to him, and he turned it over in his crippled old hands.
"It was full then—or fuller, anyway," I suggested.
"You wouldn't want to get her into trouble—that little girl?" he asked cautiously.
I laughed. "Not I. I—myself—"
I was going to say—well, you can imagine what I was going to say, and that I didn't say it or anything like it.
"Well—there she is, Kitty Wilson, over yonder," he said.
I gasped, it was so unexpected. And I turned to look. There on one of the benches sat Kitty Wilson. If I hadn't been blind as a bat and full of trouble—oh, it thickens your wits, does trouble, and blinds your eyes and muffles your ears!—I'd have suspected something at the mere sight of her. For there sat Kitty Wilson enthroned, a hatless, lank little creature about twelve, and near her, clustered thick as ants around a lump of sugar, was a crowd of children, black and white, boys and girls. For Kitty—that deplorable Kitty—had money to burn; or what was even more effective at her age, she had goodies to give away. Her lap was full of spoils. She had a sample of every good thing the fruit-stand offered. Her cheeks and lips were smeary with candy. Her dress was stained with fruit. The crumbs of cake lingered still on her chin and apron. And Kitty—I love a generous thief—was treating the gang.
It helped itself from her abundant lap; it munched and gobbled and asked for more. It was a riot of a high old time. Even the birds were hopping about as near as they dared, picking up the crumbs, and the squirrels had peanuts to throw to the birds.
And all on Nancy Olden's money!
I laughed till I shook. It was good to laugh. Nancy Olden isn't accustomed to a long dose of the doleful, and it doesn't agree with her. I strolled over to where my guests were banqueting.
You see, Mag, that's where I shouldn't rank with the A.D. I'm too inquisitive. I want to know how the other fellow in the case feels and thinks. It isn't enough for me to see him act.
"Kitty," I said—somehow a twelve-year-old makes you feel more of a grown-up than a twelve-months-old does—"I hope you're having a good—time, Kitty Wilson, but—haven't you lost something?"
She was chewing at the end of a long string of black candy-shoe-strings, all right, the stuff looks like—and she was eating just because she didn't want to stop. Goodness knows, she was full enough. Her jaws stopped, though, suddenly, as she looked from the empty purse in my outstretched hand to me, and took me in.
Oh, I know that pause intimately. It says: "Wait a minute, till I get my breath, and I'll know how much you know and just what lie to tell you."
But she changed her mind when she saw my face. You know, Mag, if there's a thing that's fixed in your memory it's the face of the body you've done up. The respectables have their rogues' gallery, but we, that is, the light-fingered brigade, have got a fools' gallery to correspond to it.
In which of 'em is my picture? Now, Margaret, that's mean. You know my portrait hangs in both.
I looked down on the little beggar that had painted me for the second salon, and lo, in a flash she was on her feet, the lapful of good things tumbled to the ground, and Kitty was off.
I was bitterly disappointed in that girl, Mag! I was altogether mistaken in my diagnosis of her. Hers is only a physical cleverness, a talented dexterity. She had no resource in time of danger but her legs. And legs will not carry a grafter half so far as a good, quick tongue and a steady head.
She halted at a safe distance and glared back at me. Her hostility excited the crowd of children—her push—against me, and the braver ones jeered the things Kitty only looked, while the thrifty ones stooped and gathered up the spoil.
"Tell her I wouldn't harm her," I said to one of her lieutenants.
"She says she won't hurt ye, Kit," the child screamed.
"She dassent," yelled back Kitty, the valiant. "She knows I'd peach on her about the kid."
"Kid! What kid?" I cried, all a-fire.
"The kid ye swiped this mornin'. Yah! I told the cop what brought her back how ye took her jest as I—"
"Kitty!" I cried. "You treasure!" And with all my might I ran after her.
Silly? Of course it was. I might have known what the short skirts above those thin legs meant. I couldn't come within fifty feet of her. I halted, panting, and she paused, too, dancing tantalizingly half a block away.
What to do? I wished I had another purse to bestow on that sad Kitty, but I had nothing, absolutely nothing, except—all at once I remembered it—that little pin you gave me for Christmas, Mag. I took it off and turned to appeal to the nearest one of the flying body-guard that had accompanied us.
"You run on to her and tell her that if she'll show me the house where that baby lives I'll give her this pin."
He sped on ahead and parleyed with Kit; and while they talked I held aloft the little pin so that Kit might see the price.
She hesitated so long that I feared she'd slip through my hands, but a sudden rival voice piping out, "I'll show ye the house, Missus," was too much for her.
So, with Kit at a safe distance in advance to guard against treachery, and a large and enthusiastic following, I crossed the street, turned a corner, walked down one block and half up another, and halted before a three-story brownstone.
I flew up the stairs, leaving my escort behind, and rang the bell. It wasn't so terribly swagger a place, which relieved me some.
"I want to see the lady whose baby was lost this morning," I said to the maid that opened the door.
"Yes'm. Who'll I tell her?"
Who? That stumped me. Not Nance Olden, late of the Vaudeville, later of the Van Twiller, and latest of the police station. No—not Nance Olden ... not ...
"Tell her, please," I said firmly, "that I'm Miss Murieson, of the X-Ray, and that the city editor has sent me here to see her."
That did it. Hooray for the power of the press! She showed me into a long parlor, and I sat down and waited.
It was cool and quiet and softly pretty in that long parlor. The shades were down, the piano was open, the chairs were low and softly cushioned. I leaned back and closed my eyes, exhausted.
And suddenly—Mag!—I felt something that was a cross between a rose-leaf and a snowflake touch my hand.
If it wasn't that delectable baby!
I caught her and lifted her to my lap and hugged the chuckling thing as though that was what I came for. Then, in a moment, I remembered the paper and lifted her little white slip.
It was gone, Mag. The under-petticoat hadn't a sign of the paper I'd pinned to it.
My head whirled in that minute. I suppose I was faint with the heat, with hunger and fatigue and worry, but I felt myself slipping out of things when I heard the rustling of skirts, and there before me stood the mother of my baby.
The little wretch! She deserted me and flew to that pretty mother of hers in her long, cool white trailing things, and sat in her arms and mocked at me.
It was easy enough to begin talking. I told her a tale about being a newspaper woman out on a story; how I'd run across the baby and all the rest of it.
"I must ask your pardon," I finished up, "for disturbing you, but two things sent me here—one to know if the baby got home safe, and the other," I gulped, "to ask about a paper with some notes that I'd pinned to her skirt."
She shook her head.
It was in that very minute that I noticed the baby's ribbons were pink; they had been blue in the morning.
"Of course," I suggested, "you've had her clothes changed and—"
"Why, yes, of course," said baby's mother. "The first thing I did when I got hold of her was to strip her and put her in a tub; the second, was to discharge that gossiping nurse for letting her out of her sight."
"And the soiled things she had on—the dress with the blue ribbons?"
"I'll find out," she said.
She rang for the maid and gave her an order.
"Was it a valuable paper?" she asked.
"Not—very," I stammered. My tongue was thick with hope and dread. "Just—my notes, you know, but I do need them. I couldn't carry the baby easily, so I pinned them on her skirt, thinking—thinking—"
The maid came in and dumped a little heap of white before me. I fell on my knees.
Oh, yes, I prayed all right, but I searched, too. And there it was.
What I said to that woman I don't know even now. I flew out through the hall and down the steps and—
And there Kitty Wilson corralled me.
"Say, where's that stick-pin?" she cried.
"Here!—here, you darling!" I said, pressing it into her hand. "And, Kitty, whenever you feel like swiping another purse—just don't do it. It doesn't pay. Just you come down to the Vaudeville and ask for Nance Olden some day, and I'll tell you why."
"Gee!" said Kitty, impressed. "Shall—shall I call ye a hansom, lady?"
Should she! The blessed inspiration of her!
I got into the wagon and we drove down street—to the Vaudeville.
I burst in past the stage doorkeeper, amazed to see me, and rushed into Fred Obermuller's office.
"There!" I cried, throwing that awful paper on the desk before him. "Now cinch 'em, Fred Obermuller, as they cinched you. It'll be the holiest blackmail that ever—oh, and will you pay for the hansom?"
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