d isn't about here?"

"Oh dear, no! If it was, it would have been found long before this, for
the police are hunting around sharp. If it's all as they say, she's got
it hid somewhere else."

While Mrs. Bray talked with the shop-woman, Pinky, who had made a
hurried call at her room, only a hundred yards away, was going as fast
as a street-car could take her to a distant part of the city. On leaving
the car at the corner of a narrow, half-deserted street, in which the
only sign of life was a child or two at play in the snow and a couple
of goats lying on a cellar-door, she walked for half the distance of
a block, and then turned into a court lined on both sides with small,
ill-conditioned houses, not half of them tenanted. Snow and ice blocked
the little road-way, except where a narrow path had been cut along close
to the houses.

Without knocking, Pinky entered one of these poor tenements. As she
pushed open the door, a woman who was crouching down before a small
stove, on which something was cooking, started up with a look of
surprise that changed to one of anxiety and fear the moment she
recognized her visitor.

"Is Andy all right?" cried Pinky, alarm in her face.

The woman tried to stammer out something, but did not make herself
understood. At this, Pinky, into whose eyes flashed a fierce light,
caught her by the wrists in a grip that almost crushed the bones.

"Out with it! where is Andy?"

Still the frightened woman could not speak.

"If that child isn't here, I'll murder you!" said Pinky, now white with
anger, tightening her grasp.

At this, with a desperate effort, the woman flung her off, and catching
up a long wooden bench, raised it over her head.

"If there's to be any murder going on," she said, recovering her powers
of speech, "I'll take the first hand! As for the troublesome brat, he's
gone. Got out of the window and climbed down the spout. Wonder he wasn't
killed. Did fall--I don't know how far--and must have hurt himself,
for I heard a noise as if something heavy had dropped in the yard, but
thought it was next door. Half an hour afterward, in going up stairs
and opening the door of the room where I kept him locked in, I found it
empty and the window open. That's the whole story. I ran out and looked
everywhere, but he was off. And now, if the murder is to come, I'm going
to be in first."

And she still kept the long wooden bench poised above her head.

Pinky saw a dangerous look in the wo