_FOR_ weeks the search for Andy was kept up with unremitting vigilance,
but no word of him came to the anxious searchers. A few days after the
meeting with Mrs. Bray, the police report mentioned the arrest of both
Pinky Swett and Mrs. Bray, _alias_ Hoyt, _alias_ Jewett, charged with
stealing a diamond ring of considerable value from a jewelry store. They
were sent to prison, in default of bail, to await trial. Mr. Dinneford
immediately went to the prison and had an interview with the two women,
who could give him no information about Andy beyond what Mrs. Bray had
already communicated in her hurried talk with Edith. Pinky could get no
trace of him after he had escaped. Mr. Dinneford did not leave the two
women until he had drawn from them a minute and circumstantial account
of all they knew of Edith's child from the time it was cast adrift. When
he left them, he had no doubt as to its identity with Andy. There was no
missing link in the chain of evidence.
The new life that had opened to little Andy since the dreary night on
which, like a stray kitten, he had crept into Andrew Hall's miserable
hovel, had been very pleasant. To be loved and caressed was a strange
and sweet experience. Poor little heart! It fluttered in wild terror,
like a tiny bird in the talons of a hawk, when Pinky Swett swooped down
and struck her foul talons into the frightened child and bore him off.
“If you scream, I'll choke you to death!” she said, stooping to his ear,
as she hurried him from the mission-house. Scared into silence, Andy did
not cry out, and the arm that grasped and dragged him away was so strong
that he felt resistance to be hopeless. Passing from Briar street, Pinky
hurried on for a distance of a block, when she signaled a street-car.
As she lifted Andy upon the platform, she gave him another whispered
threat:
“Mind! if you cry, I'll kill you!”
There were but few persons in the car, and Pinky carried the child
to the upper end and sat him down with his face turned forward to the
window, so as to keep it as much out of observation as possible. He sat
motionless, stunned with surprise and fear. Pinky kept her eyes upon
him. His hands were laid across his breast and held against it tightly.
They had not gone far before Pinky saw great tear-drops falling upon the
little hands.
“Stop crying!” she whispered, close to his ear; “I won't have it! You're
not going to be killed.”
Andy tried to keep back the tears, but in spite of all he could do they
kept blinding his eyes and falling over his hands.
“What's the matter with your little boy?” asked a sympathetic, motherly
woman who had noticed the child's distress.
“Cross, that's all.” Pinky threw out the sentence in at snappish,
mind-your-own-business tone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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