This call occupied the best part of twenty minutes. For the attendant
proceeded to tell her in a very roundabout way that her son had been
run over and had come to the hospital with a broken leg. He dribbled
the information; and was agonizingly long-winded and vague in answering
her volley of frightened questions.
Shaken between duty to her job and a yearning to catch the next train
for town, the nurse went back at last to the nursery. The baby's crib
was empty.
It had been the simplest thing in the world for Mrs. Schwartz to enter
the house by the unfastened front door, while one of her husband's
brothers held the nurse in telephone talk; and to go up to the nursery,
unseen, while the other servants were in the kitchen quarters. There
she had picked up the baby and had carried him gently down to the front
door and out of the grounds.
One of Schwartz's brothers was waiting, beyond the gate; with a
disreputable little runabout. Presently, the second brother joined him.
Mrs. Schwartz lifted the baby into the car. One of the men held it
while the other took his place at the steering wheel. The runabout had
started upon its orderly fourteen-mile trip to Paterson, before the
panic stricken nurse could give the alarm.
Mrs. Schwartz then walked toward the village, where her husband met
her. The two proceeded together to the local motion picture theater.
There, they laughed so loudly over the comedy on the screen that the
manager had to warn them to be quieter. At once, the couple became
noisily abusive. And they were ordered ignominiously from the theater.
There could scarcely have been a better alibi to prove their absence of
complicity in the kidnaping.
Meanwhile, the two brothers continued quietly on their journey toward
Paterson. The baby slept. His bearer had laid him softly on the floor
of the car. A few drops of paregoric, administered by Mrs. Schwartz as
the child awoke for an instant on the way to the gate, insured sound
slumber. The joggling of the car did not rouse the tiny sleeper; as he
lay snugly between the feet of the man into whose care he had been
given.
The first six miles of the easy journey were soon traversed. Then, with
a pop and a dispiritedly swishing sound, a rear tire collapsed. Out
into the road jumped both men. Their nerves were none too steady. And,
already, in fancy they could hear all the police cars in New Jersey
close at their heels. It behooved them to change tires in a hurry, and
to finish their nerve-twisting trip.
The driver vaulted over the side nearest him and began to explore the
under-seat regions for a jack. The other man picked up the baby and
hurried to the rear of the runabout to detach the spare tire from its
dusty rack. Manifestly, he could not unstrap the tire while he was
carrying a baby in his arms. So he set down his burden at the roadside,
near him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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