"And when Yetta seen it was only poker chips she knew the kid couldn't buy candy with 'em--not even in Yonkers; so she didn't think any more about it until it come over her--just like that--how quiet everything was. Oh, that Yetta would certainly be found bone clear to the centre if her skull was ever drilled--the same stuff they slaughter the poor elephants for over in Africa--going so far away, with Yetta right there to their hands, as you might say. And I'm getting sicker and sicker! I'd have retained my calm mind, mind you, if they had been my own kids--but kids of others I'd been sacredly trusted with! "And then down the back stairs comes this here sandy-complected, horse-faced plumber that had been frittering away his time all day up in a bathroom over one little leak, and looking as sad and mournful as if he hadn't just won eight dollars, or whatever it was. He must have been born that way--not even being a plumber had cheered him up. "'Blackhanders!'" he says right off, kind of brightening a little bit. "I like to fainted for fair! He says they had lured the kids off with candy and popcorn, and would hold 'em in a tenement house for ten thousand dollars, to be left on a certain spot at twelve P.M. He seemed to know a lot about their ways. "'They got the Honourable Simon T. Griffenbaugh's youngest that way,' he says, 'only a month ago. Likely the same gang got these two.' "'How do you know?' I asks him. "'Well,' he says, 'they's a gang of over two hundred of these I-talian Blackhanders working right now on a sewer job something about two miles up the road. That's how I know,' he says. 'That's plain enough, ain't it? It's as plain as the back of my hand. What chance would them two defenceless little children have with a gang of two hundred Blackhanders?' "But that looked foolish, even to me. 'Shucks!' I says. 'That don't stand to reason.' But then I got another scare. 'How about water?' I says. 'Any places round here they could fall into and get drownded?' "He'd looked glum again when I said two hundred Blackhanders didn't sound reasonable; but he cheers up at this and says: 'Oh, yes; lots of places they could drownd--cricks and rivers and lakes and ponds and tanks--any number of places they could fall into and never come up again.' Say, he made that whole neighbourhood sound like Venice, Italy. You wondered how folks ever got round without gondolas or something. 'One of Dr. George F. Maybury's two kids was nearly drownded last Tuesday--only the older one saved him; a wonder it was they didn't have to drag the river and find 'em on the bottom locked in each other's arms! And a boy by the name of Clifford Something, only the other day, playing down by the railroad tracks--' "I shut him off, you bet! I told him to get out quick and go to his home if he had one. "'I certainly hope I won't have to read anything horrible in to-morrow's paper!' he says as he goes down the back stoop. 'Only last week they was a nigger caught--'