“I can’t tell even now how it happened.  All I know is that it was two o’clock, and all at once it was five-thirty P.M. by a fussy gold clock over on the mantel with a gold young lady, wearing a spear, standing on top of it.  I woke up without ever suspicioning that I’d been asleep.  Anyway, I think I’m feeling better, and I stretch, though careful, account of the dame in the plush bonnet with forget-me-nots; and I lie there thinking mebbe I’ll enter the ring again to-morrow for some other truck I was needing, and thinking how quiet and peaceful it is—­how awful quiet!  I got it then, all right.  That quiet!  If you’d known little Margery better you’d know how sick that quiet made me all at once.  My gizzard or something turned clean over.

“I let out a yell for them kids right where I lay.  Then I bounded to my feet and run through the rooms downstairs yelling.  No sign of ’em!  And out into the kitchen—­and here was Tillie, the maid, and Yetta, the cook, both saying it’s queer, but they ain’t heard a sound of ’em either, for near an hour.  So I yelled out back to an old hick of a gardener that’s deef, and he comes running; but he don’t know a thing on earth about the kids or anything else.  Then I am sick!  I send Tillie one way along the street and the gardener the other way to find out if any neighbours had seen ’em.  Then in a minute this here Yetta, the cook, says:  ’Why, now, Miss Margery was saying she’d go downtown to buy some candy,’ and Yetta says:  ’You know, Miss Margery, your mother never ’ets you have candy.’  And Margery says:  ’Well, she might change her mind any minute—­you can’t tell; and it’s best to have some on hand in case she does.’  And she’d got some poker chips out of the box to buy the candy with—­five blue chips she had, knowing they was nearly money anyway.

“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.