“A tall, bold-faced, dashing, dare-devil sort of a girl, with a snaky look in her eyes.  She wears a pink hat with a white feather.”

“Yes, I think I have seen some one like that, but she’s not been around here long.”

“When did you see her last?”

“If it’s the same one you mean, I saw her go by here not ten minutes ago.  She lives somewhere down the alley.”

“Do you know the house?”

“I do not; but it can be found, no doubt.  You called her Pinky.”

“Yes.  Her name is Pinky Swett.”

“O-h! o-h!” ejaculated the shop-woman, lifting her eyebrows in a surprised way.  “Why, that’s the girl the police were after.  They said she’d run off with somebody’s child.”

“Did they arrest her?” asked Mrs. Bray, repressing, as far as possible, all excitement.

“They took her off once or twice, I believe, but didn’t make anything out of her.  At any rate, the child was not found.  It belonged, they said, to a rich up-town family that the girl was trying to black-mail.  But I don’t see how that could be.”

“The child 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.