Chapter XXVII

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.

The motherly woman, who had leaned forward, a look of kindly interest on her face, drew back, chilled by this