Further Adventures of Lad

by Albert Payson Terhune

But, deftly, Mrs. Schwartz met and conquered the difficulties raised. In the first place, the baby would come to no harm. Her sister would see to that. In the second, the matter of the reward and of the return could be juggled so as to elude detectives and rural constables. She had known of such a case. And she related the details;—clever yet utterly simple details, and fraught with safety to all concerned;—details which, for that very reason, need not be cited here.

Bit by bit, she went on with her outline of the campaign; testing each step and proving the practicability of each.

The next Thursday evening, Rennick and his wife went, as usual, to the weekly meeting of a neighborhood bridge club which they had joined for the summer. The baby was left in charge of a competent nurse. At nine o'clock, the nurse went to the telephone in reply to a call purporting to be from an attendant at a New York hospital.

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.