“‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘She’s left town.’
“‘I don’t believe it!’ I said.
“‘Yes, she has,’ said the girl. ‘She pawned all her togs—that new white dress and the swell shoes and her new suit and hat to get money to make a getaway.’
“I might as well have tried to hang on to a fish as to hold that slippery little street Arab. She broke away and ran. I was after her, but it was no use. She knew the ins and outs of the alleys like a rat and I lost her. You see, I didn’t know my girl’s last name. When I asked her, she said: ‘Call me Marta.’ I didn’t care about knowing her last name then, because I was so keen to give her my own name.
“I was just about crazy. I hunted all over the part of the city where I’d left her the first night. Then I went to see Reilly, but he didn’t know who she was. I made him see what it meant to me to find her, and he promised to try his best and to forward at once any letter that came to him. If I don’t hear after a while, when work gets slack so you can spare me, I’m going to Chicago and go through it with a fine tooth comb. Reilly will help me follow every girl by the name of Marta that’s ever lived there.”
Kurt’s eyes, full of infinite pity and regret, turned to Jo as he broke the little pause that followed.
“She is doubtless a poor little stray of a girl and luck has been against her, but, Jo, put all thoughts of marrying her away, just as she has. Wait—” he hurried on, seeing the anger kindling in the lad’s eyes—“if it were any other offense—But a thief! ‘Once a thief, always a thief,’ is the truest saying I know. Your love couldn’t—”
“It didn’t make any change in my feelings when she told me,” said Joe staunchly. “She could steal anything I had.”
“It might not change your feelings, but it should change your intentions. Do you mean you’d marry—” Kurt had an incredulous expression on his face.
“In a second, if she’d have me. I’d buy her everything she wanted so she wouldn’t have to steal.”