Bridget’s fat figure was very reassuring. Simultaneously Betty and Babbie ran toward it, gasping out the news.
“COME ALONG NOW”
“In the loft? Well, we’ll finish ’em thin.” Bridget seized a brass-handled poker, the latest addition to the tea-shop’s stock of antiques. Then she laid it down again, carefully removed her neat black bonnet, and as carefully laid it on a table. “No use of spilin’ that in a fight. Come along now wid yez,” she ordered.
Betty seized an umbrella that some one had opportunely left in a corner, and Babbie chose as weapon a tall brass candlestick. Then the procession started, Bridget waddling and wheezing in front, Betty, still white with terror, following, and Babbie, beginning to smile again at the absurdity of the search, bringing up the rear. But they hunted conscientiously, exploring every hiding-place into which a man could possibly squeeze himself and some that would have cramped a self-respecting cat.
“They ain’t here at all,” announced Bridget at last, removing her eye from a knot-hole in the wall into which she had been spying laboriously, and standing upright with more puffings and pantings. “It’s downstairs we go. Thim stalls are foine for burgulars, and mebbe they’re in me kitchen this minute, ating up me angil-food that ’ud riz light as a feather. Oh me, oh me.”
“They aren’t here now. I’m sure they’re not,” protested Babbie. “Think how absurd it would be for a burglar to hide in here, just waiting around to be caught. I’m going to see what we’ve lost.”
Bridget persisted in completing her search, and Betty would not desert her. But when the fat cook was satisfied and had sat down to fan herself into a semblance of calmness that would make possible the successful cooking of waffles for the “Why-Get-Up-to-Breakfast Club,” Betty joined Babbie, and together they straightened out and looked over the papers from the desk.
“There’s nothing gone. Of course they wouldn’t want grocer’s bills, even if they were receipted,” Betty declared. “But I left six dollars and thirty cents all rolled up in one of the top drawers. Emily forgot it when she went to the bank. I suppose they’ve got that.”
“Drawer wide open, and one—five—yes, six dollars and thirty cents all here,” Babbie reported. “That’s very queer. Burglars that hunt as hard as this and then don’t take the money when they find it are certainly particular. Well, did they like our old brasses, I wonder, or our plated silver spoons?”