“There, there, dearie, it’s all right. Don’t be afeared, my pretty little Lady Fine Feathers. It’s only me toting of you home to your dear Lady. Yes, dearie,” whispered the thief.
The exhausted child, scarcely cognizant of herself—not at all of her surroundings—heaved a deep sigh of weariness, and subsided into quietness.
The ragpicker walked on, watching her opportunity to drop and leave the child when she could feel sure of doing so without being observed.
She met and passed, jostled and was jostled by many foot passengers on the sidewalks, and she saw and was seen by several policemen, any one of whom would have stopped and “run her in” had he had the slightest suspicion of the crime she was committing. But the sight of a ragged woman with a ragged child in her arms was a sight too common to draw remark, much less to excite suspicion.
The ragpicker, however, soon left the more crowded and busier street, and turned into a less frequented and quieter one.
She knew all the mazes in the labyrinth of that quarter, and she turned and wound among them like the crawling serpent that might have been her type.
At length she found what she had been seeking from the time she had set out on her walk with the child in her arms—a narrow, quiet street that seemed at this hour to be deserted of all pedestrian life. Lights gleamed from the windows of the tall tenements on either side; but no one seemed to be abroad.
Here she looked up and down the street, and then sat down on a cellar door, against the front wall of one of the tallest houses, shifted the position of the child from her shoulder to her knees, and took another survey of her surroundings.
One solitary pedestrian came down the same sidewalk where she sat with the child on the cellar door, and passed by within two feet of her without perceiving her in the deep shadows.
When he was gone the thoroughfare was vacant. The stage was waiting, so to speak.