“I know you are, dear little Helen, but be a good girl. We are going to see grandpa.”
“Is he the grandpa that wouldn’t let us in his house?” asked Helen, this time hugging closer to her mother, for the night’s shades brought the chill winds from the sea.
“He did not know, love, how badly we wanted to see him, I am sure, or he would not have turned us away. Now listen, dearest, and you shall have enough to eat before long.”
This was every word true, but, little Helen Standish, it would not be in your grandfather’s mansion that you would eat, but in the awfulness of a prison house. The poor exhausted mother, tired and weary, was swept from the street into the gutter by a heavy truck, and when they picked her up stunned, the policeman said that she was drunk, and she was sent to the Island for three months.
While the papers did not give her name, a small account of the dreadful woman, with her child at her side, and found drunk in the streets, gave a slight vision of some of the other half in New York of whom so little is known by those living in luxury.
But the description of the child and the woman and especially the trinket found in the woman’s fingers, which it was supposed she had stolen, made George seek Nathans.
“I believe that this woman is that Annie Standish,” cried he, “and you must find out. I believe the old man is on his last legs. He will have no opportunity to see his daughter. Now then, if this is she, then we must get the child, and do away with it, and I think the mother has consumption. Now then, you can work in that little thief Farren, can’t you?”
“How?”
“Give him a thousand dollars for kidnapping the child. Buy off some of the guards to allow him to get away by the river, and then impress upon his mind that if the child is the same he is to see that it falls into the water. It won’t be missed. He regains his freedom and a thousand, and future help if he needs it.”
The pawnbroker thought for a long time.