“No’m. Didn’t come in a car at all. She came on foot, she did. She said Bertha was a silly to run away when nothing was going to hurt her. 71 But she looked mad enough to hurt her,” concluded the observant Henrietta.
“Oh!” exclaimed Amy again. “Was she dark and thin and—and waspish looking?”
“Who was?” asked the child, staring.
“The woman who asked for Bertha,” explained Jessie, quite as eagerly as her chum.
“She wasn’t no wasp,” drawled Henrietta, with indescribable scorn. “She was big around, like a barrel. She was fat, and red, and ugly. I don’t like that woman. And I guess Bertha had a right to run away from her.”
Jessie and Amy looked at each other and nodded. They had both decided that the girl, Bertha, was the one they had seen carried off in the big French car.
“And you don’t know what Bertha was afraid of?” asked Jessie.
“I dunno. She just wrote me—I can read writing—that she was coming to see me at Foley’s. And she never come.”
“Of course you did not hear anything about her when you searched up and down the boulevard the other day?” Amy asked.
“There wouldn’t many of ’em answer questions,” said the child gloomily. “Some of ’em shooed me out of their yards before I could ask.”