“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.”
Amy had undressed the child now down to one scant undergarment. She looked from her bony little body to Jessie, and Amy’s eyes actually filled with tears.
“Aren’t you hungry, honey?” she asked the waif.
“Ain’t I hungry?” scoffed Henrietta. “Ain’t I always hungry? Mrs. Foley says I’m empty as a drum. She can’t fill me up. That’s how I came over here to-day.”
“Because she didn’t give you enough to eat?” demanded Amy, in rising wrath.