“What about the girl?” Ma demanded. “If I let her go, she’s apt to get me into hot water about those stockings.”
“That’s your funeral,” Joe the Sweeper retorted. “If you’d handled her right, she wouldn’t have become suspicious.”
The discussion went on, in lower tones. Then Penny heard Ma say:
“Okay, that’s the way we’ll do it. I’ll think up some story to convince the girl. But that brass must be out of here tonight! Another thing, you can’t sell the lantern that simpleton, Adam Glowershick, stole from the River Queen.”
“Why not?” Sweeper Joe demanded. “There’s good brass in it.”
“You stupid lout!” Ma exclaimed, losing patience. “That lantern is known to practically every person along the waterfront. Let it show up in a pawnshop or second hand store, and the police would trace it straight to us. You’ll have to heave it into the river.”
“Okay, maybe you’re right,” the factory worker admitted.
Penny had learned enough to feel certain that brass, stolen piecemeal from the Gandiss factory, had been stored in the Harper basement. Even more astonishing was the information that the trophy taken from the River Queen also was somewhere in the house.
“If the lantern is thrown into the river, no one ever be able to recover it,” she thought. “If only I could get it now and sneak away through a window!”
Penny’s pulse stepped up a pace, for she knew that to venture into the basement was foolhardy. She listened again at the door. Ma and the men still were talking, but how long they would continue to do so, she could not guess.