She had not enough money to pay for a cab, or she would certainly have taken one, and saved herself a drenching, for in a minute her light summer dress was soaking wet.
But she did not have time to think of her dress, for in another moment, as she struggled through the crowd, she felt a hand at her elbow, and she tripped and fell over a booted foot thrust out before her. Before she could recover her balance, the hand at her elbow thrust a heavy shawl over her head, smothering her shrieks of terror, and she was quickly lifted by a pair of strong arms and borne to a cab that was waiting close by.
She was flung upon the cushions, the door banged to, and then the vehicle set off rapidly, while Sadie was immediately placed under the influence of a drug that stupefied her senses for the time being, and when she awoke, the next morning, she was a prisoner in a little, low, shabby hut near the river, she judged, from what she could see through the dirty panes of a small window in her second-story room.
An old woman came up presently and unlocked the door long enough to present her with some bread and water for her breakfast. To Sadie’s angry questions, she replied coolly that she was to be her prisoner until Carl Bernicci had brought his wife to her senses.
“When she quits her foolin’ and goes home to her husband, like a dacent wife, then you’ll git out, and not afore!” said the crone sharply, as she locked the door on the outside, heedless of Sadie’s alternate threats and entreaties.
A long and weary week went by, during which poor Sadie remained a close prisoner in the miserable little hut, closely guarded by the cross old woman whom Sadie concluded must follow the trade of laundress, judging by the continual smell of soapsuds that came up through the cracks in the bare floor.
During that time she had made daily efforts to escape, but the old woman was too sharp for her, and when Sadie threatened, in desperation, to throw herself from the window, she placed iron bars across it.
Immured in the narrow room, Sadie proceeded to make it as airy as possible by breaking all the panes in the window. Through the apertures thus made, she could look down upon an unpaved street, along which there were few passers-by, and these of so rough a looking aspect that her momentary temptations to call down to them for assistance did not last long.
“No doubt all the inhabitants of the place are in collusion with the old woman,” she thought despairingly.
One day, when she had been imprisoned on bread and water for a week and a half, she heard voices in the room beneath. One belonged to the old woman, and the other was a masculine voice with a strangely familiar sound.