"I've found out that her name isn't Morris. That's the name of the people as she lives with. She's a kind of an adopted daughter, and they said as how her real name was Dilk, or something like that."
"Ha! I thought so," Brown exclaimed, inwardly. And then he bade McGinnis sit down, and for nearly half an hour they conversed in low tones.
Then Brown put a roll of bills into his confederate's hands, and the latter withdrew, saying:
"I'll do the job nately, and there'll be no trouble after it."
And that night Helen did not return home. Half-crazed with alarm, Mat and his mother awaited her coming until nine o'clock, or a little after, and then the young fellow could stand it no longer, but went in search of Helen.
He could not find her.
She did not return during the night, nor even the next day, nor when night again fell.
Mat had scoured the city for her, had visited the places where she usually sold papers, and had questioned all the boot-blacks and newsboys, but had only obtained the meager and unsatisfactory information from one little fellow that he had seen Helen in company with a man just after dusk.
She had disappeared completely, had vanished as utterly as a mist that is dissolved by the sun's warm rays.
"She is gone from us, mother," Mat at last said, in a choking voice. "You remember, mother, what Helen has told us—her impressions concerning her early childhood. And, mother, I believe there is money at the bottom of the thing, that Helen stood in somebody's way, and has been spirited off by this person's orders."