"The man's name was Hooligan, and he told me that my brother had not gone to New York at all, but had given it out that he was going merely as a 'blind' for the police. My brother, Hooligan told me, was lying very ill in a house in River Forest, and wanted to see me. I concluded to put off going to South Chicago until next day, and to go and see Hector.
"Hooligan took me to that house, from which you just rescued me, and there I was made a captive by Pete and Whipple, and turned over to the care of Mrs. Hooligan. I surmised, at once, why I had been spirited away. Pete and Whipple had found out about the paper I had secured, and they wanted to get the stolen property for themselves. And there I was with the paper! You see, I had started for South Chicago with it, and had it in my pocket. I remembered the instructions, and I tore the paper into little bits, when Mrs. Hooligan wasn't looking, and threw the pieces down a register into one of the furnace pipes.
"When Whipple and Pete came and demanded the paper, I told them truthfully that I didn't have it. They said that, even if I didn't have the paper, they knew I could remember the instructions for finding the buried spoil, and ordered me to repeat them. I refused, and for two days they gave me nothing to eat, and only a little water to drink. Whipple said he would starve me to death if I didn't tell."
"The scoundrel!" muttered Matt darkly.
"Vorse as dot!" wheezed Carl wrathfully, "ach, mooch vorse!"
"The whole lot ought to be lashed to a grating and flogged with the cat," growled Ferral.
"I was at Mrs. Hooligan's house in La Grange at that time," continued Helen. "Pete and Whipple had taken Mrs. Hooligan and me to La Grange on the night of the day I was captured. We went in a closed carriage.
"Mrs. Hooligan was with me all the time, and there never was a moment when she wasn't watching. Sometimes she treated me kindly, and sometimes she was cross and violent. She drank a good deal, and whenever she was under the influence of liquor she was always quarrelsome and hard to get along with.
"I got so weak and sick without food that Pete and Whipple must have become afraid I would die without telling them what they wanted to know. Anyhow, they began to give me something to eat, but kept me tied to a chair nearly all the time, coming to see me two or three times a day and threatening what they would do if I continued obstinate. But I made up my mind that I would let them kill me before I would say anything about where that plunder had been buried. That, I had decided, should go back to its rightful owners."
"You were a brave girl to hang out for your principles like that," put in Matt.