“Well, miss, find any presents? Little late for Santa Claus, isn’t it? But let’s see. Let’s just see what you were looking for under those stairs.”
He dropped to his knees, threw his pocket flash about, and arose, a small package wrapped in a newspaper in his hand. The girl was staring with startled, wide eyes. She was breathing quickly, her thin bosom rising and falling. Thomas wheeled on me, was about to snap at me, thought better of it, and remarked:
“Oh, well, you’re dropped to me. I might as well let you in.”
He tore off the paper wrapping from the package and in the flash of his pocket light I saw the glitter of a pair of diamond ear drops.
“Do you make them?” he asked, triumphantly. I nodded. The jewels unquestionably answered the description of those stolen from the Robbins home. It came to me like a physical blow, the shock that such a frail, broken bit of humanity as the little back alley waif before me was entangled in a thieves’ gang. I knew she was the suspect’s sister. She still held her defiant place against the house.
“I guess this time, young lady, you will go in,” said Thomas, tersely. “Do you want anything from the house? Got any thing to say? You are going to jail.”
She began to tremble violently, but her lips were still compressed.
“No,” she managed to say at last. “No! I was watching! I know now! I know! But I will not talk to you! Please don’t waken my mamma or my little brothers--let us go--now--if I must.” She started to hobble away in feverish haste, shaken with sobs that she would not permit to escape her lips. Seldom have I been affected with such a sense of sadness as came over me then: all of the tragedy that would have been in the situation with even a whole girl under such circumstances was doubled by her condition.
“Got her dead to rights that time,” chuckled Thomas to me. “She’ll spill now sure. The rest of the stuff must be cached around here somewhere.”
“You think there is no question about the Ward boy?” I asked.
“Not the slightest. And she is in and is covering up. They’re all crooked, these back alley rats. There’s more in the gang, of course. That stuff was put there, I suppose, to-night, for her to ‘shove.’ Probably she peddles it. You never can tell how these gangs operate.”