The baby was left in charge of a
competent nurse. At nine o'clock, the nurse went to the telephone
in reply to a call purporting to be from an attendant at a New
York hospital.
This call occupied the best part of twenty minutes. For the
attendant proceeded to tell her in a very roundabout way that her
son had been run over and had come to the hospital with a broken
leg. He dribbled the information; and was agonizingly long-winded
and vague in answering her volley of frightened questions.
Shaken between duty to her job and a yearning to catch the next
train for town, the nurse went back at last to the nursery. The
baby's crib was empty.
It had been the simplest thing in the world for Mrs. Schwartz to
enter the house by the unfastened front door, while one of her
husband's brothers held the nurse in telephone talk; and to go up
to the nursery, unseen, while the other servants were in the
kitchen quarters. There she had picked up the baby and had
carried him gently down to the front door and out of the grounds.
One of Schwartz's brothers was waiting, beyond the gate; with a
disreputable little runabout.
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