tails which, for that very reason, need not be cited here.

Bit by bit, she went on with her outline of the campaign; testing each
step and proving the practicability of each.

The next Thursday evening, Rennick and his wife went, as usual, to the
weekly meeting of a neighborhood bridge club which they had joined for
the summer. 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. Presently, the second brother joined him.
Mrs. Schwartz lifted the baby into the car. One of the men held it
while the other took his place at the steering wheel. The runabout had
started upon its orderly fourteen-mile trip to Paterson, before the
panic stricken nurse could give the alarm.

Mrs. Schwartz then walked toward the village, where her husband met
her. The two proceeded together to the local motion picture theater.
There, they laughed so loudly over the comedy on the screen that the
manager had to warn them to be quieter. At once, the couple became
noisily abusive. And they were ordered ignominiously from the theater.
There could scarcely have been a better alibi to prove their absence of
complicity in the kidnaping.

Meanwhile, the two brothers continued quietly on their journey toward
Paterson. The baby slept. His bearer had laid him softly on the floor
of the car. A few drops of paregoric, administered by Mrs. Schwartz as
the child awoke for an instant on the way to the gat