There was something pathetic in dear old Laddie's pleasure over the new trick he had learned; or so it seemed to the two people who loved him. And they continued to flatter him for it;--even when, among other trophies, he dragged home a pickaxe momentarily laid aside by a road mender; and an extremely dead chicken which a motor-truck wheel had flattened to waferlike thickness.
Which brings us, by degrees to the Rennick kidnaping case.
Claude Rennick, a New York artist of considerable means, had rented for the summer an ancient Colonial farmhouse high among the Ramapo hills; some six miles north of the Place, There, he and his pretty young wife and their six-months-old baby had been living for several weeks; when, angered at a sharp rebuke for some dereliction in his work, Schwartz, their gardener, spoke insultingly to Mrs. Rennick.
Rennick chanced to overhear. Being aggressively in love with his wife, he did not content himself with discharging Schwartz.
Instead, he thrashed the stalwart gardener, then and there; and ended the drastic performance by pitching the beaten man, bodily, out of the grounds.
Schwartz collected his battered anatomy and limped away to his home in the hills just above. And, that night, he called into council his two farmhand brothers and his wife.
Several characteristic plans of revenge were discussed in solemn detail. These included the burning of the Rennick house or barn, or both; the shooting of Rennick from among the hillside boulders as the artist sketched; of waylaying him on his walk to the post-office, by night, and crippling him for life; and other suggestions equally dear to the hearts of rural malefactors.
But one plan after another was vetoed. To burn any of the property would cause Rennick nothing worse than temporary annoyance; as he merely rented the farm. Daylight shooting was a dangerous and uncertain job; especially since automobiles had opened up the district to constantly passing outsiders. It was Schwartz himself who decided against waylaying his foe by night.
He had too recent memories of Rennick's physical prowess to care about risking a second dose of the same medicine. And so on with the other proposals. One and all were rejected.
Then it was that Mrs. Schwartz hit upon an idea which promised not only punishment, but profit. She had done washing for the Rennicks and she had access to the house. She proposed that they steal the Rennick baby, on the first night when opportunity should offer; carry him to a car the brothers were to have waiting; and thence take him to her sister in Paterson.
There, the youngster would be well cared for. In a family of not less than seven children, the presence of an extra baby would not excite police query. Her sister had more than once taken babies to board with her, during their mothers' temporary absence in service or in jail. And the newcomer could pass readily as one of these.
Negotiations could set in; and, if care were taken, a reward of at least two thousand dollars might be extracted safely from the frantic parents. Thus, the Rennicks could be made to sweat blood and money too, in payment of the injuries wrought upon the aching frame of Schwartz. At first, the three men sheered off from the plan. Kidnaping is a word with an ugly sound. Kidnaping is a deed with ugly consequences. Kidnaping is a crime whose perpetrators can hope for no atom of sympathy from anybody. Kidnaping is perilous, past words.
But, deftly, Mrs. Schwartz met and conquered the difficulties raised. In the first place, the baby would come to no harm. Her sister would see to that. In the second, the matter of the reward and of the return could be juggled so as to elude detectives and rural constables. She had known of such a case. And she related the details;--clever yet utterly simple details, and fraught with safety to all concerned;--details 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.
