“’Deed I have not,” returned Jessie. “I have been getting pebbles from the brook.”
“I put him right here on top of this bush,” said Adele, “and he’s gone, so you must have taken him. You did it on purpose just because you didn’t want me to have a Peter Pan.”
“I did not,” returned Jessie indignantly. “He could easily have fallen off. Look all around, in the grass and the leaves.”
“Has Mrs. Mooky been here?” asked Adele. “You know that story of the little Tom Thumb that the cow was going to eat.”
“I believe Mrs. Mooky was somewhere about,” Jessie told her. “No,” she remembered, “it wasn’t near here that I saw her; it was on the other side of the fence in the pasture.”
Adele began to hunt around diligently, Jessie joining in the search, but no lost doll was to be found. Once a bunch of scarlet berries on a bush deceived them into thinking that by some mysterious means the doll had been spirited away. “For you know he could fly,” said Adele.
At last they were obliged to give up looking, and Adele went home quite convinced that Jessie knew where the doll was hidden, and Jessie, in her turn went off up the hill toward the house, hurt and distressed to think that Adele should not have believed her.
She went back after dinner to renew the search, and became satisfied after a long hunt that Adele had mistaken the bush and that she had put it somewhere else. A hollow stump in the neighborhood seemed the most likely place, but though she managed to climb up where she could peep into the hollow, it was all dark within and a stick poked in did nothing more than scare a chipmunk nearly out of his wits, so that presently he came out chattering and bristling with rage and fear. Jessie went home and told her mother all about it, and after Mrs. Loomis had gone with her to see what she could do, they both concluded that the doll must have fallen far down into this same hollow stump, and that it could not be found unless the stump were grubbed up.
“Do you think I ought to give her my Peter Pan?” Jessie asked hesitatingly. “I like him best of all my dolls except Charity.”
“No, I don’t think you need do that,” her mother told her, “but when I go to town I will try to find one that you can give her to replace this.”