“No, I do not.” Mary was frankly curious.
“Now, turn the slipper over. What do you see?”
Mary turned the small worn slipper wonderingly and reported, “A loose patch.” Then, gleefully, “Oh, I know, Dick, that patch is some kind of coarse paper and on the inside of it, there’s writing. Is that it? Have I guessed right?”
“Well,” Dick confessed, “you know now as much as we do. We were just about to remove the patch when you came in. Jerry, let me take your knife. I left mine on a fence post over at Bar N.”
The four young people stood close to one of the long windows while Dick cut the coarse thread that held the patch.
“Oh, do hurry!” Dora begged. “Your fingers are all thumbs. Here, let me do that.” But Dick shook his head, saying boyishly, “It’s my slipper, isn’t it?”
“One more stitch and we shall know all,” Jerry said, then, smiling across at Mary, he asked, “What do you reckon that we will know?”
“I can’t guess what’s in the letter, of course,” that little maid replied, “but it can’t be anything that will tell us whether the child was eaten up by wild animals or carried off by bandits.”
The ragged piece of brown paper, which had evidently been torn from a package wrapping, was removed and opened. Although there had been writing on it at one time, it was so blurred that it was hard to decipher. Mary found a magnifying glass in her father’s desk. Dora, Dick and Jerry stood with their heads together back of the younger girl’s chair, and when they thought they had figured a word out correctly, Mary, seated at the desk, wrote it down. After half an hour, they had made out only two words of the message and had guessed at the blurred signature.
“lonesome—write—Miss Burger, Gray Bluffs, New Mexico.”