She flew down the stairs and out the front door into the icy February air, calling wildly: “Stephen! Stevie! Stevie, darling!”
But the dingy street was quite empty save for a grocer’s wagon standing in front of one of the little clapboarded houses. She ran down to this and asked the boy driving it: “Have you seen Stephen since you turned into the street? You know, little Stephen Knapp?”
“No, I ain’t seen him,” said the boy, looking up and down the street with her.
A thin old woman came out on the front porch of the house next to the Knapp’s.
“You haven’t seen Stephen, have you, Mrs. Anderson?” called Stephen’s mother.
“No, I haven’t see him, Mrs. Knapp. I don’t believe he’d go out this cold day. He’s just hiding on you somewhere. Children will do that, if you let them. If he were my child, Mrs. Knapp, I’d cure him of that trick before he so much as started it—by the shingle method too! I never used to let my children get ahead of me. Once you let them get the start on you with some....”
Mrs. Knapp’s anxious face reddened with resentment. She went back to her own house and shut the door behind her hard.
Inside she began a systematic search of every possible hiding place, racing from one to another, now hot with anger, now cold with fear, sick, sick with uncertainty. She did not call the child now. She hunted him out silently and swiftly.
But there was no Stephen in the house. He must have gone out! Even if he were safe, he would be chilled to the bone by this time! And suppose he were not safe! If only they didn’t live in such an abominable part of the town, so near the railroad yards and the slums! Her anger dropped away. She forgot the barb planted in her vanity by old Mrs. Anderson. As she flung on her wraps, she was shivering from head to foot; she was nothing but loving, suffering, fearing motherhood. If she had seen her Stephen struggling in the arms of a dozen big hoodlums, she would have flown at them like a tigress, armed only with teeth and claws and her passionate heart.
Her hand on the doorknob, she thought of one last place she had not searched. The dark hole under the stairs. She turned to that and flung back the curtain.