“Are you tired?” inquired her father.
“A little. But mostly hot. I’ll soon cool off.”
“We won’t try to walk back,” replied Mr. Gay. “If we don’t find Elsie, we can take a bus back from Coopersburg.”
“I don’t think we should do that, Daddy,” argued Mary Louise. “If we don’t find her or the gypsies either, I think we should come back here and camp for the night. That would give us a chance to make a more thorough search of the woods tomorrow. Because we might easily miss Elsie just by keeping on this path, as we are doing now.”
“Why do you want to find the gypsies, Mary Lou?”
“They may have seen Elsie. For fifty cents that fortune teller will give you any information you want.”
Mr. Gay smiled.
“I’m afraid she’d make up anything she didn’t know,” he remarked.
“Well, she was right about Jane’s lost ring—and about the ruby necklace,” Mary Louise reminded him. “John Grant said so.”
“Yes, but she used her common sense in the first case, and in the second, she may have heard a rumor about the necklace—especially if this particular band of gypsies has been coming to this neighborhood for years.... I wouldn’t attach too much faith to these people, Daughter.”