“Never can tell. I hope not. I also hope there is no story for your paper at the end of this mad ride, but we must be prepared.”
The racer was slipping through the dry snow with the ease that an airplane might breast a bank of clouds.
“If you weren’t you and I, I,” laughed Josie, “we might be taken for an eloping couple.”
“I’d much prefer being taken for that than to be taken for speeding,” declared Bob, as they swirled around a corner almost knocking the brass buttons off a belated policeman. The poor man rubbed his stomach sadly as though he had been actually touched.
“Them youngsters better be glad they didn’t hit me,” he grumbled. “If it wasn’t Christmas Eve I’d follow ’em up.”
They found the house in which Ursula lived all astir. It was an old mansion that had been converted into an apartment house, where the shabby genteel had taken refuge, but kind hearts beat under the worn coats and the lodgers had one and all come to Ursula’s assistance. To be sure some of them told dismal stories about the lost Charlie Ross of the last century, and how his mother and father had hunted him high and low, spending fortunes on the search, but never giving up, following in vain clue after clue that took them in all kinds of places and climes until they were an old white-haired couple bent and broken in spirit.
Others of the fellow lodgers were more practical in demonstrations of sympathy. One old lady put on her spectacles and solemnly began to look over the pieces in her scrap bag. She had always been finding things that were lost in that capacious bag. A nervous, middle-aged bachelor was going around to the different apartments and solemnly poking up the chimneys with a hearth broom.
“Persons often hide up flues in motion pictures,” he said.
Poor little Ben, who felt somehow that he was responsible for his brother’s disappearance, since he had slept through his flitting, was profiting by Josie’s success in finding Philip when he was lost before by making a systematic search. With tense mouth and burning eyes he was examining every crack and corner of the old house.
“Th’ain’t any dumb-waiter or elevators here,” he sobbed when Josie made her appearance, “but oh, Miss Josie, I’ve looked between the mattresses an’ behind the bureaus an’ up on top the wardrobes in every ’partment here.”