The girl at the desk was flattered by Josie’s remarks and let her make her escape without further insistence concerning names and addresses.
“Well, I know where Fitchet isn’t, at least,” muttered Josie. “And now for Peewee Valley!”
The interurban car was on time and so was Josie. She could not help smiling when she remembered Aunt Mandy’s description of this car and her calling it the interbourbon. There were two men aboard who might very well keep up the alleged reputation of the line, as their hip pockets bulged suspiciously, and their gait suggested that they might have been imbibing quite freely.
The car filled rapidly with holiday makers and parties going to spend Christmas day in the country with relations and friends.
“I might feel sorry for myself if I wanted to,” thought Josie, “but somehow I don’t. Here I am having no Christmas to speak of, but feeling as chipper as you please, with a wonderfully interesting day ahead of me. Poor Ursula is the one who may well feel sorry for herself, but I am as sure as anything I’ll find Philip, and that before so very long. But the motive for stealing him—what can it be? Ursula is as poor as a church mouse. If it only wasn’t Christmas I’d sleuth around and find out something about Cheatham’s business and his financial standing.”
So Josie mused as those on Christmas pleasure bent squeezed her into a corner of the car. She was thankful to have a seat next the window, although at first the prospect of dirty snow and empty streets was not so very pleasing.
The trolley soon whizzed through the city into the suburbs and then into open country, past pleasant homes where prosperity was the keynote. Now the snow was clean and, wherever it had drifted aside, instead of a bare brown patch, green grass met the eye, as is the way in Kentucky. Blue grass will remain green through the winter under the snow.
Peewee Valley was remarkable for its wonderful beech trees, and the fact that it was not a valley at all. In truth the trolley seemed to be going up grade. The sun, which had seemed nothing but a round orange through the smoke and fog of Louisville, was now shining brilliantly, but the mercury was steadily falling in spite of old Sol and the air was crisp and bracing. Josie remembered Mandy’s directions and stopped the car at the post office.
“That must be Colonel Trask’s,” she decided, standing for a moment in the snow as the trolley whizzed out of sight, and gazing across the road at a pleasant looking home well back from the road, approached by an avenue bordered by maple trees. They were bare and gaunt on that winter’s morning, but it was not difficult to picture them in full leaf shading the road. Indeed, here and there was a bench which, though covered with snow, made one think instinctively of summer days.
The snow had been beaten down to a hard path on one side of the road and the road itself gave evidence of much travel—prints of horses’ hoofs and of automobile tires. The house, which could be seen from the approach, was white with grey gabled roof, the sky line much broken with dormer windows and great red chimneys. Josie counted five, with smoke curling from every one of them.