CHAPTER XI
MR. CHEATHAM IS UNMASKED
“Cooled down a little by now?” asked Teddy Trask, after about a mile of record-breaking trotting. “Now, Miss Friend—that’s the only name I know you by—you listen to me a minute. I was Ursula Ellett’s friend. In fact, I hoped I was going to be closer than a mere friend. My family loved her from my father on down. We felt she must know we were to be trusted and we trusted her. Imagine our feelings when she simply departed from Louisville without saying one word to any of us, without writing a line, even to my mother. Mr. Cheatham has been out to see us and told us how her behavior has hurt him. He said she had requested him not to inform us of her whereabouts and he was forced to respect her wishes in the matter. He merely sends her a monthly remittance of five hundred dollars, which surely should be enough for her to live on very comfortably, without having to work so hard to support her little brothers.”
“Lies! Lies! All a pack of lies!” Josie flashed.
“We might have thought that, if Ursula had done anything to contradict what Cheatham has said, but her silence is enough to convince us that we were not as dear to her as we had felt. He tells us she is soon to be married to a multi-millionaire and also that she writes she cannot pretend to any affection for him but that he is so rich she feels it would be foolish to let such a chance slip.”
“Ursula to be married! Ursula with a monthly remittance of five hundred dollars! Really, Mr. Trask, I can’t believe you are serious. She has been as poor as poor can be but now she is conducting a tea room in a little shop called the Higgledy Piggledy Shop, of which I am part owner, and the boys come and help after school and eat up all the cold waffles for accommodation. All of the Higgledy Piggledies love Ursula and her boys and last night someone came and kidnaped little Philip and Ursula is wild with grief and I have come to Louisville to see if I can get a clue to a motive for stealing the child, and in that way perhaps track the villains.”
“Well, Miss Friend, you sound convincing and what you say about the cold waffles puts a human touch to your tale. But why, in the name of Heaven, if all this is so, did Ursula not write to us?”
“She dreaded what Cheatham might do to your family if you seemed in any way to connive with her. She could not stay another minute in the house with him and she is terribly afraid of him and the evil he might do to her friends and her boys, even more than what he might do to her.”
“She never told us she was afraid of Cheatham.”
“Didn’t she? But you must have known she was unhappy over her mother’s second marriage.”
“She never said so. She always avoided the subject.”