“Exactly! I then drove you to the cabin. By the way, we’ll get there finally on this road, although it is a long way round, but there is plenty of time before dinner and my horses are simply prancing for a good spin. Now, nobody is to know you ever heard of Ursula and you are to catch Cheatham entirely off his guard.”
“Fine! You have the makings of a real detective in you. In the meantime can you furnish the slightest clue for the motive any one might have had for kidnaping poor little Philip?”
Teddy Trask could think of no reason and then Josie related to him all she knew concerning Miss Fitchet’s appearance in Dorfield; how she seemed to shadow Ursula and then disappeared and then about the woman with run-down heels and blonde hair who had evidently been in the room adjoining the apartment occupied by Ursula and her brothers.
“I have a hunch that Cheatham is at the bottom of the whole thing and that Fitchet is in his employ,” said Josie. “Fitchet came to Dorfield to spy out the lay of the land before she went to Florida on this case that she has just left within the last week. Cheatham wanted to know what his stepchildren were doing and how they were living. Why he was interested I do not know. Since then something has arisen that makes him more interested. He sent for Fitchet and she dropped her case in Florida and flew to do his bidding. Philip is now with her, but where? Cheatham has not left Louisville, and as far as we know Fitchet has not returned. I am trying to find out something about Ursula’s Uncle Ben Benson, but nobody seems to know of his whereabouts since he left Louisville when his sister married Cheatham.”
“Gee! You sound like the old lady in ‘The Circular Staircase’ or the man in ‘The Gold Bug’.”
“Do you think you might casually bring in the name of Uncle Ben Benson? Ask your father, for instance, if he ever knew him. Say you heard someone mention him at the club and the man wondered if he had died. Say another man at the club was under the impression he was dead—thought he had seen something in a foreign dispatch concerning his death. Just make up any old thing and don’t be too explicit or too much interested.”
“Sure I can! I’ll be the casual one and you do the watching of Cheatham. There’ll more than likely be a big bunch of folks at dinner. Anita always has a crowd around her and Mother and Father rake in guests with a heavy hand around Christmas time. I haven’t asked anyone on my own hook this year, so it is pretty fine that I found you standing on your head in the snowdrift. The truth of the matter is I am really missing Ursula such a lot and I couldn’t seem to make up my mind to jolly up much, with her away and getting ready to marry a multi-millionaire.”
Josie patted the big glove on the hand next to her that held the reins to the prancing steeds and the young man looked down at her gratefully. She gave him a merry glance.
“By the way, Teddy, if you see me looking fish-eyed don’t be astonished. I want Cheatham to think I’m so stupid he won’t have to be on his guard with me. Another thing: my shop must not be spoken of by name, as no doubt Fitchet has told him Ursula was working for the Higgledy Piggledies at Dorfield, so suppose you let me represent a firm in Youngstown, Ohio.”
“All right, Miss Particular! What you say goes and nothing you may say and any way you may look won’t astonish me. Watch me be about as big a sleuth as there is in America. Please let me tell you how much happier I am since you got in my cutter.”