CHAPTER XVI
BOB DULANEY’S CHASE
Ursula could not help smiling at Bob’s enthusiasm. She knew that he had great sympathy for her, but at the same time she was sure he was enjoying himself hugely being what he called “a gum-shoe reporter.”
It seemed to her as though she had hardly put down the receiver after telephoning him when a prolonged tooting called her to the window, and there was Bob in his small, shabby racer whizzing by the house.
“Anyhow, I’ll soon know something,” sighed the girl. “I wish I had Josie here to counsel me. So it isn’t Mr. Cheatham and Miss Fitchet after all! I can’t telegraph such a complicated thing as this letter, but I will write immediately and get the letter to Josie on the midnight train, special delivery.”
She was glad of the occupation of writing and with great care she copied the communication found under her door and enclosed the copy in her letter to Josie.
“I am enclosing the envelope in which the letter came so you may see the kind of writing, dear Josie,” she wrote. “I know you set great store by such things. The letter itself I am afraid to trust to the mails, but will keep it carefully until I see you. Bob has gone to catch the man who put the letter under my door, but in the meantime I shall mail this and will follow it by a telegram.”
She was afraid to leave the apartment to mail the letter, thinking news of some kind might some while she was out, so she knocked on the door of the nervous, middle-aged bachelor, the one who had so carefully poked up the chimneys with a hearth broom in vain search of Philip, and asked him to attend to getting the letter off for her. He was glad to be of any assistance to his pretty neighbor and gallantly donned his goloshes and set out for the post office.
Then Ursula sat down to wait. She felt happier. Anyhow her beloved child was not dead. As for poor Uncle Ben, she was not at all sure he was dead, and although she had been very fond of him, he had been away from Louisville so long she could not make up her mind to weep very much over him—certainly not until she knew for sure that he had really passed away. The fortune reputed to have been left her she almost forgot about. The realization came to her with a start. Suppose she really had been left a fortune! What a difference it would make in her life.
“I’d rather have Uncle Ben here to love and protect me than all kinds of money,” she said to herself. “Anyhow I’ll have to go to Louisville as soon as my boy is found. Since Mr. Cheatham is not the one at the back of the kidnaping I shall not dread seeing him as much as I fancied I would. Indeed, I am ashamed to have harbored such a suspicion of him. Perhaps I have been to blame too. Maybe he is not so black as I have always painted him.”