“Let’s wait for him in front of your gate, Ken. He ought to be coming any minute, I suppose.”
The boys leaned against the fence, talking in low tones to while the time away. They were impressed before with how hard it is to be patient, but now it was doubly hard. For it seemed that Paul was not coming. They waited thirty minutes, an hour, an hour and thirty minutes and still no Paul. Jack was actually becoming worried that something had happened to his chum. Ken suggested several times, “Perhaps he is home. Do you think we ought to try to find out? Though it’s a little too late to ring the bell.”
But Jack knew better; he knew his chum. If Paul had returned before they did, he would have waited for them on the porch; that was a certainty. He would not have gone to bed until he had seen and spoken to his friends and made sure that they were all right. Finally Jack could not bear it any longer and he muttered, “I’m going to look for him.”
“I’m going with you,” said Ken with determination. “Where will we look first?”
“There are only two places where we can look—at Jones Street and then that empty house.”
“Where will we go first?”
“What do you think?”
They went down to Main Street, then they were undecided as to which direction to take. Jack said, “Let’s toss a coin.” He drew a nickel out of his pocket. “Heads we go to Jones Street; tails we go to that empty house.”
He tossed the coin into the air, caught it with his right hand and slapped it down on his left wrist. Ken put his head close to see. Jack removed his hand—it was tails up. “The empty house,” he whispered.
When Paul started out early in the evening, he leisurely strolled along Main Street until he came to his destination. There, he examined the house on the corner from every possible view. It was a two story frame house with the grocery occupying most of the ground floor; the rest of the floor, Paul figured, were either closets or some form of storage places. He was pretty sure there were no living quarters on the ground floor. The people who occupied the house lived above the store. By counting the windows—there were seven—he reasoned that there must be either three or four rooms. The grocery man and his wife most likely occupied one room, Mr. Grey another, and the children, if there were any, the other one or two rooms.