Ruth, in her usual decisive way, brooked no further delay. Surely the missing boy and girl had not gone straight up into the air, nor had they sunk into the ground. They could not have traveled far away from the corner of Willow and Main Streets without somebody seeing them who would remember the fact.
She went to the telephone and began calling up people whom she knew all about town, and after explaining to Central the need for her inquiries, that rather tart young person did all in her power to give Ruth quick connections.
Finally she remembered Mrs. Kranz. Dot and Sammy might have gone to Meadow Street, for many of their schoolmates lived in the tenements along that rather poor thoroughfare.
Maria Maroni answered the telephone and she, of course, had news of the lost children.
"Why, Miss Ruth," asked the little Italian girl into the transmitter, "wasn't you going on the picnic, too?"
"What picnic!" asked the eldest Corner House girl at the other end of the wire.
"Mrs. Kranz says Dottie and that little boy were going on a picnic. Sure they were! I sold them crackers and cheese and a lot of things. And my father sent you a basket of fruit like he always does. We thought you and Miss Agnes would be going, too."
Ruth reported this to the others; but the puzzle of the children's absence seemed not at all explained. Nobody whom Ruth and Agnes asked seemed to know any picnic slated for this day.
"They must have made it up themselves—all their own selves," Agnes declared. "They have gone off alone to picnic."
"Where would they be likely to go?" asked Luke Shepard, wishing to be helpful. "Is there a park over that way—or some regular picnicking grounds?"