“‘You Ron,’” repeated Mrs. Christensen. “Why it’s a reg’lar Chinese laundry name.”
“It does look like that,” admitted Larry.
“Maybe the villyans have him hid away in one of them Chinese places,” she suggested. “There’s lots of ’em hereabouts.”
“Perhaps,” said Larry. He was looking at the scrap of paper as though it might speak and tell him what he wanted to know.
“‘You Ron,’” he murmured over and over again. “‘You Ron.’ I wonder what in the world that means? The boy wouldn’t have taken the trouble to write it, and put his name to it unless it meant something. He had to do it in a hurry, too, for it’s rather scrawled. And then he dropped it here, in all the litter, thinking and hoping that some one would find it, and guess what it meant. I only wish I could know what it means, for I’m sure it stands for something.”
Larry gazed at the scrap of paper. He turned it over and over. He looked at it upside down. He even held it up in front of a cracked looking-glass on the wall, for sometimes written characters, made by a reversed process, or backwards, can be read by holding them in front of a mirror. Not so with this one, however. It was as much of a puzzle one way as the other.
“Don’t you want to go see some of the Chinay-men?” asked Mrs. Christensen. “They’re bad, some of ’em, and they may have the poor boy hid away in some of their opyum pipes that I’ve read about.”
“Hardly that, I think,” said Larry, “and yet——”
Once more he looked at the paper.
“‘You Ron,’ he repeated over again, sometimes rapidly, and again slowly. Suddenly a changed expression came over his face.