"Sarah!" gasped Rosemary. "She didn't come in to supper and none of us have seen her the entire afternoon. Winnie wanted to telephone Hugh, but I am so afraid it will worry Mother."
"Don't telephone!" commanded Jack. "She's somewhere on the place and has forgotten to come in; let her get hungry and she'll turn up. But we'll go find her and remind her it's after six o'clock."
Jack's cheerful matter-of-fact acceptance of Sarah's absence was the surest way to relieve the anxiety Winnie, as well as the girls, felt. At once they assured each other that Sarah was playing somewhere on the farm and had forgotten to come home. The discovery that Bony was also missing bore out Jack's theory; Sarah and the pig were having a beautiful time together.
Leaving Winnie and the two girls to search the barn and outbuildings, Jack hurried off to get reinforcements. He thought of Warren as a tower of strength, cool, level-headed Warren who could manage any situation.
Warren and Richard had finished the last chore and were beginning to change, when Jack burst unceremoniously into their room.
"Warren!" he hurdled the wall of misunderstanding that had grown up between them in one agile leap. "Warren, they say Sarah Willis is lost. She didn't come home to supper. Mrs. Willis is in Eastshore with Hugh to-night and we have to find Sarah without letting her mother know."
Warren agreed that Rainbow Hill was to be searched from one end to the other. He and Richard and Jack went in different directions and Mr. Hildreth took a fourth. Winnie stayed at the house, in case the lost one returned, and Rosemary and Shirley went down to Miss Clinton's to ask if Sarah had perhaps been there that afternoon. She had not and when they came back Winnie put Shirley to bed for it was past her bed hour and she was tired and sleepy.
No trace of Sarah was found on the farm and no better luck was encountered at the Gay farm, whither Jack went, or at the two nearest neighbors, queried by Warren and Richard, cautiously, lest the alarm spread and be relayed by the garrulous and unthinking to the little mother.
"Say, Warren," Jack stopped him as he was setting out again. "Old Belle isn't in her pasture."
"Old Belle!"