CHAPTER XII
DANNY DISAPPEARS
Danny Dexter took a hasty glance at Mary Louise’s empty room, and then with one running jump he was in the garden again, clutching his cap to save it from the wind and cursing the clouds which just then made it so dark he could not see his hand in front of him. He followed the path to the old stables as best he could, and once he paused as a soft bit of white blew into his face. It was Mary Louise’s little handkerchief that was tossing about in the elements and had finally found a very welcome lodgment. Danny recognized that soft perfume as of violets, and he placed the foolish trifle carefully in the inside pocket of his coat as though it were a very precious thing. Then he hurried on, his anxious eyes straining in the darkness toward the garage.
Past the pines he hastened, never noticing their sighs and wailings, and stopped with a hurt cry of amazement at finding the garage door open and the automobile gone.
“Oh, Uncle Jim, why did you take it?” he groaned aloud—“just when we’d worked for two hours quietly pushing it back in its place. Mary Louise would have been so happy to have found it in the morning. I’d so counted on her joy!” and the lad leaned wearily against the door.
There seemed no need to search the building further, but Danny rushed up the stairs just to be sure Mary Louise had not been there.
“Of course she couldn’t have come here,” he argued with himself, “and yet how kind of her if she had come, thinking Uncle Jim’s light meant that I was back.”
The very thought that Mary Louise had utterly despised him sent Danny flying around the tower room searching for a sign of her. But no sign was given him. He saw where the man whom he called Uncle Jim had rested through the evening and where his candle had dripped tallow on the floor, but that was all.
“Good Uncle Jimsie!” thought Danny, as he quickly scraped up the candle grease and locked the door to the tower room. “It was the one place I could hide him where I felt they would not look for him again to-night. But, thank God, we are saving him!”
Danny again went down the stairs. This time with an electric torch he carefully searched the ground outside to find just where the car had gone. “It started off in the right direction,” said Danny, as he still strained his eyes for one glimpse of something or someone that might turn out to be Mary Louise. Once he saw a gleam of white in the darkness and tearing madly toward it found with a sinking heart that it was only a bush of small white flowers.
His torch was playing upon every bit of ground about the garage, and suddenly it stopped in his hand as though paralyzed. The faint glow of its light had fallen directly upon a little bow from Mary Louise’s slipper, evidently torn off in her scurry to reach the car.