Chicken Little hardly knew whether to laugh or cry at these.
“Oh, Sherm, did you ever wear them? How you must have strutted! I can fairly see you.”
Sherm smiled and took them up tenderly. Did he, too, feel as if there were another presence haunting these relics of his childhood?
The tiny yellowed undergarments came next, all made by hand with minute even stitches. A pair of blue and white striped knitted stockings was folded with these, and last, at the bottom, a little pasteboard box appeared, containing a ring, a brooch, and a flat oval locket on a fine gold chain.
Sherm examined the ring first. Inside was inscribed William-Juanita. May 1860.
The brooch contained a lock of dark hair under a glass; the whole set in a twisted rim of gold. The locket held miniatures of a white-haired man and woman with foreign-looking faces. Both Sherm and 381Chicken Little looked these over in silence. Presently Sherm sighed, then laid the trinkets all back in Chicken Little’s lap.
“I don’t see anything there that could help much,” he said hopelessly.
Chicken Little slowly folded up the little garments and laid them neatly back in their wrapping. Her brow was puckered into a frown.
“I am trying to think where I have heard that name Juanita–some place lately. I don’t remember ever to have known anybody by that name. It’s Spanish, isn’t it?”
“I guess so, but what you’re thinking of is the song, ‘Juanita.’”