As the young girl was rapidly driven uptown she gazed out of the cab windows and the scenes of the great city made her face pale and flush alternately.
Every little while she felt in her bag for her money—the fifty dollars which her father had at last given her when she denounced him so vigorously for his treatment of Dollie.
“I’ll find her! I’ll find her!” she kept whispering to herself, and then the fearful proportions of the great city staggered her and she would be almost overwhelmed by the enormity of her undertaking.
She took a crumpled paper from her bag and read it over. It was a letter from Bert Jackson written in a cleverly disguised hand, telling her that he had reached New York safely, and giving her the address of a cheap lodging-house that he was making his home for the present.
Marion had answered the letter promptly, giving him the news of Dollie’s disappearance, and she knew full well that Bert would be constantly on the lookout for her sister.
“Poor Bert! I must hunt him up,” she whispered, with a sigh. “He’ll help me find Dollie. He’s really my only friend in all this big city!”
Then another thought entered her mind and would not go away. She was thinking of Bert’s visit to the kitchen that last night and the sudden disappearance of the family jewels.
“He wouldn’t have written if he had been guilty,” she whispered decidedly. “It was Mr. Lawson who stole them! The infamous villain who abducted my sister!”
Marion breathed a sigh of thankfulness that she had never mentioned her suspicions. There would have been people enough ready to accuse him if they had known of his visit to the farmer’s kitchen.
“When one is down, everybody gives him a kick,” she said to herself. “Even poor, dear Dollie was not spared! Oh, how our own neighbors slandered my innocent sister!”