So, while Tavia took her beauty sleep, Dorothy brushed her hair, pulled her hat down tight over the soft mass of it and sallied forth to do a little sleuthing on her own account.
Joe had bought a ticket for Chicago. On such slender information Dorothy undertook the great task of finding him.
She went first to the railroad station and there met her first big disappointment.
If her surmise that Joe had gone to Garry was founded on fact, she realized that his first action after reaching Chicago would be to buy a ticket for Dugonne, the railroad station nearest to Garry’s ranch.
If she could find any of the ticket agents at the station who remembered seeing a lad answering Joe’s description—it was a slight enough hope, but all she had—then she and Tavia might carry on the search.
But after a weary round she decided that even this one small hope must perish. No one had noticed a lad of Joe’s description and one or two were rather short about saying so, intimating that they were far too busy to be troubled with trivial things.
Turning away, weary and discouraged, deciding to give up the search for that time at least, Dorothy was startled by a touch upon her shoulder and turned quickly to see a young Italian standing beside her.
“Excuse me, Miss,” he said, with a boyish eagerness that at once disarmed any annoyance Dorothy might have felt at his presumption. “I heard you talk to the man over there and maybe I can tell you something—not much, but something.”
Dorothy’s weary face lit up and she regarded the youth pleadingly. She did not speak, but her very silence questioned him.
“I work over there, sell the magazines,” he explained, making a graceful gesture toward the piled-up counter of periodicals near them. “Another man work with me. He tell me one day two, t’ree days ago he saw young feller like young feller you speak about. But I don’ know no more nor that.”