“It’s no use,” Judy told her brother. “We may as well take him home.”
“No,” the boy protested, “not to the orphanage. Home’s over there.” He waved a grubby hand in the direction of the boarded-up house. “We used to live there when my mother was alive, and my father said we’d go back and live there again. He p-promised.”
“Where is your father?” Judy asked gently. She had supposed both the boy’s parents were dead.
“I d-don’t know.” Danny gulped. “He went away and left me at the orphanage, but he said he’d come back. He promised me he’d come back before the summer was over so I have to be at the house waiting for him.”
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Horace told him. “You have to be at the orphanage waiting for him because that’s where he left you, and that’s where we’re taking you right now.”
Danny gave in at last. He was willing to ride back to the orphanage with Judy and Horace if they would promise not to touch the lady in the beaver dam. Horace hesitated.
“We may as well promise. Danny is right,” declared Judy. “It might break up the dam if we removed it, and what good is the table leg, anyway, without the table?”
At the orphans’ home, a square brick building that looked more like an institution than a home, Horace waited in the car while Judy went in with Danny.
“We found him at the beaver dam. He was there all night,” she explained to the worried matron. “He said he had to watch the beavers.”
“But we were there looking for him,” Meta Hanley protested. “I called the police, and they searched all around with flashlights. I can’t understand it, but thank you, anyway. You don’t know how you worried us,” she added, turning to Danny. “I called the FBI this morning.”