It was after midnight before Nick and Chick reached the streets of Philadelphia.
Before they drew into the station, Nick had said:
“We’ll waste no time, but go directly to the neighborhood in which Ida was to do her work.”
“If it’s not in the main streets, the people will have been asleep these two hours,” said Chick.
“All the same,” said Nick, “if Ida is in trouble, as we believe, I don’t know the girl if she won’t find some way of letting us know where she is, if we get into our neighborhood.”
So it was that when they left the station, they followed the route that had been taken by her earlier in the afternoon, getting off the car at exactly the same corner that she had done.
Here Nick stopped a moment, to think of the memorandum he had given Ida as his guide to their further movements.
“Chief,” said Chick, “if we are now on the ground where Ida has been working, we ought to be careful how we move around, for fear some one will drop to us.”
“You are right about that, Chick,” said Nick, leading the way down the street—the same one Ida had gone.
As he got opposite a house, about the middle of the block, he stopped short, and said, in a low tone, to Chick: “That’s the house Ethel Romney left to go to New York, where she met her death.”