"Jerry, I thought—we thought her bad and we——"
"Bad! Sunny! Bad! She didn't know what the word meant. My God!"
He leaped up the stairs, calling the girl's name aloud, as if to satisfy himself that his mother's story was false, but her empty room told its own tale, and half way across the gallery he came upon Hatton. He kicked the valet awake, and the latter raised up, stuttering and blubbering, and extending with shaking hand the letter Sunny had left. The words leaped up at him and smote him to the soul. He did not see his mother. He did not hear her cries, imploring him not to go out like that. Blindly, his heart on fire, Jerry Hammond dashed out from his studio, and plunged into the darkening street, to begin his search for the lost Sunny, who had disappeared into that maelstrom that is New York.
CHAPTER XIV
Despite all that money and influence could do to aid in the search of the missing girl, no trace of Sunny had been found since the day she passed through the door of the studio apartment and disappeared into the seething throngs under the Sixth Avenue elevated.
Every policeman in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx; every private detective in the country, and the police and authorities throughout the country, aided in that search, keen to earn the enormous rewards offered by her friends. Jerry's entire fortune was at the disposal of the department. Jinx had instructed them to "go the limit" as far as he was concerned. Bobs, his newspaper instinct keyed up to the highest tension, saw in every clue a promise of a solution, and "covered" the disappearance day and night. Young Monty, changed from the cheeriest interne at Bellevue to the most pessimistic and gloomy, developed a weird passion for the morgue, and spent hours hovering about that ghastly part of the hospital.
The four young men met each night at Jerry's studio and cast up their barren results. Jinx unashamedly and even noisily wept, the big tears splashing down his no longer ruddy cheeks. Jinx had honestly loved Sunny, and her loss was the first serious grief of his life.