“His ticket read to Chicago.”
Porter walked away thoroughly disappointed. The chance had looked like a good one and there seemed to be no other. But he must in some way find the Judge; he could not wait for him. The first thing he did was to call up McNally by telephone and repeat to him what the agent had said. He told McNally to find out at what hotel the Judge had stayed, if at any, and to look for anything which might prove a clew to his whereabouts. “It's a wild-goose chase, I know,” he concluded; “but then you may manage to turn up something.” He knew that McNally would do everything that could be done in Chicago toward finding the missing Judge, so he went to work along other lines.
Judge Black was a member of two fishing clubs, one at Les Chenaux Islands, near Mackinac, and the other about forty miles north of Minneapolis, so Porter sent long and urgent telegrams to both these places. Then he began making long shots, working through a list of more or less likely places, which his knowledge of Black's tastes and habits enabled him to get together. Just before dinner a message came from McNally:—
Black at Sherman House Friday. Clerk says he took three-thirty train
on Northwestern for Lake Geneva. Can run him down in morning.
Thursday morning the two little telegraph boys at Lake Geneva and the one at William's Bay had a busy time of it, for Porter and McNally between them kept the wires hot; but neither hide nor hair of Judge Alonzo Black could they discover. From ten o'clock on through an interminable day the messages kept coming back, 'not delivered.' At half-past four Porter telephoned his lieutenant to go to the lake and continue the search in person.
At seven Katherine and her father sat down to dinner. She had known all day that something was going wrong with her father's affairs, and she could read in his silent preoccupied manner that he had not yet been able to see a way out of the difficulty. She knew that she could not make him forget his troubles. Many vain attempts had taught her that, so she waited. The long dinner wore on Porter's nerves; once he rose suddenly and walked toward his library, but stopped short when he reached the door and came back to the table. Then he drummed on the arm of his chair.
“Two days more of this,” he said, with a nervous laugh, “and that man Black will have my life to answer for.”
“Judge Black?” asked Katherine. “What has he done?”
“Done? He's disappeared off the face of the earth just at this particular moment when I've got to have him here.”
“Why,” cried Katherine, “I know where he is. He's at the Grand View Hotel—” she paused and leaned forward, her elbows on the table and her hands clasped before her. “It's some place up in Wisconsin that sounds like alpaca. Waupaca—that's it. Grand View Hotel, Waupaca, Wisconsin.”