“Oh, mother, where do you think Joan can be?” begged Joyce when Jenks had gone off to resume his search.
“I don’t know,” said mother. “It’s all so absurd.”
“If there was wood-ladies, they wouldn’t hurt a baby like Joan,” suggested Joyce.
“Oh, who could hurt her!” cried mother, and fell to calling again. Her voice, of which each accent was music, alternated with the harsh roars of Jenks.
Walter on his bicycle must have hurried, in spite of his permanently punctured front tire, for it was a very short time before bells rang in the steep lane from the road and Superintendent Farrow himself wheeled his machine in at the gate, massive and self-possessed, a blue-clad minister of comfort. He heard mother’s tale, which embodied that of Joyce, with a half-smile lurking in his mustache and his big chin creased back against his collar. Then he nodded, exactly as if he saw through the whole business and could find Joan in a minute or two, and propped his bicycle against the fence.
“I understand then,” he said, “that the little girl’s been missing for rather more than an hour. In that case, she can’t have got far. I sent a couple o’ constables round the roads be’ind the wood before I started, an’ now I’ll just ’ave a look through the wood myself.”
“Thank you,” said mother. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous, but——”
“Very natural, ma’am,” said the big superintendent comfortingly, and went with them to the wood.
It was rather thrilling to go with him and watch him. Joyce and mother had to show him the place from which Joan had started and the spot at which she had disappeared. He looked at them hard, frowning a little and nodding to himself, and went stalking mightily among the ferns. “It was ’ere she went?” he inquired, as he reached the dark path, and being assured that it was, he thrust in and commenced his search. The pond seemed to give him ideas, which old Jenks disposed of, and he marched on till he came out to the edge of the fields, where the hay was yet uncut. Joan could not have crossed them without leaving a track in the tall grass as clear as a cart-rut.
“We ’ave to consider the possibilities of the matter,” said the superintendent. “Assumin’ that the wood ’as been thoroughly searched, where did she get out of it?”