“Searched!” growled old Jenks. “There ain’t a inch as I ’aven’t searched an’ seen—not a inch.”
“The kidnappin’ the’ry,” went on the superintendent, ignoring him and turning to mother, “I don’t incline to. ’Owever, we must go to work in order, an’ I’ll ’ave my men up ’ere and make sure of the wood. All gypsies an’ tramps will be stopped and interrogated. I don’t think there’s no cause for you to feel anxious, ma’am. I ’ope to ’ave some news for you in the course of the afternoon.”
They watched him free-wheel down the lane and shoot round the corner.
“Oh, dear,” said mother then; “why doesn’t the baby come? I wish daddy weren’t away.”
Now that the police had entered the affair, Joyce felt that there remained nothing to be done. Uniformed authority was in charge of events; it could not fail to find Joan. She had a vision of the police at work, stopping straggling families of tramps on distant by-roads, looking into the contents of their dreadful bundles, flashing the official bull’s-eye lantern into the mysterious interior of gypsy caravans, and making ragged men and slatternly women give an account of their wanderings. No limits to which they would not go; how could they fail? She wished their success seemed as inevitable to her mother as it did to her.
“They’re sure to bring her back, mother,” she repeated.
“Oh, chick,” said mother, “I keep telling myself so. But I wish—I wish——”
“What, mother?”
“I wish,” said mother, in a sudden burst of speech, as if she were confessing something that troubled her—“I wish you hadn’t seen that wood-lady.”
The tall young constables and the plump fatherly sergeant annoyed old Jenks by searching the wood as though he had done nothing. It was a real search this time. Each of them took a part of the ground and went over it as though he were looking for a needle which had been lost, and no less than three of them trod every inch of the bottom of the Secret Pond. They took shovels and opened up an old fox’s earth; and a sad-looking man in shabby plain clothes arrived and walked about smoking a pipe—a detective! Up from the village, too, came the big young curate and the squire’s two sons, civil and sympathetic and eager to be helpful; they all thought it natural that mother should be anxious, but refused to credit for an instant that anything could have happened to Joan.