This is Thursday the twenty-eighth of April. I want to be sure of that. For there are very few things I can be sure of now.

The bottom has fallen out of my world. I sit here, telling myself to be calm. But it’s not easy to sit quiet when you face the very worst that all life could confront you with. My Dinkie has run away.

My boy has left me, has left his home, has vanished like smoke into the Unknown. He is gone and I have no trace of him.

I find it hard to write. Yet I must write, for the mere expression of what I feel tends to ease the ache. It helps to keep me sane. And already I realize I was wrong when I wrote “the very worst that all life could confront you with.” For my laddie, after all, is not dead. He must still be alive. And while there’s life, there’s hope.

I got back from Banff yesterday morning about nine, and Hilton was there with the car to meet me, as I had told him to be. I was anxious to know at once if everything was all right, but I found it hard 330 to put a question so personal before that impersonal-eyed Englishman. So I strove to give my interrogation an air of the casual by offhandedly inquiring: “How’s Rowdy, Hilton?”

“Dead, ma’am,” was his prompt reply.

This rather took my breath away.

“Do you mean to say that Rowdy is dead?” I insisted, noticing Poppsy’s color change as she listened.

“Killed, ma’am,” said the laconic Hilton.

“By whom?” I demanded.

“Mr. Murchison, ma’am,” was the answer.

“How?” I asked, feeling my vague dislike for that particular name sharpen up to something dangerously like hatred.

“He always comes up the drive a bit fast-like, ma’am. He hit the pup, and that was the end of him!”

“Does Dinkie know?” was my first question, after that.

“He saw it, ma’am,” admitted my car-driver.

“Saw what?”

“Saw Mr. Murchison throw the dog over the wall into the brush!”

“What did he say?” 331

“He swore a bit, ma’am, and then laughed,” admitted Hilton, after a pause.

“Dinkie laughed?” I cried, incredulous.

“No; Mr. Murchison, ma’am,” explained Hilton.

“What did Dinkie say?” I insisted. And again the man on the driving-seat remained silent a moment or two.

“It was what he did, ma’am,” he finally remarked.

“What did he do?” I demanded.

“Ran into the house, ma’am, and snatched the icepick off the kitchen table. Then he went to the big car like a mad ’un, he did. Pounded holes in every blessed tire with his pick!”

“And then what?” I asked, with my heart up in my throat.

Hilton waited until he had taken a crowded corner before answering.

“Then he found the dead dog, ma’am, and bathed it, and borrowed the garden spade from me. Then he took it somewheres back in the ravine and buried it. I gave him the tool-box off the old roadster, to put what was left of the pup in.”

“And then?” I prompted, with a quaver in my voice I couldn’t control.

“He met Mr. Murchison coming out and he called 332 him w’at I’d not like to repeat, ma’am, until Mr. McKail stepped out to see what was wrong, and interfered.”

“How did he interfere?” was my next question.

“By taking the lad into the house, ma’am,” was my witness’s retarded reply.

“Then what happened?” I exacted.

I waited, knowing what was coming, but I dreaded to hear it.

“He gave him a threshing, ma’am,” I heard Hilton’s voice saying, far away, as though it came to me over a long-distance telephone on a wet night.

I sat rigid as we mounted American Hill. I sat rigid as we swerved in through the ridiculous manor-like gate and up the winding drive and in under the ugly new porte-cochÈre. I didn’t even wait for Poppsy as I got out of the car. I didn’t even speak to Tokudo as he ran mincingly to take my things. I walked straight to the breakfast-room where I saw my husband sitting at the end of the oblong white table, stirring a cup of coffee with a spoon.

“Where’s Dinkie?” I asked, trying to keep my voice low but not quite succeeding.

Duncan looked up at me with a coldly meditative eye. 333

“Where he usually is at this time of day,” he finally answered.

“Where?” I repeated.

“At school, of course,” admitted my husband as he reached out for a piece of buttered toast. He was making a pretense at being very tranquil-minded. But his hand, I noticed, wasn’t so steady as it might have been.

“Is he all right?” I demanded, with my voice rising in spite of myself.

“Considerably better, I imagine, than he has been for some time,” was the deliberate answer from the man with the bloodshot eyes at the end of the table.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. And any one of intelligence, I suppose, could see I was making that question a challenge.

“I mean that since you saw him last he’s had a damned good whaling,” said Duncan, with his jaw squared, so that he reminded me of a King-Lud bulldog.

I paid no attention to Tokudo, who came into the room to repeat that his master was wanted at the telephone.

“Do you mean you struck that child?” I demanded, leaning on the table and looking straight 334 into his eyes, which met mine quite unabashed, and with an air of mockery about them.

My husband nodded as he pushed back his chair.

“He got a good one,” he asserted as he rose to his feet and rather leisurely brushed a crumb or two from his vest-front. He could even afford to smile as he said it. My expression, I suppose, would have made any man smile. But there was something maddening in his mockery, at such a moment. There was something gratuitously cruel in his parade of unconcern. Yet, oddly enough, as I looked at his slightly blotched face I couldn’t help remembering that that was the face I had once kissed and held close against my cheek, had wanted to hold against my cheek. And now I hated it.

I had to wait and cast about for words of hatred strong enough to carry the arrows of enmity which nothing could stop me from delivering. But while I waited Tokudo announced for the third time that my husband was wanted at the telephone. And a very simple thing happened. My husband answered his call.

I saw Duncan turn and walk out of the room. I could hear his steps in the hallway, loud on the waxed hardwood and low on the rugs. I could hear his 335 deliberated chest-tones as he talked over the wire, talked quietly and earnestly, talked me and my hatred out of his head and out of his world. And I realized, as I sat there at the table-end with my gloves twisted up under my hands and my heart even more twisted up under my ribs, that it was all useless, that it was all futile. He was beyond the reach of my resentment. We were in different worlds, forevermore.

I was still sitting there when he looked in at the door, with his hat and coat on, on his way out. I could feel him there, without directly seeing him. And I could feel, too, that he wanted to say something. But I declined to lift my head, and I could hear the door close as he went out to the waiting car.

I sat there for a long time, thinking about my Dinkie. Twice I almost surrendered to the impulse to telephone to Lossie Brown. But I knew it would be no easy matter to get in touch with her. And in two hours it would be twelve, and any minute after that my boy would be home again. I tried to cross-examine Tokudo, but I could get nothing out of that tight-lipped Jap. I watched the clock. I noticed Hilton, when he got back, raking blood-stains off the gravel of the driveway. I wandered about, like a lost turkey-hen, trying to dramatize my meeting with 336 Dinkie, doing my best to cooper together some incident which might keep our first minute or two together from being too hard on my poor kiddie. I heard the twelve o’clock whistles, at last, and then the Westminster-chimes of the over-ornate clock in the library announce that noon had come. And still the minutes dragged on.

And when the tension was becoming almost unbearable I heard a step on the gravel and my heart started to pound.

But instead of Dinkie, it was Lossie, Lossie with smiling lips and inquiring brown eyes and splashes of rose in her cheeks from rapid walking.

“Where’s Dinkie?” I asked.

She stopped short, still smiling.

“That’s exactly what I was going to ask?” I heard her saying. Then her smile faded as she searched my face. “There’s—there’s nothing happened, has there?”

I groped my way to a pillar of the porte-cochÈre and leaned against it.

“Didn’t Dinkie come to school this morning?” I asked as the earth wavered under my feet.

“No,” acknowledged Lossie, still searching my face. And a frown of perplexity came into her own. 337

I knew then what had happened. I knew it even before I went up to Dinkie’s room and started my frantic search through his things. I could see that a number of his more treasured small possessions were gone. I delved forlornly about, hoping that he might have left some hidden message for me. But I could find nothing. I sat looking at his books and broken toys, at the still open copy of The Count of Monte Cristo which he must have been poring over only the night before, at his neatly folded underclothes and the little row of gravel-worn shoes. They took on an air of pathos, an atmosphere of the memorial. Yet, oddly enough, it was Lossie, and Lossie alone, who broke into tears. The more she cried, in fact, the calmer I found myself becoming, though all the while that dead weight of misery was hanging like lead from my heart.

I went at once to the telephone and called up Duncan’s office. He was still there, though I had to wait several minutes before I could get in touch with him.

I had thought, at first, that he would be offhandedly skeptical at the message which I was sending him over the wire, the message that my boy had run away. He might even be flippantly indifferent, 338 and remind me that much worse things could have happened.

But I knew at once that he was genuinely alarmed at the news which I’d given him. It apparently staggered him for a moment. Then he said in his curt telephonic chest-tones, “I’ll be up at the house, at once.”

He came, before I’d even completed a second and more careful search. His face was cold and non-committal enough, but his color was gone and there was a look that was almost one of contrition in his troubled eyes, which seemed unwilling to meet mine. He questioned Lossie and cross-examined Hilton and Tokudo, and then called up the Chief of Police. Then he telephoned to the different railway stations, and carried Lossie off in the car to the McArthurs’, to interview Benny, and came back an hour later with that vague look of frustration still on his face.

He sat down to luncheon, but he ate very little. He was silent for quite a long time.

“Your boy’s all right,” he said in a much softer voice than I had expected from him. “He’s big enough to look after himself. And we’ll be on his trail before nightfall. He can’t go far.”

“No; he can’t go far,” I echoed, trying to fortify 339 myself with the knowledge that he must have taken little more than a dollar from the gilded cast-iron elephant which he used as a bank.

“I don’t want this to get in the papers,” explained my husband. “It’s—it’s all so ridiculous. I’ve put Kearney and two of his men on the job. He’s a private detective, and he’ll keep busy until he gets the boy back.”

Duncan got up from the table, rather heavily. He stood hesitating a moment and then stepped closer to my chair.

“I know it’s hard,” he said as he put a hand on my shoulder. “But it’ll be all right. We’ll get your boy back for you.”

I didn’t speak, because I knew that if I spoke I’d break down and make an idiot of myself. My husband waited, apparently expecting me to say something. Then he took his hand away.

“I’ll get busy with the car,” he said with a forced matter-of-factness, “and let you know when there’s any news. I’ve wired Buckhorn and sent word to Casa Grande—and we ought to get some news from there.”

But there was no news. The afternoon dragged away and the house seemed like a tomb. And at five 340 o’clock I did what I had wanted to do for six long hours. I sent off a forty-seven word telegram to Peter Ketley, telling him what had happened....

Duncan came back, at seven o’clock, to get one of the new photographs of Dinkie and Lossie for identification purposes. They had rounded up a small boy at Morley and Kearney was motoring out to investigate. We’d know by midnight....

It is well after midnight, and Duncan has just had a phone-message from Morley. The little chap they had rounded up was a Barnado boy fired with a sudden ambition to join his uncle in the gold-fields of Australia. Somewhere, in the blackness of this big night, my homeless Dinkie is wandering unguarded and alone.