The Millionaire Baby | Page 7

did)
and that child--"
"But," I forcibly interposed, "the police should know this."
"They do; and so does Mrs. Ocumpaugh; but she has only the one idea,
and nothing can move her."
I remembered the wagon with the crying child inside which had been
seen on the roads the previous evening, and my heart fell a little in spite
of myself.
"Couldn't Mrs. Carew tell us something about this?" I asked, with a
gesture toward the house we were now passing.
"No. Mrs. Carew went to New York that morning and had only just
returned when we missed Gwendolen. She had been for her little
nephew, who has lately been made an orphan, and she was too busy
making him feel at home to notice if a carriage had passed through her
grounds."
"Her servants then?"
"She had none. All had been sent away. The house was quite empty."
I thought this rather odd, but having at this moment reached the long
flight of steps leading down the embankment, I made no reply till we
reached the foot. Then I observed:

"I thought Mrs. Carew was very intimate with Mrs. Ocumpaugh."
"She is; they are more like sisters than mere friends."
"Yet she goes to New York the very day her friend gives a musicale."
"Oh, she had good reasons for that. Mrs. Carew is planning to sail this
week for Europe, and this was her only opportunity for getting her little
nephew, who is to go with her. But I don't know as she will sail, now.
She is wild with grief over Gwendolen's loss, and will not feel like
leaving Mrs. Ocumpaugh till she knows whether we shall ever see the
dear child again. But, I shall miss my train."
Here her step visibly hastened.
As it was really very nearly due, I had not the heart to detain her. But as
I followed in her wake I noticed that for all her hurry a curious
hesitancy crept into her step at times, and I should not have been
surprised at any moment to see her stop and confront me on one of the
two remaining long flights of steps leading down the steep hillside.
But we both reached the base without her having yielded to this
impulse, and presently we found ourselves in full view of the river and
the small flag-station located but a few rods away toward the left. As
we turned toward the latter, we both cast an involuntary look back at
the Ocumpaugh dock, where a dozen men could be seen at work
dragging the river-bed with grappling irons. It made a sadly suggestive
picture, and the young girl at my side shuddered violently as we noted
the expression of morbid curiosity on the faces of such onlookers, men
and women, as were drawn up at the end of the small point on which
the boat-house stood.
But I had another reason than this for urging her on. I had noticed how,
at the sight of her slight figure descending the slope, some half-dozen
men or so had separated themselves from this group, with every
appearance of intending to waylay and question her. She noticed this
too, and drawing up more closely to my side, exclaimed with marked
feeling:

"Save me from these men and I will tell you something that no one--"
But here she stopped, here our very thoughts stopped. A shout had risen
from the group at the water-edge; a shout which made us both turn, and
even caused the men who had started to follow us to wheel about and
rush back to the dock with every appearance of intense excitement.
"What is it? What can it be?" faltered my greatly-alarmed companion.
"They have found something. See! what is that the man in the boat is
holding up? It looks like--"
But she was already half-way to the point, outstripping the very men
whose importunities she had shrunk from a moment before. I was not
far behind her, and almost immediately we found ourselves wedged
among the agitated group leaning over the little object which had been
tossed ashore into the first hand outstretched to receive it.
It was a second little shoe--filled with sand and dripping with water,
but recognizable as similar to the one already found on the preceding
day high up on the bank. As this fact was borne in on us all, a groan of
pity broke from more than one pair of lips, and eye after eye stole up
the hillside to that far window in the great pile above us where the
mother's form could be dimly discerned swaying in an agitation caught
from our own excitement.
But there was one amongst us whose glance never left that little shoe.
The train she had been