The Outdoor Girls in a Winter Camp | Page 8

go if the rest did, when the telephone bell rang.
"It's Will on the wire," said Amy to Grace. "He wants to speak to you."
"How did he know I was here?" asked Grace, as she took the receiver from her chum. "Oh, papa must have told him. Yes, what is it, Will? What! Mr. Blackford there? And he has some strange news of his missing sister? Yes, you and he can come right over!"
She turned and gazed with startled eyes at her chums.
"I--I wonder if he has found her?" faltered Mollie.
CHAPTER IV
MR. BLACKFORD'S CLUE
"Hope I didn't disturb any family party," apologized Mr. Blackford, when he and Will called at the Stonington home a little later that evening.
"Not at all," greeted Amy. "Come in. We are planning another season of activity."
"I might have guessed," answered the young man who had been so peculiarly involved in the five hundred dollar bill mystery. "You Outdoor Girls are always doing something novel. What is it this time?"
"A winter camp!" they cried in chorus.
"List to the pretty maidens!" sung Will, mockingly, as he assumed a theatrical attitude.
"Behave!" ordered his sister, whereat Will proceeded to contort himself in various ways to the great amusement of the girls.
"That's fine!" exclaimed Mr. Blackford--"fine that you can go camping, I mean--not Will's circus act. But I must apologize for coming in on you this way. I happened to have some business in town, and as I received a curious bit of news I thought you girls might be interested. It's about my missing sister," he added, simply. "I've told you how I have been searching for her.
"Perhaps I shouldn't bother you with my family troubles," he continued, hesitatingly, "but, somehow, ever since you helped me out so in the matter of that five hundred dollars, I have felt as though you did really take an interest in me, as I do in you. And, as I haven't any real folks of my own--so far," and he smiled, "naturally I come to you. Shall I go on?"
The girls nodded. After making the acquaintance of the young man in the manner related in our first volume, they had learned the queer fact of Mr. Blackford having a sister of whom he had lost track. At one time he hoped it might develop that she was the strange girl who fell out of the tree, but it was not so. This girl, Carrie Norton, had, after spending some time in Deepdale, departed to live with a distant relative.
Mr. Blackford had engaged a firm which made a specialty of locating missing persons to look for his sister, but so far there had been no result.
"And it doesn't look as though this were going to be very promising," the young man went on. "You know this searching firm has been delving among my wood-pile relations, as I call them, looking for clues," he went on. "They are getting all the old documents, bits of family history, descriptions, and so on, that they can lay hands on. It all helps, in a way, but we haven't had much luck so far. But you may be interested in something that just came up, and you may be able to help me.
"I've been traveling about, in connection with my business, and as I knew I would 'make' this town to-night, I had all my mail sent here. Imagine my surprise when I got to my hotel, a little while ago, to find the most promising clue yet."
"What is it?" asked Betty, eagerly.
"I thought you might be interested," said the young man, "and that is why I called at your house," and he nodded to Will.
"You had gone out," remarked Will to Grace, "so I asked dad where, as the maid said you'd all been in the library. Then I called up here," and he nodded to Amy.
"Glad you did," she returned. She seemed to have forgotten the trouble of the afternoon.
"Well," went on Mr. Blackford, "I feared it was a sort of imposition to come, and----"
"I told him it wasn't at all," interrupted Will.
"So on I came," proceeded the young business man.
"But what is the clue?" asked Grace, interestedly.
"This," was the reply, as he took some papers from his pocket. "But it's a clue that----"
"Isn't a clue," put in Will.
"Because----"
"It breaks off in the middle."
"Oh, Will, let him tell it; can't you?" demanded Grace, impatiently. "We don't know whom we're listening to."
"Well, to be brief," said Mr. Blackford, "the firm I have engaged, the other day, wrote me that they were on the track of my sister. They felt sure they were going to find her, and I was very hopeful.
"It seems that they had found some old documents in the attic of a house where some distant relatives live. They wrote me they were sending them on,