n uneven, diminishing scrawl, as
if the letter had taxed the strength of the writer almost beyond
endurance, and I heaved a sigh of earnest sympathy for the father, now
doubly afflicted.

It was impossible now to do more than was being done from day to day,
but every morning I gave an ungrudged fifteen minutes to the writing
of a letter, in which I tried to say each day some new word of hope
and to describe some new feature of our search, that he might feel
that we were indeed leaving no stone unturned.

Meantime, from the moment when our brunette vanished from Master Billy
in the Plaisance, no trace of her could be found by the lad or by
ourselves.

For a number of days Dave and I gave ourselves to an untiring search,
by day and night. We haunted the cafe where she had found lodgings,
but we did not enter, for we did not wish to give the alarm to a young
person already sufficiently shy, and we spent much time in Midway and
upon Stony Island Avenue, near the places where the Camps had seen
Smug, and the saloon wherein he had disappeared one day.

That the brunette had not entered the cafe since the night of the
assault upon the guard, we soon assured ourselves. But we did not
relax our vigilance, and for many days the beautiful White City was,
to us, little more than a perplexing labyrinth in which we searched
ceaselessly and knew little rest, stopping only to let another take up
our seemingly fruitless search.

It was not often now that we sought our rest together or at the same
time, but one night, after a week's fruitless seeking, I came to our
door at a late hour to find Dave there before me, and not yet asleep.
He began to talk while watching me lay aside the rather uninteresting
disguise I had worn all day.

'Carl, wake up that imagination factory of yours and tell me, or make
a guess at least, why we don't run upon Greenback Bob, Delbras, or
even Smug, to say nothing of that invisible pedestal-climber of yours,
any more?'

'Easy enough,' I replied wearily. 'They're sticking close to business,
and they don't show, at least by day, in the grounds any more. If
they're here at all, they are lying perdu in Cairo Street or in some
of the Turkish quarters, smoking hasheesh, perhaps, or flirting with
the Nautch dancers, and all disguised in turban, fez, or perhaps a
Chinese pigtail.'

'Do you believe it?'

'I certainly do.'

'Jove! I wonder how they managed to get into those foreign holy of
holies.'

'Ba