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.

_Friday the Twenty-Ninth_

I have had no word from Peter.... I've had no news to end the ache
that pins me like a spear-head to the wall of hopelessness. Duncan, I
know, is doing all he can. But there is so little to do. And this
world of ours, after all, is such a terrifyingly big one.

_Saturday the Thirtieth_

I was called to the phone before breakfast this morning and it was the
blessed voice of Peter I heard from the other end of the wire. My
telegram had got out to him from Buckhorn a day late. But he had no
definite news for me. He was quite fixed in his belief, however, that
Dinkie would be bobbing up at his old home in a day or two.

"The boy will travel this way," he assured me. "He's bound to do that.
It's as natural as water running down-hill!"

Duncan asked me whom I'd been talking to, and I had to tell him. His
face clouded and the familiar quick look of resentment came into his
eyes.

"I can't see what that Quaker's got to do with this question," he
barked out. But I held my peace.

_Sunday the First_

I have found a message from my Dinkie. I came across it this morning,
by accident. It was in my sewing-basket, the basket made of birch-bark
and stained porcupine quills and lined with doe-skin, which I'd once
bought from a Reservation squaw in Buckhorn with a tiny papoose on her
back. Duncan had upbraided me for passing out my last five-dollar bill
to that hungry Nitchie, but the poor woman needed it.

My fingers were shaking as I unfolded the note. And written there in
the script I knew so well I read:

"Darligest Mummsey:

I am going away. But dont worry about me for I will be alright. I
couldn't stay Mummsey after what hapened. Some day I will come
back to you. But I'm not as bad as all that. I'll love you always
as much as ever. I can take care for myself so don't worry,
please. And please feed my two rabits reglar and tell Benny I'll
save his jacknife and rember every day I'm rembering you. X X X X
X X X

Your aff'cte son,