The Silver Shawl Read Free

Lewis’ shop and in the direction of Mrs. Henney’s
boarding-house—late that evening, a good three hours after she had
first left Mrs. Henney’s. If she had not been to Diana’s shop,
where had she been during all that time, and what had happened to
her between the spot where the witnesses had seen her and the
boarding-house where she had never arrived?
    Randall Morris asked these questions over and
over, in a way that seemed calculated to torture himself and to
drive Andrew Royal to the limit of his already short patience. He
hung over the sheriff’s desk while Royal painstakingly made out a
telegram in between telephoning to the other towns in the county
that had a telephone, giving out a description of the girl
and explaining when she had gone missing. Every word he spoke
seemed gratingly halting and deliberate to Randall, and his stub of
a pencil dithering and slow on the paper. When at last the telegram
was completed Randall snatched the paper and raced his horse down
to the depot to hand it over to the telegraph operator there, then
back to the sheriff’s office to announce that he was going to form
a search party to go over the outlying farms and countryside, and
to stipulate that a messenger should be sent to find him if there
was any news of Charity.
    When Randall had gone Andrew Royal ran his
bony hands up through his thick gray hair until it all stood wildly
on end, and then flattened it down again lest someone should come
in and see it like that and guess that he was disturbed.
     
    * * *
     
    There was no need to send a messenger after
Randall Morris that afternoon, and no news awaiting him when he
returned to the office at dusk. The search party’s efforts, which
had produced nothing, were halted by the onset of darkness.
    Morning brought pale sunshine, but shed no
light on the fate of the missing girl. Randall Morris had not
slept. His face was haggard and marked by strain.
    “She must have been kidnapped,” he said,
giving voice for the first time to the thought that had been
haunting him all along.
    His eyes were fixed on the sheriff’s face,
but Royal did not look at him. But Randall’s mute demand for
acknowledgement in the silence that followed was more insistent
than his speech, and the sheriff was forced to look up with
exasperation.
    Andrew Royal was a man who lived in undying
terror of being thought soft-hearted or sentimental. In
self-defense he cultivated a fierce moustache and a growling,
annoyed manner that was always at its height when he felt most
strongly. As he was most uncomfortable when around highly emotional
people, Randall Morris was the last companion he would have chosen
under these circumstances.
    “Someone had to have taken her,” Randall
insisted. “She had no reason to go off by herself, in the middle of
the night, without a change of clothes or even any money with her!
Something’s happened to her, Sheriff.”
    “You think I don’t know that?” said Andrew
Royal shortly.
    “Can you just sit there and not do anything
about it?” exploded Randall.
    “Why don’t you quit talking and start
thinking?” Royal shot back. “If someone took her away from here,
say in a wagon or buggy, by a road, they had all night to travel in
the dark without being seen. If some harm had come to her nearer
here…well, we’d have found some trace by now. But if anybody’s seen
her, or seen them, it’d have to be yesterday in the daylight, and
by that time they’d have been far enough away from Sour Springs
that word about a missing girl hasn’t got there yet. You’ve got to
give time for whoever might have spotted them to hear about it, and
get word back. Eat something,” he ordered, pointing with a
jam-smeared knife to the remains of his breakfast, which he was
eating at his desk according to custom.
    “I can’t.” Randall shook his head
miserably.
    The sheriff had his mouth full once again, no
doubt requiring some fortification after the longest speech he had
made in the