I was rather nervous as I walked along, going toward the Larimer lot and the park.
But the occasional despairing yelps were growing more and more familiar as I advanced, and when at last I let out that feeble pipe which is my attempt at a whistle, the dogs recognized it in a sort of ecstasy of noise.
I could make out Jock’s shrill bark and Isabel’s melancholy whine, but for some reason they did not come to me.
I stood on the pavement and called, loath to leave its dryness and security for the brush and trees and dampness of the Larimer property.
Frightened too, I admit.
Something was holding the dogs.
I am quite certain now that when I started to run toward them I expected to find Sarah there, unconscious or dead.
I ran in a sort of frenzy.
Once indeed I fell over some old wire, and I was dizzy when I got up.
But Sarah was not there.
Far back in the lot I found the dogs, and if I wondered that they had not come to me that mystery was soon solved.
They were tied.
A piece of rope had been run through the loops of their leashes and then tied to a tree.
So well tied that, what with their joyous rushes and the hard knotting of the rope, I could scarcely free them.
Asked later on about that knot, I had no clear memory of it whatever.
It was very dark.
Far back on the street a lamp lighted that corner where the path took off, to pitch steeply down into the park.
The Larimer lot is a triangle, of which the side of my property is the vertical, the street the base, and the ravine beyond the hypotenuse.
Thus: I remember calling Sarah frantically, and then telling the terrier to find her.
“Go find Sarah, Jock,” I said. “Find Sarah.”
He only barked, however, and an instant later both of them were racing for home.
But I still had a queer feeling that Sarah must be there.
I went back to the house, to find the dogs scratching at the front door, and when I had roused Joseph I took him back with me to search the lot.
He with his revolver and I with my searchlight must have been a queer clandestine sort of picture; two middle-aged folk, Joseph half clad, wandering about in the night.
And so the roundsman on the beat must have believed, for when he came across to us his voice was suspicious. “Lost anything?”
“A middle-aged woman, rather heavy set,” I said half hysterically.
“Well, she oughtn’t to be hard to find,” he observed.
“Now if it was a ring, with all this brush and stuff—”
But he was rather impressed when I told my story.
“Tied to a tree, eh?
Which tree?”
“Over there; my butler’s examining it.
The rope’s still there.”
But a moment later Joseph almost stunned me.
“There is no rope here, madam,” he called.
And incredible as it may sound, the rope was not there.
The policeman searched, we all searched. There was no rope and no Sarah.
The policeman was not so much suspicious as slightly amused.
“Better go back and get a good night’s sleep, ma’am,” he said soothingly. “You can come around in the morning and look all you want.”
“But there was a rope, I could hardly untie it.”
“Sure,” he said indulgently.
“Probably the lady you’re looking for tied them up herself.
She had business somewhere else and they’d be in the way. See?”
Well, it was possible, of course. I did not believe it, knowing Sarah; but then, did I know Sarah?
The surface of Sarah I knew, the unruffled, rather phlegmatic faithful Sarah; but what did I really know about her?
It came to me like a blow that I did not even know if she had any family, that there was no one I could notify.
“You go home now,” he said, as coaxingly as he would speak to a child, “and in the morning you’ll find she’s back.
If she isn’t you can let me know.”
And he said this too with an air, a certain paternalism, as though he had said: “Just leave this to me. I am the law. I’ll fix it.
And now just run along. I’ve my job to attend to.” The next morning was rainy and gray.