'Well done indeed. That excuses your lapse earlier,' he said magnanimously. 'Let us see how far this might take us.' We continued in the direction we had come, walking slowly on either side of the clear path cut by generations of hoofs. An hour later we passed the limits of the police search.
Holmes and I spotted the white patch at the same moment. It was a small handkerchief, nearly trampled into the mud. Holmes worked it out of the soil and held it outspread. In one corner was an embroidered J.
'Was this an accident?' I wondered aloud. 'Could she have been awake enough to drop it deliberately? Might a six-year-old do that? I shouldn't have thought so.'
We continued, and in a few minutes my doubts were stilled, for to one side of the path a narrow strip of blue ribbon hung limply from a patch of bracken. I held it up triumphantly.
'That's my girl, Jessie. Your hair ribbon.'
We walked on, but there were no further signs. Eventually the path split, one going up and over the hill, the other dropping down towards some trees. We stood looking at the two offerings expectantly, but no ribbons or signals caught our eyes.
'I'll take the uphill again.'
'Wait. Down near those trees, is the ground scuffed up?' We went down, and there, in a little hollow, were indeed signs of some flurry of activity. Holmes walked around it carefully, and then bent down quickly, reaching for something invisible to me twenty feet away. He continued his scrutiny, picked up another object, and finally allowed me to approach.
'She jumped off the horse,' he said, running his fingertips back and forth an inch above the trampled ground. 'She had bare feet, although they had taken her shoes; they had not bothered to put them on her. Her hands were not tied. Here,' he said, stabbing a finger at a clod of turf, 'you see the short parallel lines? Her toes. And here, the longer lines that draw together? Her fingers made those as she gathered herself off the ground and sprinted toward those bushes.' Once he had pointed out the signs I could see them, clear despite the intervening rains. He rose and followed the marks left by hoofs and heels.
'She made it this far before they caught her, by her night dress, which popped a button,' he held out the object he had picked up earlier, 'and by her hair, which was of course loose from having the ribbon removed.' He held up several mud crusted strands of auburn hair.
'Dear God,' I groaned, 'I hope they didn't hurt her when they caught her.'
'There's nothing on the ground that tells one way or the other,' he said absently. 'What was the moon doing on the twelfth of August?'
I was quite certain he did not need me to tell him, but I thought for a moment, and answered. 'Three- quarters full, and it had stopped raining. She may have been able to see well enough to tell when the path split, or perhaps she was trying to make it to the trees. In either case, we know where she's come. Quite a child, our Miss Simpson. But I doubt that there will be any further signs.'
'It is unlikely, but let us be thorough.'
We followed the horse trail for another hour, but there were no more signs or marks of shod hoofs. At the next trail fork we stopped.
'Back to the caravan, Mary, my girl. A bite of lunch, and the gipsies will resume their itinerant musicale.'
We got back to the wagon to find company, in the form of a large constable with a very dark expression on his face.
'And what might the two of you have been doing, on this hillside?' he demanded.
'Doin'? We been stayin' the night, I'd a thought that obvious,' retorted Holmes, and walked past him to store the spade in its niche.
'And where have you been gone to all momin'?'
'Out diggin' for truffles.' He jerked his thumb at the implement.
'What?'
'Truffles. Little roots, very expensive in the shops. The Lords and Ladies like 'em in their food. Find 'em sometimes in the hills.'
'Truffles, yes, but they use pigs to find them, not spades.'
'Don't need pigs if you've got the gift. My daughter here, she's got the gift of sight.'
'You don't say.' He looked at me with scepticism, and I smiled at him shyly. 'And did this daughter of yours with the gift of truffles find any?'
'Naow, not today.'
'Good. Then you'll not mind moving on. Within the hour.'
'Want m'dinner first,' said Holmes sulkily, though it was closer to teatime than the noon hour.
'Dinner, then. But gone in two hours, you'll be, or it's in a cell you'll find yourselves. Two hours.'
He stalked off over the hill, and I sat down and giggled in relief. 'Truffles? For God's sake, are there truffles in Wales?'
'I suppose so. See if you can find some food while I dig out the maps.'
Holmes' maps were of the extremely large-scale topographical sort, showing the kinds of vegetation, the rights- of-way, and small black squares indicating houses. He folded the table up out of the way and chose a series of maps from a shallow drawer beneath my bunk. I handed him a sandwich and a tin mug of beer, and we walked across the paper floor-covering in our stockinged feet.
'This is our route,' he pointed out. 'The campsite, here, and the trail going away, roughly along this contour line.' The tip of his brown finger followed the contour of the hill, dropped down into the hollow on the next map, and stopped at the Y junction on the edge of the third. 'From here, where? She had to be inside, Russell, before light. In a building, or a vehicle.'
'But not — under the ground?'
'I think not. Had they intended to kill her, surely they would have done so when she tried to escape, to save themselves further trouble. I saw no indication of blood there.'
'Holmes!' I protested in dismay.
'What is it, Russell?'
'Oh, nothing. You just sound so — callous.'
'You prefer a surgeon who weeps at the thought of the pain he is about to inflict? I should have thought you had learnt that lesson by now, Russell. Allowing the emotions to involve themselves in an investigation can only interfere with the surgeon's hand. Now, assuming the child was taken as early as midnight, and it is light by five o'clock; without an automobile, that would place the limits they could have ridden approximately here,' and he drew a semicircle, using as its centre the Y where the trail had disappeared. 'Within this area; a place where a telephone is to hand; a large enough village for the delivery of The Times out of London to go unremarked. You won't overlook the significance of the agony column?'
'Of course not,' I hastened to reassure him.
He reached back into his sheaf of maps, withdrew half a dozen of the very largest scale, and fitted them together. We puzzled over the lines of streams and roads, footpaths and houses. I absently wiped a smear of pickle from the map and brushed off some crumbs, and thought aloud.
'There are only four small villages in that direction. Five, if we count this furthest, though it would have forced them to ride very fast. All are near enough to the road, they might have a telephone line. These two villages seem rather more scattered than the others, which might give whatever house they're in more privacy. I can't see that we'll make them all by tomorrow.'
'No.'
'We have only six more days before the ransom is to be paid.'
'I am aware of that,' he said testily. 'Get the horse in the traces.'
We were away before the constable returned, but it was nearly dark before we came to the first village. Holmes trudged off to the pub, which looked to be on the ground floor of someone's home, while I cared for the horse and tried to concentrate my brain on conversation with the children who inevitably appeared at our arrival. I had found that there was usually one who took responsibility for communicating with this strange visitor. In this case the representative was a very dirty girl of about ten. The others kept up a running commentary, or perhaps a simultaneous translation, in a Welsh that was much too fast and colloquial for me to grasp. I ignored them all and proceeded with my tasks.
