nd upon
her feet? Impossible! Yet the thought brought the blood to my cheek.

Digging up the bungalow cellar! That meant destroying those footprints
before I had secured a single impression of the same. I should have
roused her curiosity only, not her terror.

Now all might be lost unless I could arrive in time to--do what? Order
the work stopped? With what face could I do that with her standing by in
all the authority of motherhood--frenzied motherhood--seeking the
possible body of her child! My affair certainly looked dubious. Yet I
started for the bungalow like the rest, and on a run, too. Perhaps
Providence would favor me and some expedient suggest itself by which I
might still save the clue upon which so many hopes hung.

The excitement which had now drawn every person on the place in the one
direction, was at its height as I burst through the thicket into the
path running immediately about the bungalow. Those who could get in at
the door had done so, filling the room whence Gwendolen had disappeared,
with awe-struck men and chattering women. Some had been allowed to
descend through the yawning trap-door, down which all were endeavoring
to peer, and, fortified by this fact, I armed myself with an appearance
of authority despite my sense of presumption, and pushed and worked my
own way to these steps, saying that I had come to aid Mrs. Ocumpaugh,
whose attention I declared I had been the first to direct to this place.

Struck with my manner if not with my argument, they yielded to my
importunity and allowed me to pass down. The stroke of the spade and the
harsh voice of the man directing the work greeted my disquieted ears.
With a bound I cleared the last half-dozen steps and, alighting on the
cellar bottom, was soon able, in spite of the semi-darkness, to look
about me and get some notion of the scene.

A dozen men were working--the full corps of gardeners without doubt--and
a single glance sufficed to show me that such of the surface as had not
been upturned by their spades had been harried by their footsteps.
Useless now to promulgate my carefully formed theory, with any hope of
proof to substantiate it. The crushed bonbon, the piled-up boxes and the
freshly sawed hole were enough without doubt to establish the fact that
the child had been carried into the walled-up room above, but the link
which would have fixed the identity of the person so carrying her was
gone from my chain of evidence for ever. She who s