arent. He was not missed anywhere
until the school bus that should have dropped him off did not. This was
an area of weakness that Brennan could not plug; he could hardly justify
the effort of delivering and fetching the lad to and from school when the
public school bus passed the Holden home. Brennan relied upon the
Mitchells to see James upon the bus and to check him off when he
returned. Whether James would have been missed earlier even with a
personal delivery is problematical; certainly James would have had to
concoct some other scheme to gain him his hours of free time.

At any rate, the first call to the school connected the Mitchells with a
grumpy-voiced janitor who growled that teachers and principals had headed
for their hills of freedom and wouldn't be back until Monday Week. It
took some calling to locate a couple of James Holden's classmates who
asserted that he hadn't been in school that day.

Paul Brennan knew at once what had happened, but he could not raise an
immediate hue-and-cry. He fretted because of the Easter Week vacation; in
any other time the sight of a school-aged boy free during school hours
would have caused suspicion. During Easter Week vacation, every schoolboy
would be free. James would also be protected by his size. A youngster
walking alone is not suspect; his folks _must_ be close by. The fact that
it was "again" placed Paul Brennan in an undesirable position. This was
not the youthful adventure that usually ends about three blocks from
home. This was a repeat of the first absence during which James had been
missing for months. People smile at the parents of the child who packs
his little bag with a handkerchief and a candy bar to sally forth into
the great big world, but it becomes another matter when the lad of six
leaves home with every appearance of making it stick. So Brennan had to
play it cozy, inviting newspaper reporters to the Holden home to display
what he had to offer young James and giving them free rein to question
Brennan's housekeeper and general factotum, the Mitchells. With
honest-looking zeal, Paul Brennan succeeded in building up a picture that
depicted James as ungrateful, hard to understand, wilful, and something
of an intellectual brat.

Then the authorities proceeded to throw out a fine-mesh dragnet. They
questioned and cross-questioned bus drivers and railroad men. They made
contact with the local airport even though its facilities were only used
for a daisy-