There May Be Danger by Ianthe Jerrold Read Free Book Online

the autumn sunlight, looked a very different place from the rain-enwrapped, silent huddle under the lowering hill which Kate had approached last night in Mr. Davis’s trap. There were people about, and a grocery-van at the kerb, and a man with a flock of sheep and a collie dog. And in the playground of the red-brick school a large number of small children in shirts and dresses as variegated as a flower garden were performing toes rise and double knee-bend under the tuition of a stout elderly teacher who was struggling bravely to get an untrained voice across the wind—Kate made a mental note that she ought to go and see Sidney’s schoolmaster. He might give Kate another angle on Sidney’s character and habits.
    So far, the impression of Sidney Brentwood that she had derived from Mrs. Howells tallied pretty closely with the sketchier portrait supplied by his great-aunt in Bayswater. It was, Kate surmised, the portrait of a boy who might well go off on his own and get lost; but it was not the portrait of a boy who would have any dark or abstruse reason for doing so. 
    Sidney Brentwood’s character seemed singularly free from psychological complications. The reason for his absence, Kate, toiling up the village street on a bicycle far too low for her, decided, was probably simple. Had he intended to go for good?
    On the face of it, the answer appeared to be no. For to go off and send no word for three weeks to Mr. and Mrs. Howells seemed too heartless an action for a “real nice boy.” But, Kate reminded herself, many real nice boys were of that adventurous temperament which neither worries nor considers worry in other people, which looks always ahead and never backward, and to whom to be out of sight is to be out of mind. Kate reflected that Sidney’s father was a sailor, and that there was something traditionally sailor-like about such a character.
    However, if there was no psychological improbability about Sidney’s trying to disappear, there was a strong practical improbability of his succeeding, in these days of ration-books and registration-cards. One could discount the possibility, Kate thought, of a successful voluntary disappearance. What remained?
    Accident. The obvious answer, and one Kate had already received not only from Miss Brentwood and Mrs. Howells and Mrs. Davis, but from Mrs. Evans and the nice woman in the County Library as well. Sidney had left Hastry for a boy’s simple reason, a night’s adventure, and had met with an accident, and had not come back.
    But what accident could completely remove every trace of a boy and his bicycle? The answer to that question was not so obvious, and nobody, so far, had been able to provide it.
    Perhaps, then, the adventure upon which Sidney had gone that night was not so simple as it had seemed to him: perhaps there had been other people, not happy-go-lucky boys, involved in the adventure: perhaps he had been prevented from coming back. That would explain his complete disappearance better than any easy, sorrowful talk of “accident” could do. But what kind of adventure could such have been? Kate had to admit that the possibilities that flitted through her mind were vague, wild, and improbable: but then, she reminded herself, the complete disappearance of a boy and his bicycle is itself an improbable thing, yet it has happened.
    She propped her new bicycle up against the woodshed wall in Mrs. Howells’ garden, and stood frowning at a small troop of purple asters in a box-encircled camp. Suppose the adventure Sidney had set forth upon that night had been dangerous, more dangerous than he knew? Unlawful, more unlawful than he knew?
    If only all Sidney’s words and actions for, say, a week before his disappearance could be recalled, so that Kate could pore over the record for any hint of what had been occupying his mind! But nobody noticed, nobody remembered, the things children chattered about, the questions they