“We’re bringing her good news,” said Ronicky calmly.  “Now see if you can’t remember where she said she lived in New York.”  And he gave added point to his question by pressing the muzzle of the revolver a little closer to the throat of the Pullman conductor.  The latter blinked and swallowed hard.

“The only thing I remember her saying was that she could see the East River from her window, I think.”

“And that’s all you know?”

“Yes, not a thing more about her to save my life.”

“Maybe what you know has saved it,” said Ronicky darkly.

His victim eyed him with sullen malevolence.  “Maybe there’ll be a new trick or two in this game before it’s finished.  I’ll never forget you, Doone, and you, Gregg.”

“You haven’t a thing in the world on us,” replied Ronicky.

“I have the fact that you carry concealed weapons.”

“Only this time.”

“Always!  Fellows like you are as lonesome without a gun as they are without a skin.”

Ronicky turned at the door and laughed back at the gloomy face, and then they were gone down the steps and into the street.

Chapter Six

The New York Trail

On the train to New York that night they carefully summed up their prospects and what they had gained.

“We started at pretty near nothing,” said Ronicky.  He was a professional optimist.  “We had a picture of a girl, and we knew she was on a certain train bound East, three or four weeks ago.  That’s all we knew.  Now we know her name is Caroline Smith, and that she lives where she can see the East River out of her back window.  I guess that narrows it down pretty close, doesn’t it, Bill?”

“Close?” asked Bill.  “Close, did you say?” “Well, we know the trail,” said Ronicky cheerily.  “All we’ve got to do is to locate the shack that stands beside that trail.  For old mountain men like us that ought to be nothing.  What sort of a stream is this East River, though?”

Bill Gregg looked at his companion in disgust.  He had become so used to regarding Doone as entirely infallible that it amazed and disheartened him to find that there was one topic so large about which Ronicky knew nothing.  Perhaps the whole base for the good cheer of Ronicky was his ignorance of everything except the mountain desert.

“A river’s a river,” went on Ronicky blandly.  “And it’s got a town beside it, and in the town there’s a house that looks over the water.  Why, Bill, she’s as good as found!”

“New York runs about a dozen miles along the shore of that river,” groaned Bill Gregg.

“A dozen miles!” gasped Ronicky.  He turned in his seat and stared at his companion.  “Bill, you sure are making a man-sized joke.  There ain’t that much city in the world.  A dozen miles of houses, one right next to the other?”

“Yep, and one on top of the other.  And that ain’t all.  Start about the center of that town and swing a twenty-mile line around it, and the end of the line will be passing through houses most of the way.”