Ronicky presented a brave face to the morning and at once started with Bill Gregg to tour along the East River.  That first day Ronicky insisted that they simply walk over the whole ground, so as to become fairly familiar with the scale of their task.  They managed to make the trip before night and returned to the hotel, footsore from the hard, hot pavements.  There was something unkindly and ungenerous in those pavements, it seemed to Ronicky.  He was discovering to his great amazement that the loneliness of the mountain desert is nothing at all compared to the loneliness of the Manhattan crowd.

Two very gloomy and silent cow-punchers ate their dinner that night and went to bed early.  But in the morning they began the actual work of their campaign.  It was an arduous labor.  It meant interviewing in every district one or two storekeepers, and asking the mail carriers for “Caroline Smith,” and showing the picture to taxi drivers.  These latter were the men, insisted Ronicky, who would eventually bring them to Caroline Smith.  “Because, if they’ve ever drove a girl as pretty as that, they’ll remember for quite a while.”

“But half of these gents ain’t going to talk to us, even if they know,” Bill Gregg protested, after he had been gruffly refused an answer a dozen times in the first morning.

“Some of ’em won’t talk,” admitted Ronicky, “but that’s probably because they don’t know.  Take ’em by and large, most gents like to tell everything they know, and then some!”

As a matter of fact they met with rather more help than they wanted.  In spite of all their efforts to appear casual there was something too romantic in this search for a girl to remain entirely unnoticed.  People whom they asked became excited and offered them a thousand suggestions.  Everybody, it seemed, had, somewhere, somehow, heard of a Caroline Smith living in his own block, and every one remembered dimly having passed a girl on the street who looked exactly like Caroline Smith.  But they went resolutely on, running down a thousand false clues and finding at the end of each something more ludicrous than what had gone before.  Maiden ladies with many teeth and big glasses they found; and they discovered, at the ends of the trails on which they were advised to go, young women and old, ugly girls and pretty ones, but never any one who in the slightest degree resembled Caroline Smith.

In the meantime they were working back and forth, in their progress along the East River, from the slums to the better residence districts.  They bought newspapers at little stationery stores and worked up chance conversations with the clerks, particularly girl clerks, whenever they could find them.

“Because women have the eye for faces,” Ronicky would say, “and, if a girl like Caroline Smith came into the shop, she’d be remembered for a while.”

But for ten days they labored without a ghost of a success.  Then they noticed the taxi stands along the East Side and worked them as carefully as they could, and it was on the evening of the eleventh day of the search that they reached the first clue.