Five minutes later Miss Miller had set out on her bicycle for Chudstone, and the two girls and Punch had begun another expedition through the woods. It had been a brilliant idea of Kitty’s to include Punch in the party. ‘In all the stories of children getting lost there’s always a gallant Newfoundland who rescues them,’ she had remarked. To be sure Punch was about as much like a gallant Newfoundland as the Feudal Castle was like a castle, but that was a detail.
‘I expect Punch’ll scent Micky out long before the police could find him,’ said Kitty, almost cheering up again as she and Emmeline climbed the railings dividing the wood from the road. ‘What shall we do supposing he tracks him out of the wood?’ she went on as Emmeline kept silence, feeling too miserable to answer. ‘For we promised Miss Miller not to go outside.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Emmeline impatiently. ‘There’ll be time enough to think of that when he does track him out.’
There certainly was time enough. Punch’s behaviour in the wood was most disappointing. It was in vain that they urged him to ‘go find Micky, like a good dog.’ He only stood stock still, wagging his tail apologetically, and staring up at them with a worried expression in his wistful brown eyes. It was so impossible to make him realise that for the first time in his life he was expected to take the lead in a walk, that at last, in despair, they had to give up trying to do. After that Punch trotted along happily a few feet behind them, except once when he raised their hopes cruelly by sniffing the ground violently and then rushing away among the bushes, only to come back a minute or two later with the rather crestfallen look he always had after wild and unsuccessful pursuits. It was only too plain that it had been a hunting expedition, not a rescue one.
‘Oh, Punch, you aren’t nearly so much good as a story dog!’ complained poor Kitty, ‘how can you think about hunting rabbits when Uncle Micky’s lost?’
It was nearer twelve than eleven o’clock when the two girls came home again, after a weary and futile search, but Miss Miller did not say a word of reproach to them. She herself had not been waiting for them long, for, though her ride to Chudstone and back had only taken about half-an-hour, she had since been out again looking for Micky here, there and everywhere. One or other of the servants too, had been constantly going off to some place where it had suddenly struck them that the boy might possibly be, but, so far, everybody’s searching had been equally in vain. Micky might have disappeared from off the face of the earth for all the trace of him that they could find.