"I hope so," I replied. "Anything to break this heat. The air over the
street looks like the heat waves over the radiator." I could not help
wishing fervently that Gladys had chosen a cool breezy day to get lost
on.

We stopped at so many places and asked if they had seen a brown car
with black stripes carrying four girls in tan suits that our voices
became husky on those words. Sahwah suggested that we print our inquiry
on a pennant and fasten it across the front of the car. But nowhere was
there a sign or a trace of the car for which we were seeking. People
had seen brown cars, but no girls in them, and they had seen tan coats
in black or red cars, but nowhere was the tan and brown in combination.

Looking for a needle in a haystack has several advantages over looking
for an automobile on a hundred mile stretch of road. For one thing,
there is only one haystack, so you are pretty sure of finding your
needle there if you look long enough; whereas there were several roads
to Indianapolis; and for another thing, your needle is stationary and
not traveling through the haystack, so you are reasonably sure when you
have ascertained that it is not in a certain part of the haystack that
it will not be there at a later time; whereas the Striped Beetle might
be moving from place to place, in which case we were going to have a
lively time catching up with it.

Especially did we inquire if there had been any accidents. Once we had
a scare; we were told that a brown car had been struck by a suburban
car that morning and several girls seriously injured. The injured ones
had been taken to a hospital in Indianapolis, but the automobile was in
a repair shop in the village of D----. We hastened to D---- and elbowed
our way through the crowd in front of the repair shop to see the wreck