of the car and sighed with relief when we saw it was not the Striped
Beetle. One door was still intact and that bore the monogram DPS in
large block letters.

If Fate has anything to do with the color of paint, or rather, if the
color of paint has anything to do with Fate, brown must be an unlucky
shade to paint a car. The number of brown cars which had come to grief
along that road was unbelievable. In another place one had turned
turtle on a bridge and thrown its passengers into the river beneath,
but those passengers were all men, we were told, and we did not stop to
investigate further. One woman told a story of having seen four girls
walking along the road almost frantic because their car had been stolen
while they got out to look at something in a field, and we thought
these might possibly be our girls. Hinpoha is crazy about calves and if
she saw a calf in a field she would not only go over and pet it
herself, but drag all the others along too. When asked to describe
their dresses the woman said vaguely that they had had on some light
kind of coats or suits, she couldn't remember which, and she wasn't
sure about the veils. They might have been green for all she knew, but
she always had been color blind and hated to make a definite statement
because she had been fooled on more than one occasion. Where the girls
were now she did not know; she thought they were walking to the nearest
town to notify the police.

While there was nothing definite about this information it was just
enough to tantalize us, and we wondered if the Striped Beetle really
had been stolen and the girls were wandering about in distress. We
strained our imaginations trying to picture what had happened to Gladys
that she did not appear in Rochester, and conjured up all sorts of
circumstances to account for it. But I doubt if an imagination as rich