It took the two girls merely fifteen minutes, exploring the first three gaps in the sagging wire and the wandering trails beyond, beaten into the hard summer earth.

“They went this way,” Letty announced with confidence. Yes, there they were – the straight tracks of narrow wheels, and the footprints of someone whose’ shoes were about the same size as Letty’s were marked in the pale dust between patches of low-growing weeds. “Towards the old Sheffield place. I wonder if …” She left that thought unfinished, and Retta finished it for her.

“They’re camped out in the icehouse? It’s got a roof on it, for sure. If I wanted to stay hidden, and had a place to hide out from everyone, I’d sure as certain consider the icehouse … I wonder how they found it, though.”

“How did they find out that Mrs. Allison goes on the bus to Karnesville and spends the whole day at the hospital?” Letty replied. The two girls walked on silent cat-feet along the narrow beaten path through the thicket of oak trees and scrub brush, brush which covered a low rise above a bend in the San Antonio River – a rise hardly sufficient to be termed a hill. They had nearly reached where the old icehouse had been dug into that hill, when they heard a small child giggling, somewhere hidden by the thick undergrowth. A girl’s voice – startlingly close to them, but unseen, called –

“Coral! Time for your nap! Don’t be a naughty girl, now!”

Retta looked over her shoulder at Letty, who nodded and gestured that they should walk away. The mystery brownies clearly had set up housekeeping in the thickets around the Sheffield ruins, likely taking shelter at night in the ice house. Retta and Letty hurried away, not daring a sound until they had reached the road.

“Well, we shall have something definite to report, now,” Retta commented, wholly satisfied with what they had been able to discover; that it was a real person, and not a familiar household spirit, doing chores at the Allison home. She consulted the alarm clock – which she had carried with her in her little bag of First Aid supplies. Retta wanted to be a nurse when she grew up, and the aid kit accompanied her everywhere. As a Scout, she was always prepared.

They were only a short distance from the club-house; the girls had a shorter distance to cover than the boys, who need travel the farther distance from Luna City. It was a few minutes after four, when Douglas, Artie and Stephen finally appeared, sweaty, breathless and only moderately triumphant.

“They’re living in the icehouse?” Douglas sounded skeptical, and Letty reassured him.

“We followed them almost there – the girl and the baby. They can’t be anywhere else. What did you find out in town?’

“We went everywhere!” Artie was in full, enthusiastic flow. “Looking for strangers who might be kids like us! Even to Abernathy Hardware – every shop along the Square. I think we talked to everyone … Sgt. Drury even asked what we were doing. I told him we were doing a scavenger hunt, and had to get a copy of a newspaper from someplace else. Pretty clever, huh?”

“Yes, but what did you find out?” Letty could hardly contain her impatience. “How did the girl find out about the Allisons … and the old icehouse…”

“There are two boys,” Douglas explained. “They weren’t from around here, everyone is certain about that. Also – the talk different. Almost like city folk, but not quite. One is about my age, maybe a bit older. The other looks to be seven or eight. Everyone we talked to, who noticed the boys says that they’ve seen the older boy running errands and making deliveries for the grocery store. For tips, mostly. And Mr. Mason – that’s the guy who runs it now – he says he don’t bother with asking for a name, since he’s not paying wages. But he lets that boy and his brother pick through the trash and spoiled things that he’s throwing away at the end of the day, ‘cause it’s unfit to sell.”

“Yuck,” Retta made a face. “That’s disgusting.”

“You get hungry enough, you’ll eat what you can that won’t bite back,” Artie pointed out, with feeling. The Vaughns were hard up, everyone in Luna City knew that. Mr. Vaughn, whose little ranch property near Beeville had been foreclosed on at the very start of the crash, made only a pittance as a policeman for the Luna City Police Department – hardly enough to support a wife, Artie and his younger brother Harry. If it weren’t for them keeping hens and a garden out in back of the Vaughn place, and their father regularly going hunting … they’d also be scavenging what they could from the grocery store, like those unnamed boys.

“So, where did they come from?” Letty asked. “Did anyone know that?”

“I went and talked to Manny Gonzalez, at the garage,” Stephen answered. “I thought that he might have seen something, since so many travelers go past his father’s place.”

Manny – or Manolo, was an older teenage boy, who was interested in nothing but engines and mechanical things, to the exclusion of practically everything else. Manny quit school as soon as it was allowed, to work in the Gonzalez family enterprise. This was an auto repair shop on the very edge of town, situated – like the Tip-Top Ice House Gas & Grocery – to take best advantage of travel on the main road between San Antonio, Beeville and Rockport.

“Did he?” Retta demanded, impatiently. “Stop keeping us all in suspense, Douglas – it’s not fair. What did Manny tell you? Did he see the boys? Did he know anything about them.”

“He did, indeed,” Douglas replied, with something of the air of Sherlock Holmes explaining something to Dr. Watson. “He told me that a trucker with a busted brake line and a load he had to get to Brownsville stopped at the shop about six weeks ago … and there were four kids with him. Four kids with an old wagon and a couple of bags and an ‘ol suitcase strapped onto it. The two boys, a girl about eleven or twelve, and another little girl – just about able to walk, Manny says. The littlest had curly blond hair and looked sort of like that cute little girl with the ringlets in the movie shorts – that’s how come Manny took notice. He also noticed that the four kids didn’t stick around, until the trucker got his brakes fixed. When he moved on, the kids weren’t with him. Manny thinks the oldest boy is the one doing errands for the grocery store.”

“If he was hanging around there, looking for work,” Stephen had already made the logical deduction, “Then he might have overheard Mrs. Allison talking to the others, waiting for the Karnesville bus. What are we going to do now, Captain?”

Douglas sounded as if he were thinking out loud. “I really think that we should talk to them. These kids. Find out what’s going on. Why they’re on the road, without any family to look after them. I’ve never heard of kids going on the bum, all alone, ‘cept in the movies. Maybe a boy by himself, looking for work and hitting the road. But with his little sisters? There is something odd and curious about this situation. I think we ought to get to the bottom of it, before we tell anyone else. Tomorrow is Sunday … the bus doesn’t run on Sunday, and the grocery store is closed. I think we ought to go out to the icehouse tomorrow afternoon … after church and talk to these kids. Find out what the story is. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Stephen nodded. “Meet here first, then go all together. And not a word about this to the grownups … until we find out what the story is.”

They all agreed, although Letty saw that Retta hesitated.

Finally, Retta mumbled, “Well … with a baby, who still needs milk… we really ought to tell someone. Someone who really cares. And can do something.”

“We will tell someone, as soon as we know that their story is,” Douglas assured her. It was nearly suppertime – and their mothers would all be irate, if they were late to the table. There was no more time to talk about the matter of the family of children living surreptitiously in the ice house: they headed for home, as speedily as their various means could take them – Douglas and Letty on their bicycles, and Stephen on a spry ranch cowpony. Retta and Artie on foot.