There May Be Danger by Ianthe Jerrold Page B

connected with something that he wanted to keep a secret. Nets! thought Kate, bird-nets, fish-nets, butterfly-nets, camouflage-nets, nets for rabbiting, nets for snares—
    There was an echo here of what Kate had been thinking as she toiled home on her bicycle. Snares were dangerous—for the snared creature. And sometimes a hunter was caught with his own snare, and the danger was his. Was there a connection between Sidney’s interest in nets and his departure? Had he already made his net secretly before he went? Kate picked up her oilskin coat and went upstairs to her bedroom. Taking up “Things for a Boy to Do,” she was about to turn to the index when she found it was unnecessary. The book fell open at page 105, Netting. The page had that peculiarly fingered and dingy appearance reading matter acquires when the young idea has been poring over it.
    â€œFor Netting,” read Kate, “a netting needle and a spool are needed—”
    And, Kate supposed, quite a lot of string. If Sidney had been secretly practising net-making during the month before he went—perhaps during those fight evenings when Mrs. Howells had thought him touring the countryside on his bicycle—he must have acquired his materials from somewhere. No doubt it was possible to buy twine and netting needles at Llanfyn, which was the nearest market-town. But, if Sidney had bought his materials there, the police would surely have discovered it and questioned Mrs. Howells about the transaction?
    Or Sidney might have got his materials privately, as a gift, or loan. But if so, why had the giver kept the matter so quiet that Mrs. Howells had not heard of it? Was the giver involved in whatever danger had overtaken Sidney? Did he even know —too well, perhaps—what had happened to the boy?
    Kate, standing there in the little bedroom with the boy’s book in her hands, became aware that she was casting her own nets a bit wide. They were catching at all kinds of distant, sinister possibilities which she was quite unable to draw in and examine. For the present, she had better attend to collecting facts, rather than to casting about for possibilities. She thought a bicycle-ride would clear her head, and went downstairs to raise the saddle of Mrs. Evan’s bicycle a couple of inches, and to tell Mrs. Howells that she was going over to Llanhalo and would not be back till evening.

Chapter Six
    Kate’s cycle-ride took her downhill and up again on a road that skirted along the lower slopes of Rhosbach, on whose far upper slopes the distant sheep seemed to crawl like lice. Below her, to her left, when she could glimpse the landscape through the tall hedges and the woods that clung here and there around the base of the hills, lay wide, rolling tracts of farmland and handsome old magpie houses showing tantalisingly here and there behind the yew trees which protected them from the winds.
    Occasionally a farmer’s battered motor car, or a flock of sheep with drover and collie, passed her on the road. And once a gipsy’s caravan went by, with two rough ponies tied on behind the vans, and a couple of half-grown boys walking alongside.
    As they passed her, Kate thought of Sidney, and even turned her head, as if hoping to see, sitting in the back doorway of the lumbering vehicle, a fair-skinned, fair-haired boy. But the person who sat on the step nursing a baby and smoking a cigarette was an old wrinkled woman, anything but fair-skinned.
    The afternoon was fine, with a tattered blue and white sky and a lovely shifting light upon gold-turning trees and gleaming, browning grasses. The road crossed the valley, and then went uphill once more, and then down and up again along the lower slopes of the spurred hills until she caught sight, on the bank below her, of a rather ruinous-looking small church or chapel, a square stone house and a great many barns huddled round it, and decided that she had better get off and take a look at