Read "Annihilation" by Isabel Ostrander online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The cold, early light of a clouded morning found McCarty and Dennis seated over pancakes and coffee in an all-night restaurant on Sixth Avenue not far from Fiftieth Street. The intervening hours since they left the New Queen's Mall had been fruitlessly spent in a weary round of the ferries and railroad terminals in search of news of a small, solitary traveler and now they had just come from an interview with the superintendent of the palatial studio apartment building in which the artist Blaisdell resided, whose exact address a nearby druggist had been fortuitously able to supply.
"I always thought those painter guys lived in garrets with never a square meal nor a second shirt," Dennis spoke in a slightly dazed tone. "I mind that day watchman Bill said young Horace told him Blaisdell was one of the greatest in the country, but he must have some regular business to be able to live in a place like that! There's one thing sure; no matter how much of a fancy he'd took to the kid he could afford to get into no trouble by taking him on a tour without his father and mother being willing, and if the boy showed up he'd bring him back. Where is it again that he's gone sketching?"