It meant interviewing in every district one or two storekeepers, and asking the mail carriers for "Caroline Smith," and showing the picture to taxi drivers.

These latter were the men, insisted Ronicky, who would eventually bring them to Caroline Smith.

"Because, if they've ever drove a girl as pretty as that, they'll remember for quite a while." "But half of these gents ain't going to talk to us, even if they know," Bill Gregg protested, after he had been gruffly refused an answer a dozen times in the first morning.
"Some of 'em won't talk," admitted Ronicky, "but that's probably because they don't know.

Take 'em by and large, most gents like to tell everything they know, and then some!" As a matter of fact they met with rather more help than they wanted.
In spite of all their efforts to appear casual there was something too romantic in this search for a girl to remain entirely unnoticed.
People whom they asked became excited and offered them a thousand suggestions.

Everybody, it seemed, had, somewhere, somehow, heard of a Caroline Smith living in his own block, and every one remembered dimly having passed a girl on the street who looked exactly like Caroline Smith.