“I don’t know who to trust,” he exclaimed over the wire. “No,” in answer to Rob’s question, “Dugan has not come back. When he does I shall see that he is sent to Washington under guard.”
But Dugan did not return to his duty with the aero squad that night, nor on any succeeding night. He and the Jap disappeared as completely as though the earth had swallowed them. A visit to the hut revealed a cot-bed and the rough furniture the lads had noticed, but there were no other traces of human occupancy.
“Good-by, Dugan,” chorused the lads, as it became certain that the ruffianly wearer of the army uniform had vanished from their midst, but could they have looked into the future they would, perhaps, have changed their form of farewell to “Au revoir.”
One afternoon, not long after the events related in the last chapter, Paul Perkins had a visitor. The caller was Freeman Hunt’s father, a man of past middle age, but flashily dressed notwithstanding the plentiful sprinkling of gray in his hair and carefully trimmed mustache. A diamond ring sparkled on Mr. Hunt’s left hand and a similar stone blazed in his tie. He regarded the wearing of the jewels as advertisements of prosperity, and wore them with the same satisfaction with which he looked upon his new, gaudily furnished house on the hill above the village, and his automobile—also very new—and his numerous other possessions, all of which, like himself, seemed somehow to savor of veneer and to nowhere have the true ring of solid wood.
There was, perhaps, a reason for this. Stonington Hunt had not always enjoyed “ease and a competency.” His earlier years, in fact, had been a hard struggle. He had been a messenger boy for a firm of Wall Street brokers, but, by natural sharpness and shrewdness, had worked himself up till he obtained an interest in the business. Then he branched out. His fortune grew by leaps and bounds, till Stonington Hunt was recognized as a wealthy man. The newspapers had shown up several of his financial transactions as being distinctly shady, but somehow he had always been “smart enough,” as he would have expressed it, to keep to windward of the law. “Smartness,” in fact, was his gospel. He preached it morning, noon, and night to his son. Had Freeman had a different sort of father, he might have been a different sort of boy. But his mother having died when he was but a small lad, he had fallen exclusively to his father’s care. Stonington Hunt had brought his son up to believe it was disgraceful to be poor, and doubly disgraceful to fail in anything one set out to do. Principle, the elder Hunt had none, and he had taught his son that a sense of honor was a useless encumbrance. Such was the man who rang Mrs. Perkins’s front door bell and greeted her with overdone effusiveness.