“Is your brother Gregory in this country now?” asked Tom slowly.
“Not to the best of my knowledge,” almost drawled their employer. “The last I heard of him he was still on his plantation in Honduras, probably hatching more revolutionary plots and giving the government a good excuse for sending its soldiers to shoot him one of these days. But I _do_ know that, for a while, Greg had American lawyers hard at work trying to find some way to smash Aaron’s will. They gave it up, though, and so did Greg, after hearing from me that Master Ted was wild to follow a soldier’s career.”
Both boys were silent for some time. Yet, if they did no talking, their thoughts very nearly ran riot. To them it seemed that Ted Dunstan’s lot in life lay in all the bright places of glory and fortune. How they would have relished such a grand chance!
“By the way,” said Mr. Dunstan, rising slowly and stretching, “I haven’t seen the youngster in hours. I think I’ll locate him and bring him around here.”
He went into the house. Within the next ten minutes two of the men servants left the house, running hurriedly out of sight in different directions. At the end of twenty minutes Mr. Dunstan himself appeared, looking actually worried.
“We can’t seem to find Ted anywhere,” he confessed uneasily. “The young man hasn’t been seen since he stabled his pony at half-past twelve. I thought he would lunch with Mrs. Dunstan; she thought he was lunching with us. We’ve sent all about the grounds, we’ve telephoned the neighbors and the town, and all without avail. The pony is in the stable and the young man seems to have disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” repeated Tom Halstead, springing to his feet, electrified by the news. “Don’t you think it more likely, sir, he’s been _helped_ to disappear?”
“You think he may have been spirited away?” demanded Mr. Dunstan. “But why?”
“Haven’t you yourself told us, sir, that it would be worth some one’s trouble, to the extent of nine hundred thousand dollars, to have the boy vanish?” asked Tom breathlessly.
“Pardon me, sir, for forgetting that Gregory Dunstan is your brother,” Tom went on whitening. “Yet that talk about disabling the ‘Meteor’! The man who looked like a Spaniard—but the people of Honduras are of Spanish descent. Why should anyone want to disable the ‘Meteor,’ unless to stop a pursuit by water? You yourself have told us that your brother has a weakness for mixing up in revolutions down in Honduras.”