“You mean him and the young colored man with him.”
Ann’s big gray eyes became bigger with surprise.
“He didn’t have any colored person with him.”
“But you have seen them together within the last few days?”
The young woman gravely shook her head.
“Professor Morgan is the strangest man I ever have saw; he has been here a good many times but never spoke a word to me, and I don’t believe he’s said a half dozen words to paw; he never brought any person to the hotel and I’ve never saw a colored boy with him.”
“Have you ever been to his place in the woods?”
“No; folks say he won’t let anyone come nigh it; if a person does so he has some contraption that will blow him into the sky; you don’t catch me running such a resk.”
Harvey Hamilton’s heart sank within him. The fact that Professor Morgan had come alone to this house for his meals had a sinister meaning as regarded Bohunkus, whose appetite was something which could be soothed only in the way nature intended.
Had the lunatic discovered that Bunk sent a letter to his friend, and had he punished him for it? Was he starving the poor fellow to death, or had he taken quicker means of ridding himself of his company? Had he turned him adrift, dropped him from his airship, or chosen one of a score of methods for wiping the lad out of existence?