Tom’s lips puckered. Whistling, he turned his face away from his chum, looking out through one of the portholes.
“What’s the matter?” inquired Dawson, looking up in some surprise.
“Joe,” retorted the young skipper, “don’t you think that was rather a scurvy trick to play on justice?”
“Trick?” repeated Joe in an injured voice. “Well, if you call that a ‘trick,’ my captain, then all I have to say is that Judge Swan didn’t seem to be very much upset about it.”
“There having been no legal session of probate court to-day,” Tom went on, “that gives our friends one day of grace in which to find Ted Dunstan.”
“I wish it were a year more, instead of a day,” sighed Dawson.
“I wonder,” muttered Tom, as though talking to himself. “I wonder whether Judge Swan hinted himself aboard the ‘Meteor’ just so Joe could play that scurvy, unmannerly trick against the blind goddess of justice? I wonder!”
CHAPTER XVIII—THE MESSAGE UNDER THE ROCK
“And so you’ve gained until another day, anyway, sir,” Tom wound up his account of the “accident” to the “Meteor’s” motor.
“I fear it will do us but little good,” sighed Horace Dunstan. “I feel that possibility in the way of search has been exhausted. It looks as though we were doomed to defeat.”