"Then I want to tell you that you are laboring under a misapprehension," sneered the former officer. "I can see that I am not welcome here. I'll go."
Dick did not ask him to stay. The young millionaire was anything but a hypocrite.
"What did he want?" asked Mr. Vardon, when Larson had left.
"To build my airship. He evidently did not know that I had already engaged you. He got a surprise, I think."
"He is a dangerous man, and an unscrupulous one," said the aviator. "I do not say that through any malice, but because I firmly believe it. I would never trust him."
"Nor shall I," added Dick. "I presume though, that he will have some feeling against me for this."
"Very likely," agreed Mr. Vardon. "You will have to be on your guard."
The young millionaire and the aviator then went into details about some complicated point in the construction of the Abaris, with which it is not necessary to weary my readers.
Larson must have recalled what Dick had told him about Uncle Ezra being a wealthy man, for, as subsequent events disclosed, the disappointed army officer went almost at once to Dankville. And there he laid before the miserly man a plan which Uncle Ezra eventually took up, strange as it may seen.
It was the bait of the twenty thousand dollar prize that "took," in his case.