“No,” Rob agreed; “if it hadn’t been for you, we should have been in bad straits.”
“If it hadn’t a bin fer them bees, lad, you mean,” amended the captain earnestly.
Soon after, they reached the Inlet and the captain set out for the wharf, having exacted a promise from the boys to visit him at an early date.
“Ther island’s seemed kind er lonesome since the Boy Scout camp weighed anchor,” he said.
“We’ll be back again this summer,” Rob assured him.
When Rob reached home he found a telephone message awaiting him. It was from Lieutenant Duvall. The boy soon obtained connection with his friend, one of the improvements at the mansion having been the installation of a ’phone. The lieutenant actually gasped as he listened. He had trusted Dugan implicitly up to that afternoon, and the revelation of his brutal attack following the lad’s disclosures of what they had overheard in the hut had shaken his faith in human nature tremendously.
“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.”