“Not men like Colonel Vedant,” Grail insisted warmly. “He is the type that fights rather than runs away. Besides, in this case there is absolutely no ground for such a suspicion. His record is unassailable, and he is due for honorable retirement in a few months. He has no financial troubles. His health, for all his fifty odd years, is perfect, and no one who knows him could doubt his sanity for a moment. What possible reason could there be for such a man to chuck the game?”
“Perhaps a woman?” suggested Schilder.
“Rot! The only woman the colonel is interested in is his daughter, and he would never do anything to cause her the slightest distress or uneasiness. Why, man, on her account alone, if for no other reason, the theory you offer is simply ridiculous.”
There was some further discussion along the same line, but of little consequence. Shortly after, Major Appleby, with a couple of officers from the fort, arrived in a motor car.
“Bless my soul!” exclaimed the major, a short and rather apoplectic-looking warrior, when the situation had duly been made clear to him. “We must lose no time in getting to the bottom of this.”
“Mr. Schilder,” remarked Grail quietly, “is firmly convinced that the colonel took himself off voluntarily.”
“Nonsense!” protested Major Appleby, and his companions promptly echoed the opinion. “Vedant is the last man in the world to have done a thing of that sort.”
“All right,” conceded the manager; “you gentlemen are probably more competent to judge on that point than I. Just the same, I surely am curious to see what other explanation you can get to fit the facts.”
“Ah!” The major cocked his head importantly on one side. “That will no doubt come out in the investigation. The chief thing now is to learn just what the exact facts are.”
The inquiry he set on foot, however, elicited nothing new, and in the end the newcomers had to confess themselves as completely baffled as Grail and Schilder. Still, it did not escape the shrewd eyes of the foundry manager, as the fruitless investigation proceeded, that certain more or less vague suspicions were forming in the minds of Appleby and his associates; and he gathered, too, not so much from anything that was said or done as by a sort of coolness in the atmosphere, that these were in some way hostile to the adjutant.