"Why, Jack, you—you don't think that anything has happened to him, do you?" asked Tom.
"I don't know. He was talking quite cheerfully to me and then, without any warning, he gave a sort of gasp and then everything was silent."
The next minute the boys entered the workshop of the inventor.
Jack's worst fears were realized as they gazed at the scene before them. On the floor, stretched out inanimate before the radio telephone apparatus, lay Mr. Chadwick. His right hand grasped a letter.
His head lay in a pool of blood, oozing from a cut at the back of his head.
"Dad! dad! What has happened?" cried Jack, in an agony of alarm, as he fell to his knees at his father's side.
But Mr. Chadwick did not answer. The next moment Tom's shout for help brought everybody about the place running toward the workshop where the alarming discovery had been made.