“He might be over at Mary Nestor’s house,” suggested Mr. Newton, when the person who had called Tom on the telephone had been told to ring up later in the day.
“That’s so,” agreed the young manager. “It’s the most likely place to find him. I should have thought of that before.”
But Mary also answered in the negative. Tom was not there.
“Is anything the matter?” she asked, influenced to do so perhaps by an anxious note in Ned’s voice.
“Oh, no; nothing wrong,” he said. “It’s just an important message for him. He’ll be around soon, I guess.”
But Tom Swift was far from “being around.”
Ten thousand years seemed to pass while the young inventor lay in a fog of incoherence. At least, it appeared to Tom to be ten thousand years—perhaps longer.
Slowly he opened his eyes, but the darkness about him was so intense that he thought it was still an effect of the cowardly blow, which he now remembered. But in a moment he knew that his eyes were open and that he was staring out of them, but without seeing anything.
The blackness was profound—like a piece of black velvet wrapped about him.
And then, as he tried to move and found that he could not, Tom knew that he was bound—bound with ropes and in a dark and strange place.