Jem Chip, the vegetarian, had even shaken hands with the president and left him with
"Tomorrow!"
And William T. Forbes, the manufacturer of sugar from rags, had received a cordial shake from Phil Evans who had said to him twice,
"Au revoir!
Au revoir!"
Miss Doll and Miss Mat Forbes, so attached to Uncle Prudent by the bonds of purest friendship, could not get over the disappearance, and in order to obtain news of the absent, talked even more than they were accustomed to.
Three, four, five, six days passed. Then a week, then two weeks, and there was nothing to give a clue to the missing three.
The most minute search had been made in every quarter. Nothing!
In the park, even under the trees and brushwood. Nothing!
Always nothing!
Although here it was noticed that the grass looked to be pressed down in a way that seemed suspicious and certainly was inexplicable; and at the edge of the clearing there were traces of a recent struggle.
Perhaps a band of scoundrels had attacked the colleagues here in the deserted park in the middle of the night!
It was possible.
The police proceeded with their inquiries in all due form and with all lawful slowness.
They dragged the Schuyllkill river, and cut into the thick bushes that fringe its banks; and if this was useless it was not quite a waste, for the Schuyllkill is in great want of a good weeding, and it got it on this occasion.
Practical people are the authorities of Philadelphia!
Then the newspapers were tried.
Advertisements and notices and articles were sent to all the journals in the Union without distinction of color.
The "Daily Negro," the special organ of the black race, published a portrait of Frycollin after his latest photograph.
Rewards were offered to whoever would give news of the three absentees, and even to those who would find some clue to put the police on the track.
"Five thousand dollars!
Five thousand dollars to any citizen who would --"
Nothing was done.
The five thousand dollars remained with the treasurer of the Weldon Institute.
Undiscoverable!
Undiscoverable! Undiscoverable!
Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans, of Philadelphia!
It need hardly be said that the club was put to serious inconvenience by this disappearance of its president and secretary.
And at first the assembly voted urgency to a measure which suspended the work on the "Go-Ahead."
How, in the absence of the principal promoters of the affair, of those who had devoted to the enterprise a certain part of their fortune in time and money--how could they finish the work when these were not present?
It were better, then, to wait.
And just then came the first news of the strange phenomenon which had exercised people's minds some weeks before.
The mysterious object had been again seen at different times in the higher regions of the atmosphere.
But nobody dreamt of establishing a connection between this singular reappearance and the no less singular disappearance of the members of the Weldon Institute.
In fact, it would have required a very strong dose of imagination to connect one of these facts with the other.
Whatever it might be, asteroid or aerolite or aerial monster, it had reappeared in such a way that its dimensions and shape could be much better appreciated, first in Canada, over the country between Ottawa and Quebec, on the very morning after the disappearance of the colleagues, and later over the plains of the Far West, where it had tried its speed against an express train on the Union Pacific.
At the end of this day the doubts of the learned world were at an end.
The body was not a product of nature, it was a flying machine, the practical application of the theory of "heavier than air."
And if the inventor of the aeronef had wished to keep himself unknown he could evidently have done better than to try it over the Far West.
As to the mechanical force he required, or the engines by which it was communicated, nothing was known, but there could be no doubt the aeronef was gifted with an extraordinary faculty of locomotion.
In fact, a few days afterwards it was reported from the Celestial Empire, then from the southern part of India, then from the Russian steppes.
Who was then this bold mechanician that possessed such powers of locomotion, for whom States had no frontiers and oceans no limits, who disposed of the terrestrial atmosphere as if it were his domain?
Could it be this Robur whose theories had been so brutally thrown in the face of the Weldon Institute the day he led the attack against the utopia of guidable balloons?
Perhaps such a notion occurred to some of the wide-awake people, but none dreamt that the said Robur had anything to do with the disappearance of the president and secretary of the Institute.
Things remained in this state of mystery when a telegram arrived from France through the New York cable at 11-37 A.M. on July 13.
And what was this telegram?
It was the text of the document found at Paris in a snuff-box revealing what had happened to the two personages for whom the Union was in mourning.
So, then, the perpetrator of this kidnapping "was" Robur the engineer, come expressly to Philadelphia to destroy in its egg the theory of the balloonists.
He it was who commanded the
"Albatross!"