Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/201

 his chin in his hand. There lay before him the disagreeable duty of cabling Mr. Bolliver that the boys were in trouble and missing. He reproached himself for not going in person with them to Nangpoo, but his own business had been such as to keep him in Shanghai, and it had seemed a simple enough expedition.

"They didn't know the people; they didn't know the country, "he mused. "But how could I guess the man would load them with gems? Shall I never learn to understand the Chinese? Eh, dear me—and I must let Bart know."

But first of all he telephoned the consulate and the municipal building and set in motion the slow-turning machinery of the law, in the hope that something might penetrate to that unknown waterway whither the kidnappers' boat had fled.

"They might have done so many things, those villains," Mr. Tyler sighed. "So many!"

And then he wrote his cablegram.

The cable, of course, did not reach Mr. Bolliver at once, nor, fortunately, did it reach the aunts at all, as it was sent to Mr. Bolliver's Boston office and forwarded to him. Those poor old ladies were pitifully distressed enough