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Page 75
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.
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