"
"That fox!" The explosion cleared the atmosphere for an instant.
"That fox!" answered Jack, in a confirmatory tone; and then
followed an account of the interview, the boy chuckling at the end
of every sentence in his delight over the situation.
"And what are YOU going to do?" asked Peter in an undecided tone.
He had heard nothing so comical as this for years.
"Going to do nothing,--that is, nothing with Uncle Arthur. In the
first place, the property is worthless, unless half a million of
money is spent upon it."
"Or is SAID to have been spent upon it," rejoined Peter with a
smile, remembering the Breen methods.
"Exactly so;--and in the second place, I would rather tear up the
deed than have it added to Uncle Arthur's stock of balloons."
Peter drummed on the table-cloth and looked out of the window. The
boy was right in principle, but then the property might not be a
balloon at all; might in fact be worth a great deal more than the
boy dreamed of. That Arthur Breen had gone out of his way to send
for Jack--knowing, as Peter did, how systematically both he and
his wife had abused and ridiculed him whenever his name was
mentioned--was positive evidence to Peter's mind not only that the
property had a value of some kind but that the discovery was of
recent origin.
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