ssing since September fifteenth. Letter follows.

The Camerons felt as badly as though Peter Fearing had been their own
brother.

"The telegram doesn't say that he's dead," Trudy declared, over and
over again.

"Maybe he's a prisoner," Tom suggested.

"Perhaps he had to come down in a wood somewhere," Henry speculated,
"and will get back to our lines."

"The government makes mistakes sometimes," Stannard said. "There was a
woman in Upton--" He went on with a long story about a woman whose son
was reported killed in France on the very day the boy had been in his
mother's house on furlough from a cantonment. There were a great many
interesting and ingenious details to the story, but nobody paid much
attention to them. "So you never can tell," Stannard wound up.

"No, you never can tell," Bruce agreed, but he didn't look convinced.
Something, he was quite sure, was wrong with Pete.

"Don't anybody write Mother Jess," he said. "She and Laura have enough
to worry about with Sid."

"What if they see it in the papers?" Elliott asked.

"They're busy. Ten to one they won't see it, since it isn't head-lined
on the front page. Wait till we get the letter."

"How soon do you suppose the letter will come?" Gertrude wished to
know.

"'Letter follows,'" Henry read from the yellow slip which the postman
delivered from the telegraph office. "That means right away, I should
say."

"Maybe it does and maybe it doesn't," said Tom and then _he_ had a
story to tell. It didn't take Tom long, for he was a boy of fewer
words than Stannard.

Morning, noon, and night the Camerons speculated about that telegram.
They combed its words with a fine-toothed comb, but they couldn't make
anything out of them except the bald fact that Pete was missing.

If you think they let it go at that, you are very much mistaken. Where
the fact stopped the Cameron imaginations began, and imaginations
never know where to stop. The less actual information an imagination
has to work on, the busier it is. The Camerons hadn't any more
imagination than most people, but what they had grew very busy. It
fairly amazed them with its activity. If you think that this was silly
and that they ought to have chained up their imaginations until the
promised letter arrived, it only shows that you have never received
any such telegram.

After all, the letter, when it came, didn't tell them much. The letter
said that Lieutenant Peter Fearing had gone out with his squa