"I think I had better hold it for two or three days before I try to answer it myself. Devlin or that impetuous young diplomat from Colombia may drift in and tell me some news. And Goodwin himself may reappear. I hate to cable the agitated parent that his son's whereabouts are unknown. It would be like looking for a needle in a hay-stack for me to try to find him in Panama." The surgeon tucked the message in his pocket and went to join his white-clad fellows in the operating-room. He was a very busy young man, and there was no time in his crowded day to investigate the disappearance of Walter Goodwin. And inasmuch as the _Dauntless_ and the marines had been sent to sea with very little publicity, several days passed before the story of the pursuit of the _Juan Lopez_ reached the hospital. Meanwhile that anxious parent, Mr. Horatio Goodwin, had found it difficult to give proper attention to his book-keeping duties in the office of the coal-dealer in Wolverton. He started nervously when any one entered the place and his eye was alert for the cap and buttons of a telegraph-messenger boy. At the end of the first day of waiting, he trudged homeward in a state of mind distraught and downcast. His wife was grievously disappointed that no word had come from Walter, but Eleanor maintained her blithe spirits. She had suddenly decided to become a sculptor and labored until bedtime over a sticky lump of modelling clay. "This is a bust of Walter," she announced. "It looks as if his face had been stepped on, but the firmly moulded chin is quite well done, don't you think? It is comforting to look at that sculptured chin. It shows that Walter can overcome all obstacles. It helps to keep me from worrying about him." Even this masterpiece failed to console the parents, who waited in vain through another long day. Every little while Mr. Goodwin darted from the coal-dealer's place to the telegraph office. At supper he told his wife: "There has been no interruption in the cable service, and our message must have reached Ancon within two or three hours after I sent it." "Walter may have left the hospital by this time," said she, "but they ought to know his address." "Yes. The department in which he is employed should be able to locate him at once. The whereabouts of every American must be on record." Walter's silence tortured them. Like other fathers and mothers since the beginning, they imagined all sorts of mischances which might have befallen him, just as when he had lingered after dark at the skating-pond his mother was sure he had broken through the ice. Such crosses as these the right kind of parents must bear. It is part of the price they pay. On the Isthmus of Panama Walter Goodwin might consider himself a man, but in his own home, in the hearts of his own people, he was still a boy to be watched over, to be feared for, to inspire a thousand tender anxieties of which he would never be aware.