He submitted to the porter and his friend Lathrop, and, the train just rolling in, he was carried through the gates and placed aboard it in the parlor car where seats had been procured. He had never before traveled in such luxury, but instead of the gay abandon with which he would once have accepted and enjoyed it, he seemed now not to notice anything about him. Except that, just as the train was moving out, he caught at a newsboy hurrying from it, seized a paper, tossed a nickel, and spread the sheet open on his knee.
Alas! for all the over-wise precautions of his friends! The first words his eyes rested upon were the scare-head capitals of this sentence:
THE FATE OF POSTMAN JOHN CHESTER'S DAUGHTER DOROTHY STILL UNKNOWN--KIDNAPPING AND MURDER THE PROBABLE SOLUTION OF THE MYSTERY.
He stared at the letters as if they had no significance. Then he read them singly, in pairs, in dozens--trying to make his shocked brain comprehend their meaning. The utmost he could do was to see them as letters of fire, printed on the air before him, and on the darkness of the tunnel they now entered. A darkness so suggestive of the misery that had shrouded a once happy household that poor Martha, burying her face in her hands, could only sob aloud.
But from the stricken "father John" came neither sob nor groan, for there was still upon him the numbness of the shock he had received; and it was in that same silence that he made the long journey, with its several changes, and came at last to the farmhouse on the hilltop, which was to have been made glad by a child's presence and was now so desolate.
Dorothy reread the note. Then she took off the scrawl attached to it and tore it into bits, remarking to the mastiff, or whoever might hear:
"Well, I don't want any milk. I shall never like it again. I believe that dreadful man put something in it last night--was it only last night?--that made me go to sleep and not know a thing was happening after I got into the carriage till I woke up here. Milk! Ugh!"
With a shudder of repulsion she looked over her shoulder just as a sibilant, warning "S-Ssh!" came from the room behind. Then she stood up and screamed as the mastiff, likewise rising, grasped her skirt in his teeth.