Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/322

 requests that you return mine to her at Oakwood immediately.

I leave to-night on the Limited for Atlanta where I join a friend. We go to Savannah, and thence by steamer to Boston where I shall visit Helen for a month. Sincerely,

For a long time he looked at the letter in a stupor of amazement. That her father could coerce her hand into writing such a brutal commonplace note was a revelation of his power he had never dreamed. And then his anger began to rise. His fighting blood from soldier ancestors made his nerves tingle at this challenge.

He took up the letter and read it again curiously studying each word. He opened the folded sheet hoping to find some detached message. There was nothing inside. But he noticed on the other side of the sheet a lot of indentures as though made by the end of a needle. He turned it back and studied these dots under different letters in the words made by the needle points. He spelled,—

"My Darling—Unto the Uttermost!"

And then he covered the note with kisses, sprang to his feet and looked at his watch.

It was now ten-thirty. The Limited left Independence at eleven o'clock and made no stops for the first hundred miles toward Atlanta. But just to the south where the railroad skirted the foot of King's Mountain, there was a water tank on the mountain side where he knew the train stopped for water about midnight.

With a fast horse he could make the eighteen miles and board the Limited at this water station. The only danger was if the sky should cloud over and the starlight be lost it would be difficult to keep in the narrow