The innocent and unsuspecting child did as she was directed. Her little head nodded. She struggled against the increasing drowsiness, but in vain. In five minutes she was fast asleep.
"There will be no further trouble," thought Hartley. "When she wakes up it will be morning. My plan has been a complete success."
It might have been supposed that some instinct of parental affection would have made it disagreeable to this man to kidnap his own child by such means, but John Hartley had never been troubled with a heart or natural affections. He was supremely selfish, and surveyed the sleeping child as coolly and indifferently as if he had never before set eyes upon her.
Two miles and a half beyond the South Ferry, in a thinly settled outlying district of Brooklyn, stood a three-story brick house, shabby and neglected in appearance, bearing upon a sign over the door the name
DONOVAN'S
Wines and Liquors.
It was the nightly resort of a set of rough and lawless men, many of them thieves and social outlaws, who drank and smoked as they sat at small tables in the sand-strewn bar-room.
Hugh Donovan himself had served a term at Sing Sing for burglary, and was suspected to be indirectly interested in the ventures of others engaged in similar offenses, though he managed to avoid arrest.