The peril of the man whom Dorothy believed to be a fellow-soldier with her own father, Major Dale, was the uppermost topic in Dorothy’s mind and conversation. Tavia began to have another, and more personal, worry.
“I could eat a planked steak—plank and all!—right now,” said the flyaway. “Dear me, Doro! I wish your purse was like the widow’s cruse, and never gave out. There’s a buffet car on, too.”
They had to satisfy their appetites for the time being by buying some fruit from the train boy. But this was a poor substitute for planked steak—or any other hearty viand.
“I hope Aunt Winnie and Ned and Nat will wait for us at Sessions, as I asked them,” sighed Dorothy.
“If they don’t, we’ll have to steal a ride,” said Tavia, quickly. “Ned has our tickets, you know.”
But that was not a real worry. Dorothy was pretty sure her aunt and the boys would do just as she had asked them to do. What was happening outside that car, on the rear step, was a matter (so she thought) for real anxiety!
A dozen times she went back to peer through the window in the vestibule door and caught a glimpse of the top of the battered Grand Army hat.
Perhaps she went once too often—for the contentment of the old man who was cheating the railroad company of a fare. Or, it may have been in some other manner that the brakeman’s attention was called to the presence of the stowaway on the step. For he was discovered before the train reached the junction, at eleven o’clock, where Dorothy and Tavia were to leave the train.
The conductor had been through again and talked to them, and they had learned when and where to look for the station. Other passengers were already getting their baggage out of the racks, and putting on their light wraps.
Suddenly the two friends heard a disturbance at the end of the car. Tavia jumped up and looked back.