the two boxes of bullion
were gone!

Catesby's heart was thumping against his ribs as he fumbled with his
key. He laid his hand upon Skidmore's shoulder, but the latter did not
move. The fair hair hung in a mass on the side of his forehead, and here
it was fair no longer. There was a hole with something horribly red and
slimy oozing from it. The carpet on the floor was piled up in a heap;
there were red smears on the cushions. It was quite evident that a
struggle had taken place here. The shattered glass in the window
testified to that. And the boxes were gone, and Skidmore had been
murdered by some assailant who had shot him through the brain. And this
mysterious antagonist had got off with the bullion, too.

A thing incredible, amazing, impossible; but there it was. By some
extraordinary method or another the audacious criminal had boarded an
express train traveling at sixty miles an hour in the teeth of a gale.
He had contrived to enter the cashier's carriage and remove specie to
the amount of eight thousand pounds! It was impossible that only one man
could have carried it. But all the same it was gone.

Catesby pulled himself together. He was perfectly certain that nobody at
present on the train had been guilty of this thing. He was perfectly
certain that nobody had left the train. Nobody could have done so after
entering the station without the guard's knowledge, and to have
attempted such a thing on the far side of the river bridge would have
been certain death to anybody. There was a long viaduct here--posts and
pillars and chains, with tragedy lurking anywhere for the madman who
attempted such a thing. And until the viaduct was reached the express
had not slackened speed. Besides, the thief who had the courage and
intelligence and daring to carry out a robbery like this was not the man
to leave an express train traveling at a speed of upwards of sixty miles
an hour.

The train had to proceed, there was no help for it. There was a hurried
conference between Catesby and the stationmaster; after that the
electric lamps in the dead man's carriage were unshipped, and the blinds
pulled down. The matter would be fully investigated when Edinburgh was
reached, meanwhile the stationmaster at Lydmouth would telephone the
Scotch capital and let them know there what they had to expect. Catesby
crept into his van again, very queer and dizzy, and with a sensation in
his legs suggestive of creeping paralysis.

*