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Updated: June 30, 2025
Will you give me a try?" The elder ignored the question in the concern he exhibited for Allen's injury. "It is a cursed outrage!" he declared. "Those Hatburns will be got up, or my name's not Priest! We'd have them now, but the jail wouldn't keep them overnight, and court three months off."
They would have awarded him the position immediately, he felt, if he had properly attended to the Hatburns. He wanted desperately to explain his failure to Priest, but a dogged pride prevented. The storekeeper was tapping on an open ledger with a pen, gazing doubtfully at David. "You couldn't be worse than the drunken object we have now," he admitted.
David commented: "I wouldn't have et a thing till I'd got them!" In the ruddy reflection of the lamp his pink-and-blue charm, his shy lips, resembled a pastoral divinity of boyhood. Allen laughed. "That family, the Hatburns " He paused. "Why, they'd just mow you down with the field daisies." David flushed with annoyance.
Subconsciously he stopped the stage. On the right the dwelling of the Hatburns showed vaguely through the mist. No one else could have been on the road. A troubled expression settled on his glowing countenance, a pondering doubt; then his mouth drew into a determined line. "I'll have to go right up and ask," he said aloud.
The elder moved on to the pounded earth beyond. Here, in their presence, David felt the loathing for the Hatburns a snake inspires dusty brown rattlers and silent cottonmouths. His hatred obliterated every other feeling but a dim consciousness of the necessity to recover the mail bag.
The next mid-morning, descending the sharp grade toward Elbow Barren, there was no lessening of David's bitterness against the Hatburns. The flavor of tobacco died in his mouth, he grew unconscious of the lurching heavy stage, the responsibility of the mail, all committed to his care.
His objective senses were abnormally clear, cold: he saw every detail of the Hatburns' garb the soiled shirts with buttoned pockets on their left breasts; the stained baggy breeches in heavy boots such boots as had stamped Allen into nothingness; dull yellow faces and beady eyes; the long black hair about their dark ears.
"David," she continued, her voice now lowered, fluctuating with anxiety, "you weren't reckoning on paying off them Hatburns? You never?" She halted, gazing at him intently. "Why, they'd shoot you up in no time! You are nothing but a " "You can call me a boy if you've a mind to," he interrupted; "and maybe the Hatburns'll kill me and maybe they won't.
And he, David Kinemon, had had to step back, like a coward or a woman, and let the Hatburns triumph. The stage drew up before the Beaulings post-office in the middle of the afternoon. David delivered the mail bags, and then led the team back to a stable on the grassy verge of the houses clustered at the end of tracks laid precariously over a green plain to a boxlike station.
He saw no Hatburns; the sun wheeled from east to west at apparently the same speed as the stage; and Beaulings held its inevitable surge of turbulent lumbermen, the oil flares made their lurid note on the vast unbroken starry canopy of night. The morning of his return was heavy with a wet low vapor.
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