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The mail-driver would not be ready to go before noon, so Dorian would have time to get the tree and help the children decorate it. Then he would have to find out all there was to know about Carlia. Surely, she was somewhere in the locality. After breakfast, Dorian found the axe in the wood-shed, and began to make his way through the deep snow up the hill toward a small grove of pine.
They answered him that if the storm grew worse, they might stay in the willow-bushes till night and be drowned all the same. They proceeded to settle it by majority of votes, and decided to row on. An evil mocking fate is mine. Oh, why these jests? We rowed on in silence, concentrating our thoughts.... I remember the figure of the mail-driver, a man of varied experiences.
A light as if from a wood fire in a grate danced upon the white curtain of the unshaded windows. With his mail-bag, the driver shuffled his way through the snow to the kitchen door and knocked. The door opened immediately and Mrs. Hickson, recognizing the mail-driver, bade him come in. Two children peered curiously from the doorway of another room.
Young Perry Hutton, reared by you to kidnap, then to drive the mail and filch its letters a Delaware boy, too perished on the gallows for killing a mail-driver more scrupulous than himself, who detected him under his mask. Young Moore was he your connection, darling? stopping the mail-stage at the Gunpowder Forge, fell under the driver's buckshot. And Hare "
He would try. Had they some parafine, used to seal preserve jars. Oh, yes, large pieces were found. And this with some string was soon made into some very possible candles. The children were intensely interested, and even the mail-driver wondered at the young man's cleverness. They had never seen anything like this before. The tree and its trimmings had always been bought ready for their use.
Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn't understand why every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver, told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy's. Cheap and easy way to get a reputation, isn't it?" "But you must have something back of it," insisted the girl. "Are you a good shot?" "Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town."
To be dug out now and then in the winter is a contingency the mail-driver reckons as part of his daily life, and the waggons going to and fro frequently pass between high walls of frozen snow.
I have said that the cross-mail conveyances in Canada did not seem to be very closely bound as to time; but they are regulated by clock-work in comparison with some of them in the United States. "Are you going this morning?" I said to a mail-driver in Vermont. "I thought you always started in the evening." "Wa'll, I guess I do; but it rained some last night, so I jist stayed at home."
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