th instantly dived to the bottom of the stage, his boots
and pistol among my legs.

"Throw your coat over me," he urged.

I concealed him with that and a mail-sack, and stretched my head out to
see what lioness stood in his path. But it was only a homelike little
cabin, and at the door a woman, comely and mature, eying the stage
expectantly. Possibly wife, I thought, more likely mother, and I asked,
"Is Mrs. Follet strict?" choosing a name to fit either.

The driver choked and chirruped, but no sound came from under the
mail-sack until we had passed the good-day to the momentous female,
whose response was harsh with displeasure as she wheeled into her door.
A sulky voice then said, "Tell me when she's gone, Bill." But we were a
safe two hundred yards on the road before he would lift his head, and
his spirits were darkened during the remainder of the journey.

"Come and live East," said I, inviting him to some whiskey at the same
time. "Back there they don't begin sitting up for you so early in the
evening."

This did not enliven him, although upon our driver it seemed to bring
another fit as much beyond the proportion of my joke as his first had
been. "She tires a man's spirit," said black curly, and with this rueful
utterance he abandoned the subject; so that when we reached Thomas in
the dim night my curiosity was strong, and I paid little heed to this
new place where I had come or to my supper. Black curly had taken
himself off, and the driver sat at the table with me, still occasionally
snickering in his plate. He would explain nothing that I asked him until
the gaunt woman who waited on us left us for the kitchen, when he said,
with a nervous, hasty relish, "The Widow Sproud is slick," and departed.

Consoled by no better clew than this I went to bed in a down-stairs
room, and in my strange rising next day I did not see the driver again.
Callings in the air awaked me, and a wandering sound of wheels. The
gaunt woman stood with a lamp in my room saying the stage was ready,
and disappeared. I sprang up blindly, and again the callings passed in
the blackness outside--long cries, inarticulate to me. Wheels heavily
rolled to my door, and a whip was struck against it, and there loomed
the stage, and I made out the calling. It was the three drivers, about
to separate before the dawn on their three diverging ways, and they were
wailing their departure through the town that travellers might hear, in
whatever place the