"Oh, is there a wreck?" Mrs. Dunstall asked anxiously.
"Yes. Forty-four run into a open switch up at Cornell. If the switch is open, I never see why the train don't just run on out the other end and keep right along; but all the accidents is as often open switches as anything, so I guess there's a reason. At any rate, the wrecking-train's gone up and the second mail's going to be late. Tip your head a little, Billy. Yes, indeed."
"I wonder if we'd better wait," said Mrs. Dunstall, unwrapping her shawl somewhat and taking a chair. "What do you say, Pinkie?"
Pinkie was already seated. She weighed two hundred pounds and never stood up when she could help it. "I say 'Wait,'" said Pinkie.
Mrs. Dunstall thereupon sat down, too, and after ten minutes of a most solemn silence Mrs. Ray finished her task and dismissed the children. She faced her callers, then, folding her little gray shoulder-wrap tightly across her bosom as she did so, and tucking the ends in close beneath her armpits. The little gray shawl was one of the first signs of winter in Ledge; Mrs. Ray always donned it at the beginning of October, and never took it off before the last day of May.
"Well!" she said now; "anything new come up?"
"Millicent come on the same train with that girl," Mrs. Dunstall began at once. "I wasn't really expecting any mail this morning, but I thought I might as well come down about now and tell you how Millicent come on the train with her. You know who I mean, of course?"
"She knows," said Pinkie.
"I s'posed you would. And so Millicent come on the same train with her. Seems too curious of Millicent coming on the same train with her, when Millicent hasn't been on a train but twice in her life before, and then to think that she would come back with that girl. Things do fall out queer in this world. She sit right in the seat behind her, too. That was awful curious, I think."
Mrs. Ray gave the ends of her shawl a fresh tuck, and drew in some extra breath.