Presently the railways will have taken over his perilous profession, and he will exist only as a memory of pioneer days. For this reason I took great heed while my host talked concerning him and of the qualities which go into making a successful postie under the aurora. He must be agile, light of weight, abstemious, trustworthy, tireless, thewed and sinewed like a lynx, and, above all, he must have wire-strung nerves. In a word, his profession requires a strong will in a sound body.
"Does it ever happen that the mail is not delivered?" I asked.
My host hesitated, and made three rings of smoke while he considered the answer, as though he would be sure-footed as to his facts.
"Sometimes it is not delivered, Madam," said he; "there may be an untoward happening, in which event its delivery depends upon the recovery of the carrier's body."
When he made another three rings of smoke he proceeded with the story. "Yes! the mail-carrier in this country is a special person and must not be judged as general. He deserves a much better reward than he gets. To my thinking, it is a vast pity poetic justice so frequently fails. It may be that some day you will write a story about us Northmen, and if you do, be sure you set down how Destiny so often blue-pencils our lives in the wrong places. We will read your book down here, all of us, just to see if you have been true to us instead of laying up for yourself royalties on earth."
"And where do you bury a postman who dies with his mail-bags?" I further pursued.
"Holy Patriarch!" he ejaculated. "You don't think he is carried back to Athabasca Landing? His body is cached in a tree and the police are notified. When they give their permission, and when the ground is thawed out in the spring, we bury him just where he died. It may, however, interest you to know that the letters 'O.H.M.S.' are cut on his tombstone."
"'O.H.M.S.'" I repeated. "Don't you mean 'I.H.S.,' Iesous Hominum Salvator, the same as we write over our altars and on our baptismal fonts?"
"No!" he replied, "I mean 'O.H.M.S.'; the same as they stamp on government letters which are franked 'On His Majesty's Service.' You see the work of delivering the mails down this way, while extremely arduous, must never for a moment be considered as menial. The carrier is a servant to none save His Imperial Majesty, George the Fifth, of England."
They are all gamblers, these Northmen: they play for love, for money or for the mere pleasure of the play, and Boys of our Heart, like the mail-couriers and the striplings of the Mounted Police, gamble with the elements for life itself.