Little Snap had picked up the sack, and, with it lying across his left arm, stood in the opening answering for a doorway to the "office."
The quartet stopped suddenly in their advance, either lacking the courage to attack the determined boy, or waiting for an order from the postmaster to do so.
"It's no use for us to git mixed up in th' muss," said the latter, directly. "He's under Uncle Sam; but ye can count on me to report him in short meter."
Without replying, Little Snap threw the pouch over Jack's back and fastened it to a ring in the pommel of the saddle. Then, while the five looked on in silence, he sprang into his seat.
"This is only th' beginnin' o' th' end," said Dan Shag, shaking his fist after the departing postboy.
The country, after leaving the Hollow Tree, was less broken, the post road winding through a desolate region, thinly populated, and often lonely in the extreme.
While trying in his mind to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Hollow Tree mail, Little Snap allowed Jack to take his own gait, until the Greenbrier River had been reached and he had passed over the pole bridge.
"It is hardly possible that Budd Grass dropped it when she sorted the mail at her office, though it is not very likely," he thought. "I will speak to her about it to-morrow. But if she did do that, she has found it before this and sent it on to Hollow Tree. Of course it will come out all right, for I can't see as I am to blame. At any rate, I expect more trouble from those Burrnocks than from the loss of that mail. What can be on foot among the bushbinders? I have it! Perhaps some of them stole the missing mail! But, how?"
Jack quickened his pace, and, naturally light-hearted, his rider was putting the thoughts of his late adventures from his mind, when a sharp voice called upon him to stop, while a wild, elfish-looking figure sprang suddenly into the middle of the road at the imminent risk of being trampled under the feet of the post horse.
"Hello!" exclaimed Little Snap, reining in Jack, with an abruptness which threw the creature back upon its haunches. "What is the trouble? and how is it you throw yourself under my horse's very feet?"