Though he could not have told the reason for it, he had always unfolded these scraps of paper before throwing them away. He always felt, too, a sort of awed feeling as he gazed on the spotless pages, innocent of conveying any message, unless outside of the power of pen or pencil.
His surprise may be imagined on this occasion, therefore, when he unfolded the sheet to find a few lines of closely written manuscript.
His astonishment increasing, he read:
"Keep your eyes open; step lightly on Eagle's Tracks; fly through the Devil's Wash Bowl!"
The paper contained no signature, and puzzled over its meaning, Little Snap read it several times before he crumpled it in the hollow of his hand.
"Some foolish whim of his," he said to himself. "Come, Jack, we must move faster than we have, or we shan't get to Six Roads until midnight."
As young as he was, Little Snap, whose name, by the way, was Dix Lewis, though he was seldom addressed thus, had been carrying the mail between Upper Loop on the Kanawha and Union Six Roads, at the very base of the backbone of the Alleghany Mountains, for about two years.
The distance between the two isolated towns was nearer forty than thirty miles, but he had never lost a trip yet, and he had never felt in better spirits than on this particular afternoon.
The valley of the Great Kanawha, as the lower section of this "River of the Woods" is called, is one of the most fertile regions to be found in West Virginia; but beginning near the Greenbrier Uplands, the stream finds its course often through rocky gateways. Particularly is this the case where a narrow gorge in the Great Flat Top Mountains allow the water to escape from the rock-bound basin lying between that rugged ridge of earth and Greenbrier Mountain.
The gnarled live oak, with its blasted top, where Little Snap had met Old Solitaire so many times, stood on the west side of the ascent leading to the Narrows, where the road wound over a spur of the mountain, to descend into one of the wildest valleys even the hackneyed landscape of the Old Dominion can show.