The driver flicked his team, and the white road slipped behind them, and David had started on the track to Canada.
For a half-mile Will was silent. Then he spoke, looking steadily at his horses’ ears.
“Seems to me that one o’ two things is bound to happen,” he said. “Either Widow Lister is going to leave the road, or I am. There’s not room for the two of us.”
He waited for David’s answer; and, getting none, went forward with his grievance, not troubling to turn his head.
“A woman that can carry a saucepan grudge for fifteen years—gee up, lass Polly, we’ve time to make up!—is a woman that cannot help scaring a man. ’Tis not just that,” he broke off, still flicking the ears of his team with a gentle, contemplative whip, as if he were casting for trout, “’tis not just that bothers me. ’Tis her durned, queer way o’ being out o’ breath, and growing plumper on ’t every day, an’ holding up the mail three days out o’ the seven, year in, year out. And the widow allus chooses her three days—days when we chance to be late, I mean.”
The dust went by them faster and faster; for Will prided himself on reaching Shepston to the minute, though he hated this overdriving of good cattle.
“The widow’s never grown up,” he went on, cheerful and happy-go-lucky again, now that he had vented his grievance. “She’ll be a bairn o’ six years old till she dies. That’s her ailment, and that’s why we humour her, I reckon. Yet she married a fairish sensible man, and ought to have learned summat by now. Gee-up, lass Polly. We’ve time to make up, I say. She was left a widow too young, maybe.”
Another mile went by, broken only by a farm lass who held up the coach like a gentle highwayman, handed a letter and a penny to the driver, and smiled at him. The outlying farmsteads posted their letters in this haphazard way, and neither the driver nor the maid said a word to each other; they were too friendly to need words, as it chanced, for Will was pledged to marry her within a month or two.
The next mile passed them, dusty and white. The sun beat down, and there was not a friendly cloud to hide the pitiless blue of the sky. It was no friendly blue, such as pansies wear, when times go hard and the cool, quiet flowers look at a man with eyes of pity; it was a cold light and a hard light, for all its warmth, this never-ending sky that kept the Black Fever close to Garth’s borders.
“There’s no good news fro’ Shepston, David,” said Will, by and by. “Every day there’s the same tale when I drive in—more folk down wi’ fever, and bodies waiting to be buried because the coffiners are feared to go nigh them. I’m tough myself, but I’m getting a lile bit nervous. They never stop talking on’t, ye see, i’stead o’ letting it be, and a man can’t help thinking o’ what’s being dinned into his ears by every body he meets. Bless me,” he broke off, with a quiet laugh, “I’ve got that bad I’m finding myself looking at Shepston passengers when they get aboard the mail—looking to see if there’s any sure mark of the fever on their faces.”