“Plattsburg—fifty mile—due south.”
“Christmas! Little far to walk.”
“Say, you take this horse, Jim,—go ahead! I can walk just as well as not, I’m getting too fat, anyhow. Go on, you take the horse and have a ride to Plattsburg!”
“Yes, take the shirt off your back, and never mind if a bit of the skin goes with it. I’ll see you far away first. Tell you what you could do for me, Buddy; the herd of burros is around now, if you’d round up one of them for me?”
“Sure thing! You sit on the mail sack till I come back. There’s a heap of registered stuff in it this trip. Oh say! What do you think? I was held up t’other side of the Bulldog. Bang! Zipp! says a little popper from the bushes. I climbed for them bushes, and out goes a beggar like a rabbit. I was after him like a coyote, bet cher life. Who do you suppose it was, Jim?”
“Hang it, how should I know?”
“That little down-east cuss with the crook in his back. He begged hard. Poor devil, he was up against the sandpaper side, all right. He heard from the postmaster that there was a lot of valuable mail going out, so he thought he’d make a try for it. Then what do you think he had the cold, cold nerve to do?”
“Pass it up—’most anything, I reckon.”
“Worse’n that. Struck me for fifty!”