CHAPTER II
IN the Harniss post office Reliance Clark was sorting the evening mail. The post office was a small building on the Main Road. It sat back fifteen or twenty feet from that road and a white picket fence separated the Clark property from the strip of sidewalk before it. A boardwalk, some of its boards in the last stages of bearability, led from the gap in that fence to the door. Over the door a sign, black letters on a white ground, displayed the words “POST OFFICE.” On the inner side of that door was a room of perhaps fifteen by ten feet, lighted in the daytime by two windows and at night by three kerosene lamps in brackets. There was a settee at either end of the room, a stove in the middle, and a wooden box filled with beach sand beside the stove. The plastered walls were covered with handbills and printed placards. The advertisement of the most recent entertainment at the town hall, that furnished by “Professor Megenti, the World Famous Ventriloquist and Necromancer,” was prominently displayed, partially obscuring the broadside of “The Spalding Bell Ringers” who had visited Harniss two weeks earlier. Beneath these were other announcements still more passé, dating back even as far as the red, white and blue placards of the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in ’76. The room was crowded with men and boys, dressed as befitted the weather, and the atmosphere was thick with tobacco smoke and the smells of wet clothing, fishy oilskins and damp humanity.
Across the side of the room opposite the door was a wooden partition, divided by another door into two sections. On the left was a glass showcase displaying boxes of stick candy, spools of thread, papers of pins and needles, and various oddments of the sort known as “Notions.” Behind the showcase was standing room for the person who waited upon purchasers of these; behind this a blank wall.
At the right of the door, and extending from floor to ceiling, was a wooden frame of letter boxes with a sliding, ground-glass window in the center. This window was closed while the mail was in process of sorting and opened when it was ready for distribution. In the apartment on the inner side of the letter boxes and window, an apartment little bigger than a good-sized closet, Reliance Clark, postmistress of the village of Harniss, was busy, and Millard Fillmore Clark, her half-brother, was making his usual pretense of being so.
Reliance was plump, quick-moving, sharp-eyed. Her hair had scarcely a trace of gray, although she was nearly fifty. The emptied leather mail bag was on the floor by her feet, packages of first and second class mail matter lay upon the pine counter before her and her fingers flew as she shot each letter or postal into the box rented by the person whose name she read.
Millard Fillmore Clark was older by five years. He was short, thin and inclined to be round-shouldered. He was supposed to be sorting also, but his fingers did not fly. They lingered over each envelope or post card they touched. Certain of the envelopes he held, after a precautionary glance at his half-sister, between his eyes and the hanging lamp, and the postal cards he invariably read.
“Humph! Sho!” he muttered aloud, after one such reading. Reliance heard him and turned.
“What is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter now?”
Millard, who had spoken without being aware of it, looked guilty.
“Why, nothin’ special,” he answered, hurriedly. “I just— Humph! Seems that Peter Eldridge’s wife’s nephew has had another baby. That’s news, ain’t it!”