The girls looked at one another questioningly.
"Mercy, I wonder who's calling upon us in this weather?" said Mollie.
"It might be a good idea to look and see," Betty returned dryly, and ran to the kitchen, followed closely by the others.
She flung open the door, letting in a gust of wind and a flood of rain as she did so, and a tall figure in a rubber coat almost fell into the room.
"Why, it's our delivery-boy-mail-carrier!" cried Betty, as the young giant recovered himself and pulled off his dripping hat.
"Yes'm," he replied, with a good-natured grin that stretched from ear to ear. "The very same, an' at your service."
"But how did you manage to get here?" cried Betty, too astonished even to offer the unexpected visitor a seat. "You never could drive through that awful mud."
"No'm, I reckon mos' likely I couldn't," he answered amiably, adding with a return of the loquacity that was his most marked failing: "I remember one year we had a storm near's bad as this, an' Luke Bailey, he got kind of short o' pervisions—campin' in the woods he was—an' he tried to drive his team into town—"
"But you said you didn't drive out!" Grace interrupted. "And if you didn't drive, you must have walked all the way."
"Yes'm, reckon I did. Well, Luke he got jest about as fur—"