A Widow's Tale, and Other Stories

by Mrs. Oliphant

"A woman on the road—did you see a woman on the road? there's few foot-passengers here at this hour of the night," said the guard.

"I saw her as clear as I see you." He held up his lamp instinctively to the face of the other, which was bent like his own on the ground.

"One of you," cried the guard, "hurry up the hill and stop her if she's gone that way. She canna have gone far on this steep road. Stop her and see what she knows."

But no wayfarer was found on the ascending road, nor could all the light of the lamps find any trace of any one who had fallen. The inhabitants of the first wayside cottage at the foot of the hill were imperiously knocked up by the guard and put upon the trace.

"We canna stop the coach whatever happens," he cried, "but we'll send out a search party from Duntrum immediate. How long were you sleepin'?" he added peremptorily to John, who looked at his watch in the light of the lamp and answered—

"Perhaps an hour."

"An hour is a long time," said the guard, knitting his brows. "As far back as the brig we would be then, and at a smart pace, for the horses, poor things, scented their stables. Take your lantern, lad, if you have one, and go as far as that.—Ou ay, ye'll be paid, you needna be feared for that. Will ye come, sir, or bide? I daurna stop the coach."

John looked into the blankness of darkness before him and shivered, but it was not this only that moved him. He felt certain that the catastrophe, whatever it was, must have happened within a much shorter time than an hour,—that it had just occurred, indeed, when he woke, and when the sudden blast of the cold wind roused him with its searching chill. He felt convinced that he and his companions had already come to the farthest limits in which the accident, if it was an accident, could have occurred. His head was confused with the effort to find an explanation. What was it? After searching so far, he became convinced that the clue was not to be found on the road. Where, then, was it to be found? He made no answer either to this question in his own mind or to the guard, but turned back, leaving the others with the sleepy and startled cottagers, father and son, who had been roused from their beds, for it was already late, and were reluctantly accepting the directions of the guard, whose red coat made a spot like a fire in the darkness, lighted up by the lantern which he had attached to his belt. John turned back and began to reclimb the hill, throwing the flash of his lamp on every roughness of the road, and making his way back to where the coach smoked into the night, the breath of the passengers and the emanations from the horses forming a mist of life which rose dim yet consolatory across the light of the lamp in the midst of that chill of winter and darkness. As he came up to it his foot caught upon something almost under the hindmost wheel, and he gave a loud cry, which brought every one on foot around him. He set down his lamp on the frozen ground, and they all clustered over it in a circle. It was the heavy bundle of the mail-bags strapped together, one end of the leather strap still entangled with the step of the coach. The guard pulled them up with an exclamation.

"Dod! she's trailed the mails with her," and then he too uttered a cry, which was fierce with instant terror and dismay. "But where's the bag from Dunscore?"

The two lamps were immediately fixed upon this new problem, and their light shone upon a circle of faces, the guard's blanched with sudden alarm, all turned towards that dark mass gleaming with its metal clasps.