About a hundred yards from the approaching station, a mail-bag hung suspended from a massive wooden frame. The bag weighed nearly eighty pounds. It was fitted so exactly in its place, with reference to the approaching train, that its neck was caught to a nicety in a fork, which swept it with extreme violence off its hook, and laid it in the net. This process, reversed, had been at the same moment performed on the bag given out by the train. To prevent the receiving and delivering apparatus from causing mutual destruction in passing each other, the former is affixed to the upper, the latter to the lower, part of the van. There was a rather severe jerk. The junior sorter exerted his powers, raised the net, and hauled in the bag, while the train with undiminished speed went thundering on.
“What was that I saw on the floor?” asked the junior sorter, looking anxiously round as he set the mail-bags down.
“Only two white mice,” replied Bright, who was busy in front of his pigeon-holes. “They nibbled themselves out of a parcel under my very nose. I made a grab at ’em, but they were too quick for me.”
“Isn’t it strange,” observed the registered-letter clerk, sealing one of the bags which had just been made up, “that people will break the law by sending live animals through the post?”
“More strange, it seems to me,” returned Bright, as he tied up a bundle of letters, “that the people who do it can’t pack ’em properly.”
“There’s the next station,” said the junior sorter, proceeding once more to the net.
“Whew!” shrieked the steam-whistle, as the train went crashing towards the station. Bright looked out. The frame and its mail-bags were all right and ready. The net was lowered. Another moment and the mail-bags were swept into the van, while the out-going bags were swept off the projecting arm into the fixed net of the station. The train went through the station with a shriek and a roar. There was a bridge just beyond. The junior sorter forgot to haul up the net, which caught some object close to the bridge—no one knew what or how. No one ever does on such occasions! The result was that the whole apparatus was demolished; the side of the van was torn out, and Mr Bright and the junior sorter, who were leaning against it at the time, were sent, in a shower of woodwork, burst bags, and letters, into the air. The rest of the van did not leave the rails, and the train shot out of sight in a few seconds, like a giant war-rocket, leaving wreck and ruin behind!
There are many miraculous escapes in this world. Mr Bright and the junior sorter illustrated this truth by rising unhurt from the débris of their recent labours, and began sadly to collect the scattered mails. These however were not, like their guardians, undamaged. There were several fatal cases, and among these was the Bones epistle. That important document had been caught by a mass of timber and buried beyond recovery in the ballast of the line.
But why pursue this painful subject further? It is sufficient to say that although the scattered mails were carefully collected, re-sorted, and, finally, as far as possible, delivered, the letter with which we have specially to do never reached its destination. Indeed, it never more saw the light of day, but remained in the hole where it had been buried, and thus it came to pass that Mr William Stiggs failed to make his appearance on the appointed night of the 15th, and Abel Bones was constrained to venture on his deed of darkness alone.
On the appointed night, however, Tottie did not fail to do her best to frustrate her father’s plans. After a solemn, and last, consultation with her mother, she left her home with fluttering heart and dry tongue, and made for the General Post-Office.