“Now,” she thought, “if I could only stop him! I wonder if I can’t. I’ll try, and then,” swinging her silken bag, “I shall have news to carry home, the very latest, too.”
As she swung the bag she suddenly remembered that she had something within it to offer the rider.
“Of course I can,” she went on saying to herself. “Post-riders are always hungry, and it’s lucky for him that I didn’t have to eat my dinner myself, to-day. Now, if I only had a basketful of clover heads or roses for that pony, I’d find out all about Boston while it was eating.”
The only roses within sight were blooming on Pussy Dean’s two cheeks as Sweeping Wind came clattering his shoes against the frozen ground. He would have gone straight on had a scarlet cloak not been planted, like a fluttering standard, full in his pathway.
The rider gave the pony the slightest possible check, since he felt sure that no red-coated soldier lurked behind the red cloak.
“Take something to eat, won’t you?” accosted Pussy, rather glowing in feature and agitated in voice by her own daring.
Meanwhile the rider had given Sweeping Wind a second intimation to stand, which he obeyed, and sniffed at Pussy’s cloak and cheeks and silken bag as she held it forth to the rider, saying 71 naively, “I went to meeting and was invited to luncheon, and so didn’t eat mine.” She spoke swiftly, as though she knew she must not detain him.
He answered with a smile and a “Thank you,” took the bag, and rewarded her by saying, “The British are getting out of Boston, bag and baggage.”
“And where are you going?” demanded Pussy, determined not to go home with but half the story if she could help it.
“To Governor Trumbull with the good news and a demand for two thousand men to save New York,” he cried back, having gone on. His words were entangled with a mouthful of gingerbread or mince-pie to such an extent that it was a full minute before Pussy understood their import, and then she could only say over and over to herself, as she hastened on, “Father will be here, father will come home, and we’ll have the good old times back again.”