The odds are very uneven when this happens--a man's ingenuity
against a man's life, and death playing with loaded dice. And every
letter the Fizzer carries past that well costs the public just twopence.
A drink at the well, an all-night's spell, another drink, and then away
at midday, to face the tightest pinch of all--the pinch where death won
with the other mail-man. Fifty miles of rough, hard, blistering,
scorching "going," with worn and jaded horses.
The old programme all over again. Twenty miles more, another spell for
the horses (the Fizzer never seems to need a spell for himself), and then
the last lap of thirty, the run into Anthony's Lagoon, "punching the poor
beggars along somehow." "Keep 'em going all night," the Fizzer says;
"and if you should happen to be at Anthony's on the day I'm due there you
can set your watch for eleven in the morning when you see me coming
along." I have heard somewhere of the Pride of Harness.
Sixteen days is the time-limit for those five-hundred miles, and yet the
Fizzer is expected because the Fizzer is due; and to a man who loves his
harness no praise could be sweeter than that.
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