The elder ignored the question in the concern he exhibited for Allen's injury.
"It is a cursed outrage!" he declared. "Those Hatburns will be got up, or my name's not Priest! We'd have them now, but the jail wouldn't keep them overnight, and court three months off."
David preserved a stony silence--the only attitude possible, he had decided, in the face of his patent dereliction.
"Will you try me on the Beaulings stage?" he repeated. "I've been round horses all my life; and I can hold a gun straighter than Allen."
"You are too light--too young," he explained; "you have to be above a certain age for the responsibility of the mail. There are some rough customers to handle. If you only had five years more now--We are having a hard time finding a suitable man. A damned shame about Allen! Splendid man!"
"Can't you give it to me for a week," David persisted, "and see how I do?"
They would have awarded him the position immediately, he felt, if he had properly attended to the Hatburns. He wanted desperately to explain his failure to Priest, but a dogged pride prevented. The storekeeper was tapping on an open ledger with a pen, gazing doubtfully at David.
"You couldn't be worse than the drunken object we have now," he admitted. "You couldn't hold the job permanent yet, but I might let you drive extra--a day or so--till we find a man. I'd like to do what I could for Mrs. Kinemon. Your father was a good man, a good customer.... Come and see me again--say, day after to-morrow."
This half promise partly rehabilitated his fallen pride. There was no sign in the men he passed that they held him in contempt for neglecting to kill the Hatburns; and his mother wisely avoided the subject. She wondered a little at Priest's considering him, even temporarily, for the stage; but confined her wonder to a species of compliment. David sat beside Allen, while the latter, between silent spaces of suffering, advised him of the individual characters and attributes of the horses that might come under his guiding reins.
It seemed incredible that he should actually be seated in the driver's place on the stage, swinging the heavy whip out over a team trotting briskly into the early morning; but there he was. There were no passengers, and the stage rode roughly over a small bridge of loose boards beyond the village. He pulled the horses into a walk on the mountain beyond, and was soon skirting the Gait farm, with its broad fields, where he had lived as a mere boy.