uperstition of her childhood
flashed into her mind. Hazel Lee had told her once that if you make a
wish on a hay-wagon it will come true if "yes" is the first word you say
after doing so. But should you be asked a question requiring any other
answer, or should it be necessary to make a remark not beginning with
the magic yes, you'll "lose your wish."

So it was with a smile at the old foolishness that Mary watched the
loaded wagon go lumbering by. She had wished for a speedy and favorable
reply to the letter she was about to post. It had been a point of honor
with Hazel and herself whenever the other came running up, significantly
tapping mute lips with an impatient forefinger, to ask, "Do you love
candy?" or "Do you like peaches?" recognizing the necessity of some
question to which the liberated little tongue could respond with a
fervent yes. Boys were always so mean about it, asking, "Do you want me
to pull your hair?" or "Do you love Peter Finn?" a half-witted boy in
the neighborhood.

The childish rite brought up a little of the old thrill of apprehension,
that no one might ask her the proper question to make her wish come
true, and Mary smiled broadly over her own foolishness as she went on up
the street. It was the only street which Lone-Rock boasted; just a
straggling road, beginning down by the railroad station and the mine
offices, and ending farther up the mountain in a narrow wagon track. The
houses of the white families were scattered along it at uneven intervals
for the space of half a mile. Then one came to a little wooden
school-house on one side, and on the other the tiny box of a room which
served as a post-office. The school-house was used as a chapel one day
out of the week. The mining company's store was beyond that, and a
little farther along, the colony of shanties where the Mexican workmen
and their families lived.

The fact that Mary had met no one since leaving home and that only the
hay-wagon had passed her, emphasized the loneliness of the little hamlet
and made her glad that she need not look forward to spending a winter
there. Her quick eyes noted a few changes, however, which promised
interesting things. Five new houses had gone up in their absence. There
was a piano in one of them, Billy Downs had told Norman, and Mr.
Moredock, the man in the new yellow house, who had come for his health,
was writing a history of some kind, and had brought a whole wagon-load
of books.

The postmaster