Then a few years later came that memorable storm of 1831, of which men in Tweedsmuir still speak almost as if it were an event of yesterday.  It was in the days of the old mail coaches, and the event which served to fix this storm indelibly in the public mind occurred on or near the old coach road from Dumfries to Edinburgh.  The road runs past Moffat and up something like five miles of very heavy gradient to the Devil’s Beef Tub, ascending in that distance nearly nine hundred feet; from the Tub it crosses the lonely, desolate watershed which divides Tweed from Annan, then by easy slope drops past Tweedshaws and Badlieu, and so by Tweedsmuir and the old Crook Inn—­with Broad Law upheaving his massive shoulder on the right—­slips gradually into country less unkind in days of storm than are those bleak upper regions.

Snow had been falling all day on the 1st of February 1831, and the morning mail from Dumfries to Edinburgh was already late in reaching Moffat.  Would “she” go on, would “she” risk the terrible drifts that even now must have formed nearer the bleak moorland summit?  And the little knot of faithful admirers who, according to custom, daily assembled by one’s and two’s about the inn door at Moffat to wait the coming of the coach—­their one excitement—­agreed that “MacGeorge would gang on if the de’il himsel’ stude across the road.”  MacGeorge was guard of the mail-coach, a fine, determined man, an old soldier, one imbued with abnormally strong sense of duty.  Once before, for some quite unavoidable delay, the Post-Office authorities had “quarrelled” him (as he expressed it), and this undeserved blame rankled in the old soldier’s heart.  It should not be said of him a second time that he had failed to get his mails through on time.  So it came to pass that, in spite of rising gale and fiercer driving snow, in spite of earnest remonstrance from innkeepers and spectators, with “toot-toot” of horn away into the white smother, spectral-like, glided the silent coach.  A mile from the inn she was blocked by a huge drift.  That safely won through, a couple of miles farther she plodded on, slowly and ever more slow; and finally, in a mighty wreath, stuck fast; “all the King’s horses” might not have brought her through that.  MacGeorge was urged to turn now, to make the best of a bad business and to go back to Moffat.  The delay was unavoidable; no one could cast blame on him, for the worst part of the road was yet to come, and no power on earth could get the mails through that.  But no!  It was his duty to go on, and go he would.

The horses were taken out of the coach.  Some were sent back to Moffat in charge of the lads who rode the extra tracers used in snowy weather for the few miles of heavy collar-work out of Moffat; of the rest, loaded with the mail-bags, MacGeorge led one, Goodfellow, the coachman, another; and the two set off for Tweedshaws, accompanied by a man named Marchbanks, the Moffat roadman, who had been a passenger on the coach.  It was but four miles to Tweedshaws, yet before they had struggled through half the distance the horses had come to a standstill, utterly blown and exhausted; nothing could get them to stir forward, or longer to face the drift.  Marchbanks suggested that now at length they might reasonably turn and fight their way back.  Goodfellow hesitated.