“Give ’em a drink at the well there,” the Fizzer says as unconcernedly as though he turned on a tap.  But the well is old and out of repair, ninety feet deep, with a rickety old wooden windlass; fencing wire for a rope; a bucket that the Fizzer has “seen fit to plug with rag on account of it leaking a bit,” and a trough, stuffed with mud at one end by the resourceful Fizzer.  Truly the Government is careful for the safety of its servants.  Added to all this, there are eight or ten horses so eager for a drink that the poor brutes have to be tied up, and watered one at a time; and so parched with thirst that it takes three hours’ drawing before they are satisfied—­three hours’ steady drawing, on top of twenty-three hours out of twenty-seven spent in the saddle, and half that time “punching” jaded beasts along; and yet they speak of the “Fizzer’s luck.”

“Real fine old water too,” the Fizzer shouts in delight, as he tells his tale.  “Kept in the cellar for our special use.  Don’t indulge in it much myself.  Might spoil my palate for newer stuff, so I carry enough for the whole trip from Renner’s.”

If the Downs have left deep lines on the Fizzer’s face, they have left none in his heart.  Yet at that well the dice-throwing goes on just the same.

Maybe the Fizzer feels “a bit knocked out with the sun,” and the water for his perishing horses ninety feet below the surface; or “things go wrong” with the old windlass, and everything depends on the Fizzer’s ingenuity.  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.  Perhaps one of the brightest thoughts for the Fizzer as he “punches” along those desolate Downs is the knowledge that a little before eleven o’clock in the morning Anthony’s will come out, and, standing with shaded eyes, will look through the quivering heat, away into the Downs for that tiny moving speck.  When the Fizzer is late there, death will have won at the dice-throwing.