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Agnes Morley Cleaveland

Several months after our arrival [in New Mexico] a weekly mail route was established .... If we hadn't done so before, we children certainly earned our bed and board then! In rain or shine, heat or cold, daylight or night time, we made that twenty mile round trip on horseback singly or in pairs every Monday of the world. With mail sacks flabby though never empty (for my mother was one of that species rapidly becoming extinct a letter writer) going to the post office, and bulging with mail coming back from it (we subscribed to innumerable papers and magazines), we children high trotted back and forth, up and down that ten mile stretch of Datil Canon, for more times than I probably would believe if count had been kept.
With icicles six inches long hanging from my pony's nostrils, and with frostbitten feet, I have made that trip in sub zero weather, or, in midsummer, I have ridden it with the sun blasting down with all the force of a glass furnace. I have ridden it on easy gaited horses, on rough gaited horses, horses that were gentle and horses that were not: I have ridden it when I wanted to and when I didn't, when my excited imagination had Indians following me, and when I knew that coyotes were.

Source: Agnes Morley Cleaveland, No Life for a Lady, p. 47.

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