Indeed the thought came to him in a way that had determined him to attend to his mail at early dawn and return at sunrise lest the owner should disappear and take the bundle with him.
The silks were the very things he needed to help him solve one of his greatest difficulties.

He would try, as the sailor-pedler had done, to sell them in the neighborhood of Moorlands--( a common practice in those days)--and in this way might gather up the information of which he was in search.

Pawson had not known him--perhaps the others would not: he might even offer the silks to his father without being detected.
With this plan clearly defined in his mind, he had walked into a livery stable near the market, but a short distance from his lodgings, with the silks in a bundle and after looking the stock over had picked out this unprepossessing beast as best able to take him to Moorlands and back between sunrise and dark.
As he rode on, leaving the scattered buildings of the town far behind, mounting the hills and then striking the turnpike--every rod of which he could have found in the dark--his thoughts, like road-swallows, skimmed each mile he covered.

Here was where he had stopped with Kate when her stirrup broke; near the branches of that oak close to the ditch marking the triangle of cross-roads he had saved his own and Spitfire's neck by a clear jump that had been the talk of the neighborhood for days.

On the crest of this hill--the one he was then ascending--his father always tightened up the brakes on his four-in-hand, and on the slope beyond invariably braced himself in his seat, swung his whip, and the flattened team swept on and down, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake that blurred the road for minutes thereafter.
When noon came he dismounted at a farmer's out-building beside the road--he would not trust the public-houses--fed and watered his horse, rubbed him down himself, and after an hour's rest pushed on toward the fork in the road to Moorlands.