“It’s not much,” Derpy said, “but it keeps the rain off, mostly.”
“That’ll be nice,” Corkscrew said in a hushed voice. He seemed awed by the inside of Derpy’s little treehouse.
“Get some sleep,” she said, pointing to the sofa. “I’ll make you breakfast when you wake, and then show you around town.”
“You mean I sleep on the sofa?”
She spun and was about to snap at him, but then she saw he was looking at the ratty old sofa with colt-like wonder and excitement in his eyes.
“Yes, Corkscrew. You sleep on the sofa.”
“Thanks, Derpy!”
She held her smile back until she stepped into her bedroom and shut the door behind her. It was refreshing how grateful he was for everything. When ponies weren’t yelling at him, he had an upbeat personality. That was something she’d missed in herself lately.
Derpy, Summer Rain, and Corkscrew had had good cloud cover most of the way back to Appleloosa. They’d navigated by the sunset and kept together by singing as they flew through the bottoms of the clouds. They dropped Summer Rain off in Appleloosa, and Derpy explained to the sheriff about the three new fliers that would arrive in about a week. “I’m not saying to trust them inside the town,” she said. “Just don’t shoot them.”
The flight over the Everfree had been uneventful. Corkscrew found it more exciting than frightening, which was worrisome, but kind of cute.
She pulled the curtains and flopped down onto her mattress, exhausted. She supposed a smarter pony would be terrified of having a raider in her house. But she’d brought him to Ponyville, so she was responsible for him. Plus, it was pointless to be afraid of him now, when they’d come so far together, and were planning to go still farther. If he were going to try anything, better here than in the southern wastes.
And anyway, Corkscrew would be all right. He wasn’t bad, once you got him away from the others. It had been an impulse to ask him to come, but when she thought about it, it felt like the kind of impulse that had been a long time growing. It had probably been stupid to trust him, but it seemed the world needed her kind of stupid right now.
She rolled onto her back and contemplated the challenges still ahead of her. She’d have to get somepony in each town to write a few copies of a summary of all that had happened there lately, to give out in the other towns. It was too tiring trying to answer everypony’s questions herself. Maybe she could find some writers in each town, pay them in cans for news reports, and then get paid back by the ponies who wanted to read them.
The big problem now, though, was that the number of letters she could carry was limited by the weight of the cans she was asking for postage. She’d had to leave a stack of cans and letters behind at Appleloosa. She’d given ten percent of the cans to the pony who’d used to own the bank, to put them in a box with her name on it and lock it in the bank’s safe until she returned. He’d been thrilled to unlock the bank’s doors and step behind the teller’s window again, calling her “ma’am” and bowing every few minutes, like it was a part in a play that he was excited to be called back to act again. “Ever reckoned you’d be a bank’s biggest customer?” he’d said, and laughed, looking at the little box of cans surrounded by piles of worthless currency.
She could try making coupons. Dig up some paper in an unusual color, something hard to find, and write “One Can” on it. Then stamp it with something from the Post Office, maybe the postage-stamp-cancellation stamp, and sign it “Derpy Hooves, Postmistress General.” If she made the townsfolk pay postage in coupons, her carriers wouldn’t have to carry bags full of cans everywhere. She could even pay her carriers with coupons she made up, and the townsfolk would have to honor them to be able to send or receive any mail. That seemed like cheating, but the more she thought about it, the more she thought it should work.
The route, though… From here to New Canterlot wasn’t so bad. If they could find the pony that had delivered Dinky’s letter to her, the three of them could manage it with some pretense to safety. She’d gathered Dodge Junction had some irregular communication with the coast. But the Everfree and the mountains divided Equestria into two halves, and the dry plains to their south divided the southern half in two again. The Ponyville-Appleloosa-Dodge Junction run was the roughest stretch, and the one that would link them all together again. It was long, hard, dangerous, and what grazing there was on the way was dry and bitter.
Tale Spin and his gang could hold down the southern end of it, but Derpy was going to need ponies faster and stronger than herself to handle the Everfree leg on a regular basis. Maybe if she gave the route an exciting name. Something dramatic that would appeal to somepony like Tale Spin. The Ponyville Express… something like that.
For that matter, how many of the younger ponies like Tale Spin could even read and write nowadays? If she used some of the postage in each town to pay somepony to teach the foals to read, it would pay itself back in the long run.
She drifted off to sleep, and dreamed of dotted lines spreading across maps to join together in the middle, and letters, and far-away ponies reading them.