Fannie had tumbled into her skirts at the juddering stop of the carriage. Her squawk of outrage bit itself back with a sudden report, loud and insistent, which shook the windows of the post chaise and she was forced to brace herself against the fore wall. She hung there, panting and staring out at the wood beyond. Imagination was not the realm of Fannie and the sounds lent themselves a certain mystery which she felt to her bones but did not know from whence it came. True, the gun had been something, as had the call to stand and deliver, both of which she had some knowledge of, even if it were nothing more than her father's hunting and the telling of horrors in the parlor respectively. Therefore, when the driver came to her door and spoke without a quaver, Fannie it was who felt she had perhaps it all wrong. “A moment!” she quavered as she strove to put herself to rights, drawing herself upwards and straightening skirts. When the door was opened from within, she popped her head out like a pup in a box and gaped at the red faced man on the ground before her. “Well?” her demand borrowed from her father's house, she lifted her brows high into her wig before she took in the direction of his eyes. “What? What?” she sputtered and tilted her head to one side, but finding it impossible to keep her wig as it ought to have been (even as a smaller monstrosity than the gentile woman might wear in society, it was meant to keep for the duration of her stay and falling off into the mud might sully it beyond repair) she was forced to reach for the driver's hand and scramble out of her carriage. “Why are we stopped? I heard a noise! Is it the wheel?” Once in the roadside, her feet dusting themselves in the turned up dirt left from too much travel before them, she spun, hand to hair, and peered up at the man atop her carriage. “Here now!” she waved a hand at him. “Get down this instant.” Her other hand reached out and grasped the driver's arm and she opened her mouth to pant. Adrenaline flushed through her and her eyes rolled like that of a frightened horse and she gave a soft sound of dismay as she watched him dismount her carriage. “Oh!” she gasped, took a step back, and would have lost her footing if it were not for the driver who quickly grasped her arm. “Oh, you... you mean to rob us.” It was an unnecessary statement, for it would have been hard to think anything but with his firearms and his dusted cloak. He was a figure for romance in a girl's heart and a great deal more terrifying to one who believed in the various creature comfort of her fire, her jewels, and her father's gifts of carriage or monies when his daughter asked them of him. To have someone sink so low as to remove any of these things from her seemed as incomprehensible as having to take a mail coach.