Читать книгу Bonanza (A Story of the Gold Trail) - William MacLeod Raine - Страница 4
ОглавлениеBONANZA
THE PONY EXPRESS RIDER
Far as the eye could see lay a rough and broken desert of sage. It stretched to the edge of a flat and arid world.
In front of the long one-story adobe station a man waited, eyes turned to the west. His hand rested on the flat straight back of a spirited chestnut horse. Byers was small and wiry, hard as nails. His high-heeled boots, buckskin breeches, flannel shirt, and skull cap had all been chosen for utility and not for looks. He wasted no energy in useless protest, but the fat station keeper who leaned against the door jamb and chewed tobacco knew he was seething with impatience. The wrangler holding a second saddled horse knew it, too. For the pony express rider from Carson was late and his delay was keeping Byers from starting on the next lap of the transcontinental journey.
The fat man sang lugubriously and tunelessly in a voice that had been created solely for his own amusement.
“Old Grimes is dead, that good old man,
We ne’er shall see him more.
He wore a single-breasted coat,
All buttoned down before.”
The wrangler looked at him reproachfully and murmured, “Durned if he wouldn’t sing at a wake and spoil everybody’s enjoyment.”
“His heart was open as the day,
His feelin’s all were true.
His hair it was inclined to gray,
He wore it in a queue,”
intoned the vocalist.
“Not news,” the wrangler told himself bitterly. “I done heard all them interestin’ details two hundred and seventy-three times.” Aloud, he attempted a diversion. “Len’ me a loan of a chew of tobacco, Jim.”
The station keeper dived into his left hip pocket, produced a ragged plug, and offered it to his helper. Meanwhile he gave further information about the wearing apparel and physical idiosyncrasies of one Grimes, defunct.
“Wonder what’s holdin’ Tim,” the stableman interposed at the end of another stanza.
“He ain’t been late before in a blue moon. I don’t recollect as he ever was late,” answered the fat man, drawn momentarily from his rhymed epitaph.
Byers said nothing.
The habit of the hard-riding pony express messengers of Russell, Majors, and Waddell was to be ahead of schedule. Each man prided himself on covering his relay under the assigned number of hours. The mounts supplied were chosen for speed, stamina, and heart; the men for gameness, resource, and knowledge of the country. To be late was contrary to the tradition of the service.
The pony express was a triumph of American pluck and energy. It stretched from St. Joseph to San Francisco, two thousand miles through the heart of the Indian country. The enterprise included five hundred superb horses, nearly two hundred stations, a hundred riders. The men in the little racing saddles were stripped to the last ounce. For protection they carried only a knife and a revolver. The mail bags never weighed more than twenty pounds. Each letter was written on thin tissue paper. The postage on the smallest was five dollars. Between the Missouri and Sacramento the time-table called for ten days, but often the pouches moved two hundred miles toward their destination in twenty-four hours.
Those in the saddle had to be man size in soul. No weaklings ever applied for this job. Some of those in the service were outlaws, for court warrants did not reach into the sage. Many were desperadoes.[1] But few of them were quitters. They played out the hand that had been dealt them.
[1] This was more true of the station keepers and the attendants than of the stage drivers and pony express messengers. Slade, the notorious man killer, was superintendent of a division at Julesburg, Colorado. He succeeded Jules, whom he murdered in cold blood. Slade ruled his crew of wild assistants with an iron fist. He was an able and efficient servant of the company. Later he was hanged by the vigilantes in Montana. Legends of the country, probably much exaggerated, credit him with having killed thirty men.—W. M. R.
“Tim’s sure late,” the wrangler said hurriedly, for he saw signs of a return to music which did not soothe his savage breast.
“Kid McClintock’s early. Hour ahead of his schedule,” the station keeper replied.
Far away to the east a small cloud of dust rose from the sage and greasewood. Almost at the same time a second billow of yellow alkali appeared in the sunset glow of the opposite horizon.
The fat man grumbled. “Hell’s hinges! That accident to Meighan is liable to shoot the whole schedule up. Tim’ll have to double back to Carson in his place. I’ll have him dig us up another man there.”
The rider from the east arrived at the station first. He pulled up beside the wrangler, leaped to the ground, and at the same time reached for the tie straps which fastened the flat leather mail pouches to the saddle. Two minutes was allowed for the change of sacks from one horse to another, but usually the transfer was made in ten seconds. The messenger, a long lean boy, swept the pouches deftly from one saddle to the other.
“Where’s Meighan?” he asked.
“Done bust his laig tryin’ to gentle that sorrel mustang. Tim Keefe will have to take his run to-night.”
“Where’s Tim?”
“Not in yet. There’s his dust.” The station keeper waved a fat hand toward the sunset.
Byers had been watching intently the dust cloud moving through the brush. “Something’s wrong,” he said briefly.
Hugh McClintock looked. The approaching horse was off the trail. Its gait was peculiar. Plunging unsteadily in spurts, it was weaving from side to side. Instead of a rider, a sack seemed to be prone in the saddle.
McClintock ran forward and caught the bridle of the unsteady horse. The flank of the animal was clotted with a splash of dust and blood.
The sack slid from the saddle as the horse shied. The sack was a man who had been clinging feebly to the mane of the bay. He groaned.
“Piutes—this side the Silver Mountains,” he whispered, and fainted.
The station manager, the wrangler, and McClintock gave him first aid. An arrow head, deeply imbedded, projected from the flesh back of the shoulder. One of the rider’s boots was filled with blood, due to a bullet which had shattered the ankle.
Byers spent no time in helping with the wounded man. He had other business. If the Indians got a messenger, that was in the day’s work. The mails had to go through without delay. He transferred the pouches to his own saddle, swung on, and galloped into the desert.
Kid McClintock rose. He, too, must be on his way, for there was nobody else to carry the mail to Carson City.
“I’ll be movin’,” he said briefly.
“Looks like you’re elected,” agreed the fat man, following the boy to a water olla where the young fellow washed his baked throat, drank deeply, and filled his canteen. “Not much use wishin’ advice on you. It’s a gamble, o’ course. Injuns may be anywhere. But I reckon maybe you better swing to the south and hit the Walker River range. They’re liable to be watchin’ the trail for you.”
“I reckon.”
The boy moved to the fresh horse, spurs dragging and jingling. He had done his day’s work. The horse upon which he had ridden in, lathered with sweat and still breathing deep from a long fast run, was mute testimony of this. The dry powdery dust of the desert covered every inch of the young rider. His legs were stiff and his shoulders tired. But the spring of splendid youth trod in his stride.
He had before him more than another hundred miles of travel, through a country infested by hostile savages. He might get through alive or he might not. That was on the knees of the gods. He had to take what came. More than once he had run a gauntlet of redskins. He had been a target for their arrows and their slugs. Tim was not the first messenger he had seen bring in on his person souvenirs of their missiles. The one salient point was that the mail had to go through. It always had reached its destination—always but once. On that occasion the messenger offered the only acceptable excuse for his failure. He lay dead on the trail, his scalp gone.
McClintock shot westward in a cloud of dust. Half a mile from the station he swung sharply to the south.
