Pony Express Page 2

  ‘What does it look like?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a mailbag, I guess. With four pouches at each corner. All of ’em are kept shut with little padlocks.’

  ‘What about this changing horses? Won’t I have to talk to folk and such? They might guess I’m not you, d’you think?’

  ‘No,’ said Jack, ‘I don’t look for that to happen. From what I can make out, you’ll just jump off the one pony and then, when the mochila’s laid over the saddle, you mount up and are off again. You won’t hardly have a chance to speak.’

  ‘And you say I’ll need to change mounts every ten, fifteen miles?’

  ‘Sure. Then, when you’re eighty miles from here, you just turn back and carry another bunch of mail heading back east. There’s nothing to it, sis. All you have to do is be able to ride like the wind and you can do that well enough’

  It was funny having Jack reassure me in this way. After all, the whole scheme had been my idea in the first place! Maybe though, I hadn’t really thought that anybody would take it seriously.

  That first boy who set out west from St Joseph was a big event in the town. His name was Johnny Fry and he was by way of being a friend of my brother’s. There was a band playing near the stables and William Russell and one of his partners, a man called Alexander Majors both gave speeches, as did the Mayor of St Joseph. This went on for some time and it looked to me as if everybody in the whole town had turned out to watch. I kept right at the back, because I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. I was able to see this mochila that Jack had told me of and, as he said, it just lay snugly over the saddle. William Russell shook hands with Johnny and then the mayor shook hands with him and then Alexander Majors shook hands with the mayor and the mayor shook hands with William Russell and after that a cannon was fired and Johnny Fry was off like an arrow out of a bow.

  The first leg of the journey was a mere half-mile, to the ferry across the Missouri into the Kansas Territory. The boat, which I recollect was called the Denver, already had a full head of steam, and the second Johnny was aboard it crossed the river.

  The one thing which made me uneasy was what would happen if there was all this fuss and commotion in two days’ time, when I was going to pass myself off as my brother Jack? I didn’t rightly fancy trying to fool somebody who’d actually set eyes on him before. I later found that he’d only spoken to William Russell himself and that Russell had more important things to do than supervise every departure of a Pony Express rider after that first one. Fact is that, when I showed up at the stables forty-eight hours later, there were no bands, mayors shaking hands, large crowds or cannons being fired. Nobody gave me a second glance.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ma was still not happy about my plans and did not scruple to tell me so. The day after the first Pony Express rider left town, she said,

  ‘You’ll do what you will do, Elizabeth, as was always the case. You was the same when you were a little girl. I could sometimes slap your brother and make him do my bidding, but it never worked on you. But I ain’t easy in my mind ’bout this idea and that’s the God’s honest truth.’

  ‘It’ll be fine, Ma,’ I told her. ‘You’ll see. It’s only for a week, ’til Jack’s leg has healed. I won’t be above eighty miles from here. The next station in the line is Seneca.’

  ‘Promise me to take care of yourself, child. Don’t take any chances and be sure to come back safe and sound.’

  I went over to my mother and gave her a hug, which wasn’t the sort of action I was prone to as a rule. Then I followed it up by kissing the top of her head. She looked surprised, but pleased, at this unusual display of affection on my part and said, ‘You can be the sweetest girl sometimes, Beth.’

  Jack’s first ride was supposed to depart from the Pony Express stables on 5 April, and so the night before I got my mother to help cut my hair short. She grumbled about it, but then brightened up somewhat when I told her we could sell the hair to a fellow in town who made wigs and suchlike for wealthy ladies. Between the two of us, Ma and I managed to get my hair looking pretty much like Jack’s.

  The clothes I was to wear were no problem, me and Jack was the same height and I wasn’t overly developed up above. When I had his pants and shirt on and with my hair cut short, both he and Ma said that it was positively uncanny how much I resembled him.

  ‘You better not talk much,’ said Jack. ‘Just kind o’ grunt when folk speak to you. ’Sides which, I don’t think there’ll be time for talkin’. It’ll be just jumping from one mount to another at the relay stations and then maybe spending an hour at Seneca. Nothing can go wrong, you’ll see.’

  Ah, the optimism of youth! Were somebody to set out such a harebrained scheme as this to me now, I would just laugh and tell them to get out of here. When you get to this age, you just know that any human enterprise which relies upon one person passing themselves off as somebody else is certain-sure to miscarry. Well, I didn’t see it then and neither did my brother. My mother should have stepped in and put a stop to it, which she could by just going down to the Pony Express stables and letting them know what was afoot. But, like I said, she too was hypnotized by that fifty dollars a month that we needed so badly. So, she did nothing, other than wringing her hands and making disapproving sounds.

  Thursday 5 April dawned bright and clear, although with a hint of frost in the air, for all that it was spring. I was to be leaving the stable at seven in the morning sharp. One of the things that me and Jack had figured was that the later I got there, the better it would be. It would be much better to be in a mad hurry and not have time to be standing round chatting and allowing people to get a good look at me and perhaps starting to think to themselves something along the lines of: Hmmm, that’s a girlish sort of boy, with a high-pitched voice to boot. Something’s not right here!

  Anyways, I went down to the centre of town and just kind of hung about near the stables until it lacked only five minutes to the hour of seven. Then I sauntered in casually and said as gruffly as I could manage, ‘Taylor.’

  The man I spoke to said angrily, ‘Where the hell you been, boy? Wasn’t you told to report here a full half-hour before seven? Never mind, you young fellows is all limbs of Satan and that’s a fact. Come now, your pony’s all tacked up and rarin’ to go.’

  And with that he led me round to where a lively-looking little palomino was waiting. He said to a man standing near by, ‘Where’s that damned mochila?’ It was handed to him and he slung it over the saddle and said irritably, ‘Lord, what are you waiting for now? Just git goin’, will you? See, the clock is about to strike the hour!’

  With that I jumped up into the saddle and was away. Right up until that moment, I don’t think that I really believed that our plan would come off and that I would be sent home with a flea in my ear. But no, there it was. I was racing off towards the ferry, where the steamboat was waiting ’til I was aboard before carrying me across the Missouri and depositing me on the opposite bank in Kansas. Once we touched the shore I was off again.

  The way that things were arranged was that there were stations every ten miles or so along the route, where a fresh horse was waiting, saddled up and ready to go. All that was needful was for me to jump off and let somebody take the mochila off this mount and transfer it to the next. The only consideration was speed and so there was no stopping for a chat or a cup of coffee and a smoke, nor anything of that nature. It was jump off, and then straight onto the next pony. I was to do that eight times between St Joseph and Seneca. Then, when once I reached Seneca, I would have time for a short rest and then take over on the eastward route; heading straight back the way I’d come.

  William Russell had calculated that the average speed for journeys would be somewhere in the region of twelve and a half miles an hour, meaning that I would take a little over six hours to reach Seneca. Then there’d be an hour or so before I started back, meaning that I’d be in the saddle for about twelve hours in total that day. This was pretty gruelling, which was why the m
oney was so good. Not that I minded at all, because I would a sight rather have been racing like the wind across open country on horseback, than I would staying at home and learning to cook or sew. There was no difficulty spotting where I was to change horses, because those locations had big signs over them, saying PONY EXPRESS. There’s little enough to say about the ride to Seneca, for nothing much happened. I rode hard and fast and made it there a little after midday. And that was where things began to go wrong.

  When I reined in at the station at Seneca I had been riding flat out, hell for leather for the better part of six hours. I had never undertaken a ride anything like so strenuous and the prospect of now carrying on for the same period of time again was a daunting one. Notwithstanding, I had little other choice, if me and my family were to gain that fifty dollars which meant so much to us. I knew that I would be allowed an hour’s rest at Seneca, before starting back, and that was a blissful prospect.

  The man in the yard greeted me by saying, ‘Change o’ plan son. We’s a man down. You’ll have to carry on west to Smoky Mountain.’ My jaw must have dropped in dismay at the unwelcome announcement, because he continued sharply, ‘An’ you needn’t look like that, neither. Don’t get all antsy ’bout it, you knew when you signed up as you might have to carry on further west if need be.’

  I managed to lower my voice a half-octave and growled, ‘I get a break, though?’

  The man softened then and said, ‘Yeah, course you can have an hour’s rest. Go over to the bunkhouse yonder and there’s a pot o’ coffee on the stove. Sorry ’bout all this here, it’s just the way it is.’

  I now faced a further ordeal, which was to walk into the exclusively masculine environment of the bunk-house and try to present myself as a young man. This promised to be a more taxing challenge than spending five and three-quarter hours in the saddle without a break, but there was nothing for it, so I strode over to the little building he had indicated and kicked open the door.

  Luckily, I had been brought up with a brother who was just the very same age as me and so I had had many opportunities over the years to observe how boys did things. Jack would never open a door gently, but always barge through with his shoulder or kick it. I felt sure that I would be able to maintain this pretence for the hour or so that I would be there. By good fortune there was only one person in the place when I entered.

  ‘Hiyah,’ said a boy about the same age as me. ‘You want some coffee?’ He had a drawl, which made ‘coffee’ sound like ‘cawfee’. It was an accent I did not recognize. I grunted an inarticulate reply and went over to the stove to pour myself a cup.

  ‘They say as you’re goin’ on to Smoky Mountain. That right?’

  Again, I made a vague, low sound in my throat which might equally well have signalled denial as it did assent. The youngster didn’t seem to mind that I was seemingly not disposed to conversation, for he was one of those individuals who always have as much to say as two normal people. He was quite capable of keeping our exchange going under his own steam.

  He said, ‘Bet you was right surprised, when Bill told ya as you weren’t goin’ home now? I would o’ been, I tell you that for naught!’

  I shrugged and mumbled, ‘I guess.’

  ‘Lordy, you could o’ knocked me down with a feather when Jimmy didn’t show. They say as he’s had to vanish for a spell. Caught thievin’ is what I heard!’

  Not knowing either Bill or Jimmy, made the conversation about these characters a little dull, but I was glad enough to lay back on a cot and listen. At least I was resting my … well that is to say that part of my anatomy that I had had planted in a saddle for nearly six hours!

  ‘You hear what happen over Crooked Creekway?’

  I shook my head and tried to show by my expression that I was raring to hear about the events in a corner of Kansas of which I had never even heard.

  The boy said, ‘Fellow come by here last night. Said as there’d been some big fight ’tween the cavalry and a bunch o’ redskins. Wiped out the whole crew of ’em, seemingly. Soldiers killed too. Like a regular battle from what was told us.’

  Since it has a direct bearing on what happened to me a few hours later, I guess I ought to explain what this was all about, as I found out later. For reasons which don’t signify as far as my story’s concerned, the Comanche were feeling a mite contentious about the white man just then. The army had come down on a group of fifty or sixty raiders at a little place called Crooked Creek and because there had been 600 cavalry facing fewer than a tenth of that number Indians; the result was not in doubt for a moment. They had disposed of one party of raiders, who had crossed into Kansas to pillage and loot, but didn’t know until later that they had missed a far larger band, which consisted of several hundred warriors.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time and the boy’s tales of some massacre, in a place I’d never heard of and wasn’t likely ever to visit, didn’t really interest me overmuch. You will scarcely credit it, but that young man carried on talking about this, that and nothing in particular for the whole hour I was there and I do not, to this very day, even know what his name was. Some folk are like that; enjoying the sound of their own voices so much that they forget about any of the social niceties.

  The man whose name was apparently Bill came to tell me when it was time for me to leave.

  He said, ‘You just head straight east. You’ll reach Smoky Mountain at seven or eight maybe and they’ll give you a bunk for the night. You can take the road home again when the next eastbound rider hits there.’ I nodded and grunted and then I was off again on my travels.

  Now I can’t recollect whether or not I have mentioned that I was carrying a pistol at my waist. This was a requirement for all the riders, and mine was a capand-ball revolver, the old Colt Navy model. This had belonged to my pa and, since it was the only gun our family owned, I had had to bring it with me. It surely came in handy, later on.

  So there I was, racing across the country. I was tired, but the speed of the ride was exhilarating. Normally, when you are hacking out on a pony, the creature begins to flag after a space, but because I was changing mounts every ten or twelve miles there was none of this. The whole journey between those two stations was carried out at a gallop, with only occasional periods when I dropped to a canter. After I had changed my pony a half-dozen times since leaving Seneca, I was thinking that I was now on the home straight and that in another ten miles, maybe, I would be able to jump down and rest for the night. My mother used to say that: ‘Man proposeth, but God disposeth’ and so it proved on that evening, because by the time I reached the station at Smoky Mountain it was as plain as a pikestaff to me, even at such a tender age, that something was amiss.

  I suppose that having at the back of my mind the name of the location, Smoky Mountain, had somehow acted upon my mind to condition me into expecting smoke, or something of the sort. At any rate, when I was, according to my calculations, only a mile or two from this Smoky Mountain, I suddenly realized that for some time past I had actually been able to smell smoke. When once I was aware of it, I began to wonder about it, because this smoke had the scent not merely of a campfire, but was mingled with a host of other, indefinable, smells.

  I sniffed the air, and for some unknown reason didn’t care at all for what I was smelling. There was little enough to be done about it for, good rider though I was, I was just about dead beat by then. I had been galloping with only a single break, for a little over twelve hours. Evening was coming on and I was just desirous of sliding down from my pony and flopping onto a bunk.

  The track led through a wood and then the trees ended and there was a patch of scrubby grassland leading up a gentle slope to a ridge. I hoped that when I had mounted that ridge I might see the Smoky Mountain station on the other side and within easy reach. So I did, for all that it was worth.

  As I gained the top of the ridge the smell of burning, which had been assailing my nostrils for the last few minutes, became an overpowering stench
, and when I looked down to the plain which stretched before me the explanation was immediately obvious. There, smouldering in the evening air, with the sun about to dip below the distant horizon, was what remained of the Smoky Mountain station. It had, by the look of it, been put to the torch and left to burn to the ground. There was no sign of anybody in, near or about the place, which gave me to suppose that perhaps those who had been running it were dead or incapacitated. Even then, I don’t think that it crossed my mind that all this was of any particular importance for me personally, or could have any implications for my future welfare. My only thought was that it was a damned shame that I would not, after all, be able to dismount and lie down on a soft bed.

  I took the pony down at a leisurely walk, it being clear to me that there was not likely to be anybody at the station urging me on to hurry so that they could take the mochila from my mount in order speedily to transfer it to another. As I drew nigh to the ruins of what I supposed could only be the station a feeling of dread began to grip me. If there had been an accidental fire, then why had nobody troubled to extinguish it? Surely they could not all have been burned to death in their beds in such a case, so where was everyone? When I was maybe a couple of hundred yards away I halted and tried to make sense of the baffling circumstance which faced me. Although smoke was still trickling lazily up into the sky, it looked to me as though the fire had probably burned itself out hours earlier. All that remained were smouldering embers. I had seen the aftermath of fires before, but never until now had I witnessed the complete and utter destruction of any building by flames. Somebody always came and put out a fire before it reached that stage.

  I started forward again and found that the pony was oddly reluctant to walk on. I urged him by squeezing my legs hard and then digging my heels sharply into his flanks and eventually he obeyed me. There was no doubt though that he was not happy about going any closer to the remains of the building. I jumped down and secured him to a stout sapling. Then I went over to see if there was any clue as to what had befallen the place. More than that, I was hoping for some indication of what my own next move should be. There was little purpose in staying here, but should I carry on to the next staging post, or return to the last?