Morning wearing on, and every station entered on time, and a Chickasaw horse ready to replace the blue mare, and later the Chickasaw by a buckskin; some of the horses scuttlers, barely lifting their feet, but swift as wind anyway; and some reachers, like Galloway, with strides spanning a wagon’s length.
And the day flying fast as hoofbeats, but things remembered just the same. The lone cottonwood with a dead Sioux warrior lying high on a scaffold under the leafy umbrella, his spear and shield catching the glint of sun. Atop the crown of the tree a bald eagle acted as lookout; and below, a wolf howled, scratching the bark.
Fast as he was going, Peter thought about the foreverness of death; and life being a race against death but in the end death always winning. He thought about Brislawn, who was closer to death, being so much older, and how Brislawn wasn’t afraid to die, only hated the act of dying.
The Indian up there in the tree seemed full of peace; more so, maybe, than when he smoked his long pipe.
Things stuck in the memory. More landmarks to count on for the road back: this river island wooded, that one bare. An old rocking chair, discarded from a wagon train, tilted in sand.
Press on. Keep going. Carry all the messages unborn, until delivered in California.
And at last the sun grinning behind the jagged teeth of the mountains. Peter’s first day done, and night closing in, while the mail goes on over the mountains, and Peter sleeps, curled up in the shaggy warmth of a buffalo robe.
The Scalp-lifters
HOME FOR Peter was now a buffalo robe on the floor of a relay station—either with Max Muggeridge at Deer Creek or with Eli Dogberry at Devil’s Gate. It was enough of a home for now.
Peter’s first ride was in the nature of a surprise with the tiniest thread of disappointment. The whole first week seemed thinned down from what he’d expected. His interview with Mr. Majors kept flashing in and out of his mind, and he could see the man’s fingers ticking off dangers: “Storms. Floods. Rivers swollen. Wolves. Buffalo. Hostile Indians. Bandits.” Where were they?
Not that Peter wanted the mail threatened, or his own life. He could hardly put a name to how he felt. And then Max Muggeridge did it for him, on a quiet Sunday when they were mucking out stalls. Between forking and pitching Max said, “Bein’ a station master ain’t ’zactly what I expected.”
“No?” Peter stopped work, resting on his fork.
“No, siree! ‘Live on expectations,’ my pap used to say, ‘and one thing’s sartain.’ ”
“What’s that?”
“ ‘Disappointment.’ ”
Peter listened sharply.
“Station tending’s the draggiest work I ever done. I like to be busier’n a handcuffed man with the seven-year itch.” He slapped his horse on the rump. “Move over, Bucephalus.” And in the same breath, “Never any excitement around here. Nothin’ ever happens. Just ready the horses and wait. Ready ’em and wait. Wait, wait, wait seems all I ever do. A feller can’t even catch himself a mess of catfish or shoot a buffler. Everything’s brought in by wagon train. Now take you. You’re lucky. On the move every dang moment. Seein’ the world.”
“Max,” Peter said, “my work’s not draggy, but . . .”
“’Course ’tain’t.”
“But where’s the danger in making all the crossings without swimming? The weather’s fine as silk for April, and a fresh horse every few miles, and Cheyennes and Sioux and Arapahos all friendly and saying ‘How?’ No bandits to kill, no wolves snapping at our heels, no buffalo coming even close.”
Max threw back his head and howled. “Well, if you ain’t the craziest! Wantin’ to look a cannon in the mouth!”
“I guess it’s a guilt feeling I have. That’s it! Guilt!” His own word took Peter by surprise. “I’m not earning my money. You see, I agreed to risk death.”
“Well, I be dogged! Ain’t it dangerous gallopin’ full tilt ten, twelve hours a day, jouncin’ on a hard saddle?”
“It’s more like play, Max. Like when I was a boy, and no goal but hunting an old Indian medicine wheel, or going swimming. Only . . . only then I was riding San Domingo.”
“You a mite homesick, maybe? For home, and a horse you give up?”
Peter didn’t answer for a while. When he did, “Maybe,” was all he said. Then after a pause, “But I didn’t give him up,” he said, his voice lingering long on the word “give.”
There was no going home now. No time for it. Rest days were busier than other days. Stalls to muck out. Horses to doctor. Pistols to clean. Clothes to wash. And Max quick at thinking up new chores when regular ones were done.
• • •
Almost from that day of confiding, things began to happen, as though some overall hand was squeezing the trigger, one-two-three, on trouble. The meek gentleness of April gave way to violence. Lightning slit the skies. Thunder rocked the earth. Creeks and rivers swelled and spilled brown water over their banks. Clawed by debris, the horses had to fight the rushing current. Peter fought with them, knees angling them across, voice shouting them across, hands dropping the reins, holding the mochila on high, protecting the mail. For that week of flood Peter felt he’d earned his twenty-five dollars.
On a morning soon after the rains had gentled and the winds were again blowing softly through the grassed hill country, Peter, riding a fast-footed sorrel, noted a small herd of buffalo on the side of a knoll some distance away. Right on schedule the sorrel burst up and over the crown of the hill, expecting to fly down a long, quiet valley. Instead, the valley was all buffalo! Acres of buffalo! Wave on wave of brown wool and horns and churned-up dust! “They’re peaceable, though,” Peter told himself, “not running, not charging, just drifting slow, and leaving gaps wide enough for a dozen horses to angle through.”
In his eagerness to make time, Peter spurred the sorrel too close to a bull. The great lumbering beast let out a bellow of alarm. Instantly a roar of answering bellows echoed up and down the valley. Cows and calves, bawling in confusion, began closing off the gaps Peter had counted on.
Buffalo-wise, the sorrel took over. Like a boxer sparring he zigzagged in and out—twisting, doubling back, swerving, spinning on his hocks, reading the minds of the bulls, anticipating which way the herd would turn. A dozen times he bored a hole through the milling mass, until at last he and Peter were out in open country again.
This was near-danger! This was what Mr. Majors had promised! “I’ll write Ma how exciting it was,” Peter thought. “She’ll be proud of me, but Pa’ll know I was riding a buffalo-wise pony.”
Max Muggeridge seemed as happy as Peter over the buffalo experience. “Now,” he said, “you’ve had yer flood, and yer buffler. What next? Injuns? Danger’s like mice, y’know. Where there’s one, there’s three.”
Peter forgot Max’s maxim. He hardly counted the change in the Indians’ attitude an out-and-out danger. Besides, they were still friendly to him. If there was a change, it had to be the fault of mosquitoes. In the split second it took to mount a horse, swarms of mosquitoes attacked face, neck, belly, and legs, making the creature spooky and irritable. Mr. Dogberry wiped his horses with citronella, but it wore off before the ride was half over. Then the pesky things came on more savage than ever, sneaking into nostrils and ears, driving the animals crazy.
Yes, if anything could make man or beast ornery, mosquitoes could be the culprits.
Will Cody and other pony riders came up with various reasons for the sullen mood of the Indians. Will thought it was the day-by-day push of the emigrants—spoiling the land, killing the buffalo, trapping the beaver, fouling the streams.
Max, however, was more emphatic. “No!” he said with authority. “A cow’s the cause.”
Peter had just settled himself into his buffalo robe on the floor and lay looking at but not commenting on the foreboding sandbags piled up against the lower half of the window.
“Come next week, I’m getting a hostler to help,” Max announced. “I writ Majors I wanted a feller with a nose lik
e a coyote’s so’s he can scent Injuns a mile away.”
Peter laughed. “I thought you didn’t want any helper getting in your hair.”
Max’s hand flew up, patting his thick thatch. “Now it’s different,” he said. “No scalp-lifter is going to fleece me o’ my crownin’ glory—not if I have to hire me a dozen assistants with a dozen rifles.”
Peter got up to swat a mosquito. “Cheer up, Max,” he said, “it’s these pesky mosquitoes that’s rankling the Indians. Maybe we’ll have a freeze and they’ll die off, and the Indians’ll be friendly again.” His tone was beginning to lack the confidence of his words.
“Mosquitoes, me eye! They fret me, too. But you don’t see me goin’ around burnin’ buildings and raidin’ corrals and liftin’ people’s scalps like they was buffalo chips.”
Max produced a wedge of berry pie from under a domed lid of paper and cut it into equal slices. “The real cause of hostilities,” he said, offering a piece to Peter, “is due to a cow with a full udder of milk.” Chewing and gulping, he relished both the pie and his sermonizing.
“It’s all clear and plain to me. The Blackfeet Injuns stole this milker cow from the U.S. Army. A rattle-headed lieutenant demands the life of the Injun. His tribe refuses to give him up. So the Army opens fire, leavin’ a lot of Blackfeet spraddled and dead.”
Peter’s appetite was suddenly gone. He slid his pie back under the paper and went to bed.
• • •
Whatever the reason, the month of May marked the change in the Indians’ attitude. Pony riders and relay stations became their target. Cheyennes, Sioux, Blackfeet all wanted horses and firearms—enough to fight the whole United States Army.
On Tuesday, the fifth of June, a station close to the California border was robbed of four horses, a half-dozen rifles, and enough bullets to wipe out a regiment. The building itself was burned to ashes. On Monday, the eleventh of June, Peter left Deer Creek at noon. He crouched low over his horse’s neck, not in fear, but copying the Indian’s way. Besides, the faster he flew, the fewer mosquitoes could light on his horse’s face or his own. A half-dozen Sioux spotted him along the way, but dismissed him as no more than a magpie in the swim of distance.
Against a head wind he made his first station, the Little Muddy, five minutes early.
At the third station he pulled in twelve minutes early. Today he might set a record. The fresh pony, ready and waiting, shot away at full speed. They passed the familiar landmarks along the river—the islands bare and the islands wooded, and the rocking chair still tilted in the sand. Grandma Lundy would have crowed at the crazy angle of it. Yes, the landmarks all there, and his pony pounding past them, ears laced back. Suddenly both ears swiveled, then shot forward, pointing toward the tree, the lone tree with the Indian body on the scaffold.
To Peter’s horror the body seemed moving, the head canted. Now, barely thirty yards away, the Indian was up, poised on the scaffold, the eagle feathers in his war bonnet quivering in the wind. Like some trick rider he leaped onto the back of a waiting horse, his rifle aimed at Peter.
As he fled, Peter heard the rifle crack. A bullet hissed by him, pinged into the side of a rock. He turned around, firing his six-shooter again and again. He saw the oncoming figure sway and swerve in his saddle.
Peter’s gun was empty! Around a bend in the river, he whipped out his mother’s pistol, ready for a life-or-death shootout. But he heard no hoofbeats . . . only his own horse’s breath rattling.
That night at Eli Dogberry’s station, Peter prayed desperately that the Indian trickster still lived. Peter had never killed a man. If the warrior lay dead, he, Peter Lundy, may have touched off a full-scale war.
A House Divided
AT FOUR o’clock next morning a courier delivered a message marked for Peter Lundy, care of Eli Dogberry.
“Hope none of your kin be ailing or dead,” Mr. Dogberry remarked with gloom as he turned up the oil lamp and pulled over a stool for the boy.
Fear sickened Peter. His hands shook so violently that he had to lay the sheet of paper on the table. In the pool of light he glanced quickly down the page to the commanding signature: Alexander Majors.
Dear Peter Lundy (the handwriting read), The company of Russell, Majors & Waddell is deeply indebted to you for ridding this Territory of a bandit who has been the scourge of the plains for a dozen years and more. The number of innocent victims he has murdered in his greed for gold and fast horseflesh is ten known, though lawmen estimate his slayings at a full score.
This varmint (I refuse to call him a man) has used many disguises in his nefarious career, posing sometimes as a doctor and sometimes as an Indian warrior. There is no doubt of his real identity, however. Those fortunate enough to survive his dastardly deeds have identified him by a withered right hand. His real name is Eph Slade.
In recognition of your dauntless courage, we shall include in your next pay a bounty of fifty dollars ($50.00).
Yours very truly,
Alexander Majors
Peter broke out in a sweat of relief. His teeth chattered as he said to Mr. Dogberry, “Now I got a letter to write.”
Still in nightcap and shirt, Mr. Dogberry scrabbled around in the cubbyhole at the side of the fireplace for pen, ink, and paper. When he came back to the table, he hovered over Peter’s shoulder, trying to make out what the important-looking letter had to say. “Bad news?” he asked expectantly.
“No. Here, you can read it. But please . . . I got to be left alone to write.”
Mr. Dogberry took Majors’ letter over to the firelight while Peter painstakingly began his own.
Dear Pa,
You will likely hear about my killing a man. I didn’t know it was Lefty Slade that I fired at. I took him for an Indian playing a trick on me. I am glad it wasn’t an Indian.
I guess you would like to think I avenged you, paying back the man who left you to die. But it wasn’t that way. You should know the truth, even if you don’t like me as much. Ma will understand how it was.
Your son, Peter
He inserted the word “loving,” erased it, and was half glad when it showed through anyway. Then he read over the letter once more while Eli Dogberry made a great to-do, stirring yesterday’s mash and muttering imponderables to himself.
By the time Peter had pulled on his boots and downed his breakfast, the night expressman came riding in, and Peter went galloping out on a fresh horse, his letter for Jethro Lundy left behind for the slow stage that would stop at Rawhide Creek.
Earth and sky were parting in a ribbon of grayness as he and his mount took off. Strange, Peter thought, how one day a person could feel high-spirited—laughing and sparring and scuffling with the other riders. And the next day that same person became a killer. The word shot terror into him, as if he were the killed and the killer both. He felt suddenly old. Killing was hard on the soul.
• • •
The death of Slade marked a milestone for Peter. Before, he had looked upon himself as a pony boy, riding the clock around, accountable only to his employer, Alexander Majors.
Now he felt laden and involved—not only with what went on in the Nebraska Territory he lived in, but with what went on in the country as a whole. Perhaps this new, deeper concern was part of growing up, of realizing that whatever affected men in high places sifted right on down and affected everyone, including himself.
The messages he carried east and west were no longer anonymous words shuttling back and forth to anonymous people. They burst into life with momentous consequences.
On May 18, Jim Baxter shouted the news before he tossed over the mochila that held it: “Abraham Lincoln’s nominated for president!”
Peter felt a satisfaction he could not define. A man who stood up for freedom for everyone must be a kind of prophet, like Moses. Yet in the days that followed, Peter heard nothing but doubts that Lincoln would ever become president.
“He’ll never in the world make it!” a traveling tinker announced. The ma
n had invited himself for “a bit and a sup” with Max Muggeridge. Through a full mouth of rabbit stew he spouted: “Such a plain, homely man don’t stand a chance against a slick whopper-jawed talker like Stephen Douglas.”
Max scratched his head in uncertainty. “I hear tell that Lincoln’s voice is on the screaky side.”
Peter bristled. He knew how it was to have a high voice when all your thoughts ran deep and strong. “What if his voice does screak?” he asked hotly. “Maybe it carries!”
Often as Peter rode he repeated Lincoln’s words: A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . this government cannot endure half slave and half free . . . it will become all one thing, or all the other. . . .
“Did the tough little mustangs,” Peter wondered, “ever give thought to their role in history? Or did they just live in a routine of happiness—flying from one corral to the next; always finding hay and grain aplenty; and water, sometimes good and sometimes tainted with alkali, but always wet; and sometimes a patch of grazing if the time of year was right?”
Red roans and blue. Buckskins and paints. Copperbottoms and steeldusts. All pressing on. To what goal in their minds? To save the Union? Or to fill their stomachs and rest their bones?
The year circled on. Days melting into weeks. Summer coming in sluggishly with grass drying to nothing, and horses hoofing up furrows of dust, and sun burning Peter’s face Indian-brown and bleaching his hair to straw.
And autumn blowing. Goldenrod taking over for wild roses. Cottonwood and aspen flaming yellow. Wild plums sweetening. Geese honking to their winter haven.
And winter with winds lashing like bullwhips. And Peter riding with lungs on fire until he remembers to mask his face with Grandma Lundy’s muffler.