Sea to Shining Sea

by Michael Phillips

  I don’t know what danger they thought Mr. Tavish was going to be in his condition, but one of them dragged him by the feet over next to me, then pulled him viciously to his feet and tied him up behind me. We could feel each other’s hands but couldn’t see each other.

  “I’m sorry about this, little lady,” Mr. Tavish groaned softly. “These blamed Pai—”

  A blow across the side of his head and face put an end to whatever he had been going to say.

  Meanwhile, the Indians who were taking things seemed to have gotten all they wanted out of the cabin and had left. Outside we could hear movement and rustling. The door was still open and I could see them dragging brush and bales of straw from the stables over toward the station. Out one of the windows I could see the same thing going on.

  “What are they doing?” I whispered when the one who had been tying us up went over to check on the knots around Pa and Juan.

  “Fixing to burn down the place,” Mr. Tavish whispered back. “It’s their favorite way—surround the place with kindling and firewood and set it ablaze.”

  “What about us?” I said in horror.

  “It’s the Paiute way of burning the white man at the stake. The good-for-nothin’ savages!”

  “They’re going to leave us inside?” I gasped.

  “Leave us inside to burn, take us outside and put arrows through our hearts—their kind ain’t too particular how the white man dies.”

  “Pa!” I wailed.

  “Be brave, Corrie,” I heard Pa answer, even though I couldn’t see him from the direction I was facing. “Just remember—this ain’t the end of it. Our Father will take care of us, even if—”

  He never finished. I heard a big whack, and I squirmed at my ropes, straining around to try to see Pa. I managed just to see him out of the corner of my eye. His head was hanging limp, a red gash from the butt of the Indian’s rifle already swelling up from above his ear down into the upper part of his cheek. The blow had knocked him unconscious.

  I found myself wishing they’d do the same to me. If I was going to get burned up, I’d rather be asleep!

  There was still a lot of activity outside, but it looked as if they had just about got the cabin all surrounded with dry material that would ignite in just a few seconds. Then it got very quiet. The Indian who had seemed to be in charge walked out the door and was gone for two or three minutes. When he finally came back in, the look on his face was one of taking a last look around to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. A handful of others followed him in, then stood back waiting. He walked slowly about, indicating now one thing, now another, with a grunt and a few words. The others picked up whatever he’d pointed to and took it outside. They grabbed up several blankets on a shelf that had been missed before, a shovel, an axe, an unopened bag of beans.

  The leader walked slowly around the table, eyeing it carefully, then over to the stove, where he first noticed the flapjacks and bacon still frying away. By now the two large pancakes on the griddle were black on the bottom, and the thin strips of bacon burned to cinders. But the smell seemed to attract his attention. He glanced back at the table, then again eyed the stove, this time lifting the lid off the pot of coffee, which still sat there steaming hot. The smell seemed to appeal to him. He smiled, replaced the lid, took a tin cup from the shelf behind the stove, and poured out a cup of the black brew.

  As he sipped at it, he must have thought more of it than I had the previous evening, because he smiled again, then called to his companions, apparently asking them if they wanted some. They all set down the things they’d been carrying outside and approached him, grabbing cups wherever they could find them, and pouring coffee for themselves.

  The five or six Indians left in the cabin talked and laughed as they sipped at Mr. Tavish’s strong coffee. Then before I even realized what was happening, they all sat down around the table, using our plates and eating up the flapjacks that we had cooked!

  There they were, getting ready to burn the place down, and us along with it, and they were celebrating by eating our breakfast!

  After some discussion, they finally figured out that the syrup was sweet and tasted good on top of the pancakes. They poured it on, then tore the pancakes in half with their fingers, picked them up, and ate them. It was the messiest breakfast I had ever seen in my life, and if I hadn’t been about to die, I probably would have laughed myself silly. As it was, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or look the other way and try to ignore their uncivilized antics.

  But they were impossible to ignore. By now they were making quite a racket. The pancakes and bacon were gone in a few minutes, and they had syrup and grease all over their faces and hands. Then they got up and started rummaging all through the cabin to see if there was anything else they could find to eat! One of them grabbed up the bottle of syrup and drank down the rest of it, then set it back down on the table with a crash and a loud laugh. The rest were helping themselves to more coffee, spilling half of it in their haste. One had discovered a tin of dried venison, which all the rest now came and started to fight over.

  Then suddenly, in the distance, a bugle sounded, followed by the pounding gallop of approaching horses.

  All activity inside the cabin stopped immediately, and they looked around at one another. Immediately, I realized that the Paiutes had heard the sound, too, and were scared by it. They dropped everything and ran for the door. Within fifteen seconds, amid shouts and unintelligible cries, we heard their ponies galloping away in the opposite direction, followed by pursuing gunfire.

  Chapter 32

  Pony Bob!

  It wasn’t the cavalry at all who had rescued us!

  Pony Bob was early in arriving on his run from the east. He’d seen signs of the Indians from far off and had ridden in shooting and firing up a storm.

  He was a courageous young boy, that much we already knew, but I doubt if he really expected to scare off twenty or thirty Paiutes all by himself. But he had help that we didn’t know about when we first heard him approach. All he’d been trying to do was distract the war party long enough for that help to arrive. Fortunately for everybody, he didn’t have to wait for it before he got into the cabin to untie us.

  We heard his horse gallop up and stop, and a few seconds later he ran inside.

  “Am I glad to see you!” Mr. Tavish whispered weakly. “Get us outta these ropes, Bob!”

  Pony Bob was already slicing through the cords around my hands and Mr. Tavish’s with a knife. The instant I was free I ran over to Pa and threw my arms around him.

  “I love you, Pa!” I said, not able to keep from crying and not the least bit embarrassed about my tears. I hardly even realized that he was still bound hand and foot and couldn’t have hugged me back if he’d tried!

  Pony Bob was just what I might have expected. Small, thin, six inches shorter than Zack, and with a recklessness, almost a mean streak in his young eyes. He didn’t look as if he was afraid of anybody or anything. Whether it was courage that drove him, or just that he didn’t have anyone in this life he cared about enough to stay alive for, I couldn’t tell. His face showed little trace of a beard, but his eyes had the hardness of a man of fifty. In Mr. Tavish’s eyes I had seen the dull pain of loneliness; in young Bob Haslam’s I saw only emptiness.

  “Everyone outside!” gasped Mr. Tavish, even before Pa and Juan were free. “We gotta pull the straw away from the station. One flaming arrow and the place’ll go up like a dry brushfire in a hot wind!”

  He staggered outside, and with his uninjured arm began dragging back the brush and straw the Indians had piled up. In a minute all four of the rest of us had joined him.

  “By now they’ll know they was run off by only Bob. They’ll either be back or will try to set the place off from where they’re hiding!”

  “In two or three minutes the army’ll be here,” said young Haslam.

  “What?” Mr. Tavish said, breathing hard and gritting his teeth against the pain.

  “Or
msby’s out from Carson. He heard they’d attacked the Widow Cutt’s place yesterday. I’d seen signs of the raiding party all the way in the last ten miles. I ran into his troop of men five or six miles back and told him I thought they were heading for the station. They’re right behind me.”

  “Blamed if you ain’t better’n a whole hundred cavalrymen!” said Tavish, his face flushed with fever and exertion. The next instant a shot rang out, followed by the sound of a bullet ricocheting off an iron wagon wheel next to the station house. It had come from the direction the Indians had gone.

  “Them Paiutes is back!” cried Tavish. “Everyone inside!”

  We rushed into the station. Pony Bob bolted the door. Pa, Juan, and Bob grabbed rifles and sent several volleys of fire out through the windows, hoping to discourage the war party from trying the same thing again. Mr. Tavish, still bleeding, made me help him get a rifle up onto the window ledge where he could rest it against his good shoulder.

  But the shooting didn’t last long this time.

  Again we heard a bugle call, followed by thunderous hoofbeats. A minute later Major Ormsby’s troop of forty men roared past after the Paiutes, who were back on their horses and making for the mountains as fast as they could. We never saw them again.

  Once the cavalry had passed, Mr. Tavish sank into the one chair, and Pony Bob packed and dressed the wound.

  “The army’s bugle didn’t sound anything like what I heard before you came,” I said to Pony Bob when he had finished bandaging Mr. Tavish’s shoulder.

  He and Mr. Tavish laughed.

  “That’s because Pony Bob’s weren’t no army bugle, little lady. Back when the Express started, they gave every rider a horn so as to announce his coming to the station. Wasn’t long before everybody knew we didn’t need ’em. You can see the dust five miles away, and hear the horse’s hooves a mile away, so what use was the horn? But Pony Bob, he just kept his. How come, Bob?”

  “Aw, just for fun,” replied Bob. “You never know when you’re gonna have need of something like that.”

  “If the army ever heard someone trying to imitate their charge with a little tin horn like that, they’d take it from him and trample it flat!” said Mr. Tavish.

  “Anyhow, the Indians believed he was a one-man cavalry charge,” laughed Pa. “So I’m mighty glad you saved it, son. Say, you know a Zack Hollister?”

  Pony Bob’s face grew thoughtful. “Yeah, I think I heard of him,” he answered after a minute. “Rides over to the east. Ain’t never run into him myself, though.”

  “These folks come from California looking to find him,” put in Mr. Tavish. “You reckon they could make it to Utah, Bob?”

  “Not unless they want to go through what you’ve just been through every day—and that’s without a station to hide in and no cavalry within miles.”

  “You reckon the Paiutes are going on the warpath again?”

  “They’re everywhere out there. I was lucky to make it through. You want my advice, Mister,” said Pony Bob to Pa, “you’ll saddle up and head for Carson and just keep right on going past the Sierras. If Zack Hollister’s your kin, there ain’t much you can do for him now. But if you aim to keep this pretty girl of yours alive, you’d best take my advice.”

  “When’s the safest time to leave for Carson, you reckon?” asked Pa.

  “Right now,” answered Mr. Tavish. “Ormsby’s driven the savages up into the hills. They won’t bother nobody for some few days, and he and his men will be moving back that way, so if there was trouble, they’d be on the trail with you.”

  “We ought to do what they say, Pa,” I said. “If we are ever going to find Zack, it doesn’t seem as if this is the time to do it.”

  Pa thought long and hard for a few minutes. He knew we had to go back, but he was torn with wanting to find his son.

  Finally he nodded. “Well then, Corrie, I reckon you and me had best saddle up our horses and get our things together.”

  “You could make Carson, or maybe even Friday’s Station before nightfall,” said Mr. Tavish.

  “I’m obliged to you for everything, Tavish,” said Pa, shaking the stationman’s good hand. “All except for nearly getting us killed, that is!”

  “You come back and visit again, Hollister,” he said, smiling weakly. “And bring the little lady with you. She’s a right fine nurse, along with being a cook and a newspaper writer!”

  “You take care of yourself!” said Pa.

  “And get a doctor to fix up your shoulder,” I added, giving Mr. Tavish a one-sided hug. “I don’t want to worry about anything happening to it.”

  Pa and I were on the trail back in the direction of Carson City in less than twenty minutes.

  We rode for the rest of the morning in silence, interrupted only by Pony Bob as he passed, finishing up his run to Carson. We had probably started fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of him, but he caught up with us in no time.

  We heard him coming behind us and stopped to turn around. At first all we could see was swirling dust in the middle of the desert valley floor, although the sound of the iron-clad hooves could be heard thudding loudly against the rocky trail. We squinted to watch as the cloud of dust grew steadily larger. Then a black speck began to appear in the middle of the cloud, which gradually sprouted arms and legs and came alive with movement. Across the endless level of the Carson sink, the cloud of dust grew, the now-defined horse and rider in its midst obscuring mountains and desert and sky. A show it was—magnificent to behold!

  He was nearly upon us, and we watched in nothing less than awe, as if history itself resided in the four locked pouches of the mochila coming from the East and bound for the Pacific. Had I been able to pull out paper and pencil, to stop the motion of Pony Bob and his steed, I would have tried to capture in a drawing what I felt as he flew past. As it is, however, the scene must lodge only in my memory, for it was over in a few brief seconds.

  As he thundered by, I saw the blur of four powerful black feet, Bob’s arms and the reins and the bandanna around his neck all flying, and in the center of it all the huge black head of the horse, his eyes flaming, his nostrils wide to suck in all the air he could, mouth foaming, his powerful frame bulging and pulsating with muscular strength. He was by us in an instant. Only Bob’s whoop of greeting, and long drawn out Hooolllisteeeerrrrr! lingered echoing in the wind with the suddenly retreating hoofbeats.

  Like a blur, it was gone. Man and horse flew by our wide-eyed faces like a thunderstorm borne on a swift wind, then receded into the distance ahead . . . tinier, tinier, until Pony Bob disappeared in a dust cloud against the blue of the horizon. Except for the lingering whirlwind of dust, I might have believed that the whole thing had been the dreaming fancy of an overactive imagination.

  But it was no dream. Pa’s next words woke me out of my reverie. He had been astonished by the sight as well.

  “Tarnation!” he exclaimed. “That boy does know how to ride! I reckon Tavish was right when he said they’re all good riders!”

  We rode for an hour after that without either of us saying anything. After all we’d been through, our anxiety over Zack, and even wondering where the band of Paiutes were, there was plenty to think about. I was thinking about the attack that morning, Zack, and the Indians. But Pa hadn’t been thinking about those things at all I found out.

  “I think I’m gonna do it, Corrie,” he said after a long, long time of quiet.

  “Do what, Pa?”

  “Run for the legislature.”

  “You are? Why, Pa, that’s . . . that’s wonderful!” I exclaimed.

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes—I was hoping you would!”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re a fine man, Pa, and I want everyone to know it. What made you decide?”

  “I can’t rightly say,” replied Pa. “Something about what happened back there just—I don’t know, Corrie, it just made me think it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Does it h
ave anything to do with Zack?”

  Pa thought for a minute. “I’m not sure. I guess I just got to figuring that everybody’s gonna die sometime. We came closer than I’d like to think back there! But if I am gonna die, then I oughta have done something worth remembering before I do. Raising my kids right is probably about the most important thing a man can do, and I ain’t done such a good job of that.”

  “Please, Pa, I don’t like to hear you talk like that.”

  “All right, Corrie. Let’s just say that one of my sons doesn’t think much of my fathering. Maybe the rest of you still look up to me. But you’re all nearly grown. Why, little Tad’s gonna be a man himself in another year or two. So I figure my fathering days are nearly over—except for little Ruth, of course. Whether I’ve done a good or a bad job of it, maybe I oughta be looking for something else worth doing that people will remember Drummond Hollister for. You don’t always get too many chances to do something important, so when one comes along, a man’s gotta look at it and decide if he wants to do it, or before he knows it, the chance is gone and might never come back.”

  “A man or a woman,” I added with a smile.

  “Right you are there, Corrie. Which is why you’ve got to take your opportunities with writing and with this election, and why maybe I’ve got to take mine with this political thing Dalton’s offering me.”

  “I understand, Pa.”

  I really did. I had been thinking along the same lines for the last couple of months—not having to do with dying or doing something important, but having to do, as Pa and Cal had both said, with taking the opportunities that came your way.

  In some ways the decisions facing both Pa and me were similar too. And the choices we made were bound to have a big effect on our futures.

  Chapter 33

  A Conversation in Sacramento

  Things started to happen pretty fast after we got back from Nevada. Pa’s decision to run for the California House of Representatives was like yanking up the boards to let the water from a stream into a sluice trough. Once the water started flowing, it rushed through fast! I know it didn’t take our minds off Zack and the danger he was in, but it kept us busy enough that we didn’t have to mope around and think about it.