BONANZA

BONANZA

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.

The wrangler looked at him reproachfully and murmured, “Durned if he wouldn’t sing at a wake and spoil everybody’s enjoyment.”

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.

“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.

“HURRAH FOR WASHOE!”

Placerville was busy as a hive of bees on a warm June afternoon. Its hotels and restaurants were crowded to capacity. The saloons were doing a rush business and the gambling halls teemed with a packed and jostling humanity. Grocery stores bustled with the activity of clerks filling orders, packing supplies, nailing up boxes, and sewing bales. The main streets were filled with mixed crowds of miners, speculators, gamblers, men of leisure then known as “bummers,” and such flotsam as is always washed up in the stampede for a new mining camp.

Vaqueros drove loaded mules and burros through the streets with soft liquid oaths of command. A sixteen-horse ore wagon, painted red, the bed of it six feet deep, rumbled down the road with two “back-actions” behind, each of these also filled with ore. They had come straight from the diggings at Virginia City. Freight outfits were loading at stores and wholesale liquor houses with supplies for the new camp. Men bought and sold hurriedly. A hundred outfits were being roped up to cross the Sierras to the Carson Valley. Ox teams swung into town and out again with goods for the new district. Everywhere was that orderly confusion of many cross currents of humanity moving to a common end.

That common end was Washoe.^[2] The name was on every tongue. It dominated every mind. All the able-bodied old prospectors who had come round the Horn in the old days, who had followed the stampedes to Kern River, the Fraser, and Told Bluff, were now headed as by one impulse for the silver diggings at the foot of Mt. Davidson. Such rich grounds never had been seen before. All one had to do was to pan the outcroppings and grow rich in a few weeks. Hurrah for Washoe! Hip hip for the land of golden dreams! Washoe or bust!

A canvas-covered emigrant wagon drawn by a pair of emaciated horses moved slowly toward the hills. The driver was a bullet-headed young fellow with sullen, close-set eyes. These were a peculiar grayish-yellow, and the pupils were very small. He was unshaven, poorly dressed, and far from clean. The hardship of a long overland trip had undermined his self-respect and worn away the thin veneer of the man’s civility.

At the crest of the first rise he turned in his seat and looked back toward the town. “Good-bye, Hangtown,”^[3] he shouted with an oath, shaking his ragged whip.

The skeleton horses crept up the road toward the mountains. Presently evidence of the stampede to Washoe began to manifest itself. The prairie schooner passed a broken-down stage, a smashed wheel, a splintered wagon tongue snapped in the middle. An empty whisky barrel advertised one of the chief staples of trade. A dead burro lay half buried in the mire.

The road had been a good one once. Perhaps it would be hard and firm again after the slush from the rains had dried. Just now it was one to try the patience of man and beast. There were stretches where even the pack mules bogged down while Mexican drivers beat and hauled at them to an accompaniment of excited curses in their native tongue.

A stage from Virginia City swung down the grade, “Pony” King on the box holding the lines, his long whip crackling out snakelike toward the leaders. The stage was not a handsome Concord, the pride of every employee of the company, but one of the mud-wagons used as a substitute when the roads were bad. A pack train of fifteen animals overtook the covered wagon. These carried nothing but liquors—whisky, gin, lager beer, brandy, some pipes of California wine, and a few baskets of champagne. Foot travellers, carrying outfits on their backs, ploughed wearily forward. Nothing but the wonders of the Comstock Lode could have kept their tired legs moving through the mud.

At every gulch there was a bar, the fixtures improvised from a couple of dry-goods boxes and a canvas top. Restaurants announced themselves every few miles, as well as hotels, which had all necessary accommodations for tired stampeders except food, beds, and bedding.

Later in the day the prairie schooner came into a region where patches of snow began to appear in the hill crotches above. The grade was stiffer and the poor horses made sorry progress. A dozen times they gave up, exhausted. The driver beat them furiously with his whip and flung raucous curses at them. From the wagon a big-eyed child and a wan-faced woman dismounted to lighten the load. Once the woman timidly murmured a protest at her husband’s brutality. Savagely he turned on her, snarling his rage explosively.

She shrank back, afraid that he was going to use the whip on her. “Don’t, Rob,” she begged, face white as the snow in the bank beside the road.

A burro train swung round the bend, and the man flung away from her and lashed the horses instead.

They camped that night at the mouth of a cañon and were on the road at daybreak next morning. The travellers were well into the mountains now. The spring rains had been heavy and had loosened the snow on the slopes. Landslides were frequent and the air was filled with the thunder of avalanches. The trail itself was treacherous. It was honeycombed with chuck holes where the mules of pack outfits had broken through and wallowed in the mud.

The American River plunged down a cañon beside the road. A growth of heavy pines bordered the trail.

When the gaunt team dragged into the clearing at Strawberry Flat hundreds of men and scores of teams were camped there for the night. The animals were tied to the tongues and sides of the wagons and fed from long feed-boxes. They were protected from the cold by heavy canvases lined with blanket stuff. The men who handled the jerkline and the blacksnake curled up under the wagons. Soon they were fast asleep, oblivious to the soft snow that drifted in and wrapped them about.

The driver of the prairie schooner fed and watered the horses while his wife made supper. She found dry wood for kindling in the wagon, and the little girl, who was all thin arms and legs and wild flying hair, gleefully cleared away snow from the spot selected. Soon a fire was roaring and little Victoria was sniffing the savoury odour of a jackrabbit stew.

She hopped up and down, first on one foot, then on the other.

“Goody, goody. Le’s hurry up’n eat, Sister Mollie,” she shouted, waving a spoon excitedly.

After supper Robert Dodson disappeared into the nearest grog shop, and his wife retired to the wagon and nursed a six-weeks-old baby. Victoria washed the dishes, played around the fire, and after a time came hop-skipping through the snowflakes to their canvas-covered home.

“Sister Mollie,” announced the child, climbing nimbly up from the tongue, “when I’m big I’m gonna marry a prince, ’n he won’t ever get drunk ’n beat me like Rob does you.”

“Sh-h-h! You mustn’t say such things, Vicky,” the older sister admonished.

“ ’N I’m gonna have shoes without holes in ’em ’n a dress not all patchy, with gold spangles ’most all over it. ’N he’ll have a silver chariot ’n great big white horses with long tails—not jus’ plugs like ours.”

Mollie sighed and caught the baby in her arms tighter, so that for a moment the infant stirred restlessly in its sleep. She, too, had once known dreams of the fairy prince who was to come riding gallantly into her life and to carry her irresistibly into the Land of Romance.

From the tent barroom where her husband had gone came the words of a drunken chorus:

Mollie recognized the voice of her husband and then his tipsy laugh. Her slight body shivered underneath the thin shawl she was wearing.

THE NIGHT RIDE

Hugh McClintock drew his horse to a walk and skirted the base of a hill. He patted the shiny neck of the bay affectionately. The boy loved the mounts he rode. His life depended on their stamina and speed, and they had never failed him.

“Good old Nevada Jim,” he whispered. “We got a long trail before us through these red devils, but I reckon we’re good for it, me ’n you.”

He was swinging well to the south of the Silver Mountains, riding through country covered with brush. He had been travelling at a rapid pace as he wound in and out among the sage and greasewood. Now he had reached the hills that marked the limit of the range. His intention was to go by way of Alkali Flat, circle Walker Lake, and cross the Walker River range. This plan was subject to change, for at any minute he might run into the Piutes. On the other hand, which was more likely, he might reach Carson without having had a glimpse of them.

Boy though he was, he knew Indians. His father was one of the earliest pioneers in Eagle Valley. Hugh’s first recollection was of the trip from Salt Lake through the desert. He recalled that a cow had worked side by side in the wagon with an ox. The first plough that had broken a furrow in Nevada had been made by his father from discarded wagon tires picked up on the overland road to California. He remembered the days when Captain Jim in beads and buckskin and his breech-clothed tribe had hung around the settlers in pretended friendship. Tame coyotes instead of dogs had followed them. There hung in his mind the memory of a morning when he had gone to the stable to find the horses run off and the cows stuck full of arrows.

One adventure he would never forget. His mother had wakened him at midnight and dressed him hurriedly. He and his younger brother had been packed in apple boxes slung on the opposite sides of a mule. Rifle in hand, his father had walked beside a second mule upon which Hugh’s mother rode. So they had crossed the Sierras from Mormon Station into California, driven from home by the news that the Indians were raiding the valleys. In his young life he could recall a hundred such memories of the dangers and hardships of pioneering.

While he was still in the hills the brilliant reds and crimsons of sunset gave way to the soft violet of dusk, which in turn melted into the deep purple of falling night. Sometimes, as he wound forward in the chaparral, he heard the faint rustling of wild shy creatures scurrying to safety.

The stars had long been out before he reached Alkali Flat. He was far from any road, but the unerring instinct of the frontiersman took him, with many twists and turns, in the direction he had chosen. Not long after midnight he struck Walker Lake. He followed the shore line around the southern point. On a little peninsula he unsaddled, picketed Nevada Jim, and slept for nearly two hours.

Darkness was still heavy over the land when he saddled and retied the mail sacks. He crossed Cat Creek, turned northwest, and began the hill trek into the Walker River Range.

Light began to filter into a sky that grew less opaque. The hills took vague outlines. A meadow lark’s piping heralded the advent of the young day.

He put Nevada Jim at the saddle of a hill and reached the brow that formed part of the lip of a small saucer-shaped valley beyond. A score of morning camp-fires shone like glowworms in the misty hollow. By chance he had stumbled on a party of Piutes who had probably raided a ranch and come down here to revel undisturbed. Very likely it was the same bunch that had waylaid and shot Tim. There rose to the express rider the pungent smell of burning meat, and he guessed that the Indians were indulging in their favourite feast of roasted horseflesh.

McClintock made to turn back, but as he did so a slim breech-clothed figure shot up from the sage almost at his stirrup. The rider, silhouetted against the skyline, was a mark hardly to be missed at such close range even by a Piute with a trade gun. Hugh dragged Nevada Jim round with fore feet in air, drove home his spurs, and charged straight at the brave.

A red-hot stab seared McClintock’s side. A moment, and he felt the shock of impact. The sentry was flung headlong before the weight of the horse, which staggered over the naked body, trod it under, and went plunging down the hill.

Hugh heard guttural shouts of alarm from the valley. Presently, riding along the arroyo below, he saw horsemen urging their mounts over the brow of the hill. A shout of triumph told him that he had been seen by his pursuers.

As the long strides of the horse carried him down the arroyo, the boy’s brain functioned to meet the emergency. He might turn to the right, circle the lake, make for Alkali Flat, and from there across the hills on the long stretch for the station. The alternative was to keep going north, strike across the range, and point for Carson. Even in this desperate emergency the morale of the service was the deciding factor. The mail was due at Carson in a few hours. With a pressure of his right knee he guided Nevada Jim up the gulch toward a mountain pass he knew above.

If his horse had been fresh McClintock would have had small fear of the result. The Indians had no such ponies as the one he was astride. Their stock was inferior, just as their rifles were. Moreover, at their best they were wretched marksmen. But all the natural advantages of the white man were neutralized. Nevada Jim was far from fresh. Any rifle was better than none, and the pony express rider had to depend on a revolver, good for fast-short-range work but useless now. He was one against many, and already he could feel a wet splash on his shirt when he pressed his hand to his side. How bad the wound was he did not know, but it was certain that the long hard ride before him would not add to his strength.

A boy of his age, trained in any other school except the hard outdoor one of the frontier, might have been forgiven for getting panicky under the circumstances. But Hugh wasted no nerve force in fear surges or in self-pity. He had a job to do. He must do it. That was the simple A B C of his reasoning. Quite coolly he set his mind to work on the problem of how it was to be done, given the conditions that confronted him. One trouble was that he did not know those conditions. How long could Nevada Jim, after the hard hours of travel that lay between him and the station, keep going at the pace required? Was he himself likely to collapse suddenly from loss of blood?

His best chance, he decided, lay in the speed of the bay. As soon as he had crossed the range—if he ever got across—he would try to run the Indian ponies off their legs. If they found they could not catch him, the Piutes would give up the chase after a few miles.

The boy looked back. The Indians had swept out of the arroyo and were following him up the gulch. A dozen of them were bunched, with three or four trailing behind. But well in front of the group and going strong was a young brave mounted on a buckskin. At every stride his horse lengthened the distance between him and his companions.

“Big Chief Heap-in-a-Hurry aims to collect me,” the boy told himself aloud. “Me, I got different notions. Get a hustle on you, Jim. This is one race where I don’t aim to throw down on myself.”

The bay answered the call gallantly. With every ounce of bone and muscle Nevada Jim flung forward at the steep trail. The horse gave all it had to give, breathing heavily as it ploughed up the divide.

McClintock had changed his plans. The young Piute on the buckskin was a factor he could not ignore. It would never do to drop down from the hills with this enemy at his heels. The fresher mount would close in on the bay and the Indian would pick Hugh off at his leisure. It would be better to risk all on a bolder, more decisive stroke.

With voice and knee and the gentle caress of hand he urged Nevada Jim to his best. “I know, old-timer, it’s breakin’ yore heart,” he pleaded. “But I got to ask it of you—just for a mile or two more, Jim—till we get to the pass; then that’ll be all, if our luck stands up.”

Hugh felt his side again and was alarmed at the sogginess of the flannel shirt. The pain of the wound was insistent, but he had no time to worry about that. What troubled him was the loss of blood. He might fall out of the saddle from sheer weakness before he reached safety.

He looked back and faintly grinned. The Indians were beginning to string out, and the gap between the buckskin and the other horses had widened. This was exactly what he wanted.

“Come on, you Buckskin,” he shouted softly down the wind. “Don’t you stick around with them broomtails.”

Nevada Jim’s lungs were pumping hard, but the clean long legs of the horse still reached with long strides for the rising ground, the muscular shoulders moved smoothly and automatically.

The head of the divide was close now, scarcely a quarter of a mile in front of the fugitives. Hugh looked back as he galloped up into the pass. The buckskin was far in advance of the other pursuers.

The pass was short and narrow. At the very summit a huge boulder outcropped from the ridge. McClintock swung his labouring horse back of this, and at the same instant leaped to the ground. Swiftly he unclinched and drew the bay close to the flat face of the great rock. For the first time since the wild race had begun he took from its scabbard the navy revolver he carried.

He had not long to wait. There came the sound of a hoof striking the hard quartz of the ridge, then the thud of galloping feet. The express rider tensed his muscles. He was like a coiled spring as he crouched back of the boulder, a menace to life as deadly as a rattlesnake about to strike.

Smoothly he slid round the edge of the rock. The Piute, taken by surprise, jerked the buckskin sideways and tried to raise his rifle. Lightning flashed from McClintock’s six-shooter—once, twice. He dived forward and caught the bridle just as the redskin tumbled from the horse. The rifle clattered to the ground.

Hugh took one look at the Indian. It was enough. He would never steal another horse from the whites. The buckskin, frightened, tried to jerk away. Its new owner spoke gently, soothingly. He coaxed the startled animal to the rock and transferred the saddle from the back of Nevada Jim.

Already he could hear approaching horses. As rapidly as possible he cinched and swung astride. Yet an instant, and he was galloping down the western slope.

As he looked back, McClintock saw an Indian’s head and the upper part of his body rising and falling with the stride of a horse. He was the first of the pursuers coming up into the pass. There was a shout and the sound of a shot. A bullet struck a spurt of sand from the ground some yards ahead of the express rider. Other shots came, a scattering volley of them. Hugh had thrust his smoking revolver back into the scabbard. He did not attempt to draw it again. The primary business of the moment was to get the buckskin into its stride and widen the distance between him and his enemies.

Soon he was out of range. Bullets were still falling, but they struck the dust behind him. The buckskin was fast and willing. Nevada Jim, like many of the company horses, had a cross of Morgan blood. This horse was a mustang, but it had unusual speed and power. Hugh wondered whether the ranchman who had owned it had been killed when his place was raided.

The pursuit continued for several miles, but the Indians fell always farther to the rear. At last they dropped out. At least Hugh saw them no more.

It was time. McClintock was faint and dizzy. He could barely stick to the saddle by clinging with both hands to the pommel. His wound, irritated by the constant motion, hurt a great deal. The fever mounted in his blood.

The amber dawn gave place to clear day. The sun climbed high in the heavens. It was noon when the buckskin picked its way through the East Walker River to the west bank.

The boy could go no farther. He slid down, tied the horse, and staggered to the water. An odd lightheaded feeling lifted him from the ground, it seemed. He floated, imponderable, on waves of air resonant with music. Then he passed out of all sensation whatever into unconsciousness.

He came to life again placidly and without energy. When he roused himself to think about it his body was singularly inert. It was almost as though it were a thing apart from himself, did not belong to him at all. He tried heavily with his hand to brush away the cobwebs from his mind. Then slowly he remembered what had taken place.

The buckskin was still standing patiently beside the willow to which he had tied it. The sun was beginning to slant from the west.

Slowly he undressed himself in part, washed the wound with clean water, and tied it up with a bandage torn from his clothing. His fever was high, and he bathed his face in the cold water fresh from the mountain snows.

He was in no condition to travel, but he knew he would have to stick to the saddle till he reached a settlement. Even if the Indians had given up the chase, he could not lie here without food, shelter, or attention to his wound. When he rose to drag himself to the horse it took all his grit to set his teeth on the pain that went through him like a knife thrust. He could not hold his body erect without agony.

Somehow he reached the buckskin and pulled himself to the saddle. He held the pony to a walk, because this jolted his side less than any other gait. His mind refused to consider the long hours he must spend on the rack of torture. Every moment was sufficient to itself. He would set landmarks for himself. That scrub cottonwood by the river must be passed. When that had been reached a bunch of greasewood ahead became his goal. So, mile by mile, in a growing delirium, he kept going till he was far up in the Pine Nut Range.

He lost count of time and of distance. He forgot where he was travelling or why. He remembered only Indians, and the fear he had resolutely repressed—which no doubt had been uppermost all the time in the boy’s subconscious mind—expressed itself in the babbling of his delirious talk.

“They’re roostin’ up there in the hills somewheres. Sure are. Want my topknot for to decorate their tepees. Hump yoreself, you Nevada Jim. I feel right spindlin’, an’ I want Mother to fix me up some sage tea. . . . They’re after me full jump. See ’em come lickety split. Aimin’ to scalp me, all on account that I didn’t stop to say ‘Howdy.’ ” His laughter jangled in the empty desert, fear for the moment forgotten. “We ce’tainly lit a-runnin’, me an’ you, Jim, when we jumped up them Piutes. Clumb for the tall timber, didn’t we, amigo viego? . . . Never did see mountains dance before. S’lute yore pardners. Grand right an’ left. Alemane . . . Here the devils come, hell for leather. Better not crawl our humps, eh, Jim? We’ll sure show ’em what for.”

It was the buckskin that saved him, that and the terror which had become an obsession. He clung to the saddle desperately, long after he no longer knew the reason for it, long after he had ceased to guide his mount. Just before nightfall the horse took him to a Mormon ranch.

A comfortable-looking matron, feeding her chickens, looked up to see the horse and its load motionless before her.

“Lands sake!” she ejaculated, amazed; then raised her voice in a shout to her husband. “Father, come here. Buckskin has come home, and——”

She broke off to run to McClintock’s aid. He had slid from the saddle to the ground.

“The poor boy,” she cried. “He’s all shot up. He’s dead, I guess. It’s them Piutes. Help me get him into the house, Father.”

With a ghost of a smile the wounded boy reassured her.