Jo's Triumph (7 page)

“Pick it up.” Without any trouble at all he let me check his foot. My, what a relief to see a sharp stone wedged between the soft frog and the back of his shoe. I fished out my penknife and worked at the stone, wiggling it back
and forth until it popped out.

Blackie was happy enough after that and seemed sure of the way. As the day grew warmer, I almost managed to convince myself the ride was no more than a pleasant canter, the kind of easy gallop I used to take to condition young horses — except, of course, my backside ached from my fall. Every so often a shudder took hold of me as I thought of my horse getting shot out from underneath my saddle.

I watched for the fork in the trail just past the entrance to the box canyon Smokey McPhail had warned me about, but Blackie knew before I did to keep heading east.

We trotted on and on, cantering when the ground was level enough to allow it, walking when the way was steep or particularly rough. And each step of the way I agonized about how I was going to get out of my job.

Nearly three-and-a-half hours after leaving Ruby Valley, feeling like I'd been riding for eighty-two years, I cantered up to the house at Butte Station.

Three men waited with a fresh horse. “Off you get. We've got Bill Winslow here ready to go. My name's Mr. Thomas.”

Never in my life had I felt so happy to be sliding off the back of a horse.

“Steady now.” I wasn't sure if the stationmaster was speaking to me or to Blackie, for my knees were so weak I could hardly stay upright.

“Fifty-nine seconds!” Mr. Thomas smacked the cantina shut and the sorrel mustang jumped forward, his rider holding onto his hat with one hand, the reins with the other.

“Y'er new,” said a wiry little man with squinty eyes.

“Jo,” I said, coughing to make my voice sound rougher.

“Hmph. They'll be sending us suckling babes before long.”

“Arnie, I'll thank you to hold your tongue,” Mr. Thomas said.

I flushed, glad of the coat of mud I wore on my face. Arnie couldn't have been much more than eighteen or nineteen himself.

“Joe, come in and have yourself some coffee,” Mr. Thomas continued, extending his hand. “I suppose you might like some bacon and bread?”

I stuck my hand out to meet his, squeezing as tight as I could so he'd have no cause to think I was but a weakling girl.

“Yes, sir.” At the thought of bacon, my mouth watered.

Arnie led Blackie away and I followed Mr. Thomas into the stationhouse. In-side, a young man with a mess of wild black hair hanging into his eyes sat on a three-legged stool by the fire.

“James — this is Joe. Joe — James.”

James nodded in our direction. His tin mug rested on a table of rough planks. The cup of coffee Mr. Thomas poured from a battered tin coffeepot was near enough the best I'd ever tasted in my whole life.

“Have a good ride?” Mr. Thomas asked.

I shrugged and said, “Only got shot at once.”

The two men stared at me. Appar ently, being fired at didn't happen
every day. That, I told myself, was a good thing to know.

“You hurt?” Mr. Thomas asked.

I shook my head.

“Lousy aim,” wild-haired James said, slouching over his mug again.

“They got my horse,” I said. “A gash on his flank is all. He'll be fine.”

“Good to hear,” Mr. Thomas said. “You can rest up here for a couple of days. We got patrols heading back to-ward Ruby Valley. They'll take care of any Indians fixing to ambush — ”

“No sir,” I interrupted. “Weren't no Indians. Was settlers with wagons that shot at me.”

“Danged eastern folk shoot at any-thing that moves,” James said, draining the rest of his coffee. “Next time anybody gives you trouble, put a bullet right here.”

He jabbed his thumb into the spot right between his eyes. The way his crazy blue eyes glittered made me real nervous.

I looked away, over toward the bunks at the back. The dirt floor, I
noticed, was soaking wet.

“Wet in here,” I said.

Mr. Thomas grunted. “That there's the edge of the stream.”

At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but the water moved slowly. It was seeping in under the cabin wall. The only area of the dirt floor that was well and truly dry was the narrow strip in front of the great stone hearth where we sat at the table.

With my belly full of bacon, biscuits, and beans, my eyelids drooped and Mr. Thomas pointed at an empty bunk. “Have a sleep,” he said. There was no argument from me. I stepped over the muddy puddle and, though it was still early in the afternoon, crawled into an empty bunk.

But sleep didn't come easily. As I lay on the rough straw mattress, my arms and legs twitched and jerked as though I were still keeping my balance on a horse. My thoughts whirled and tumbled, each more unsettling than the next. Bear's blood-spattered leg, my fall on the trail, a thousand and
one ways to get lost, shot, hurt, or killed on the trail made the twenty-five dollars a week seem like an insult.

Darn Will and Jackson anyway! I wondered where they were. Hauling nuggets of gold into the bank? Or lying dead at the bottom of some canyon?

Twenty-five dollars a week? It was still a lot of money, more than I could make doing laundry. How many weeks would I have to survive to earn what I needed? Ten more? Twelve?

I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the men's voices by remember ing how Ma used to sing to me as I fell asleep, her gentle fingers lifting my hair from my forehead and letting it fall again. Still, my thoughts ran back and forth in my head as I lay there: tough it out and save enough to get set up in California or give up, confess I was a no-good liar, and go back to the orphanage in Carson City?

I rolled over to face the rough log wall and pulled my hat forward over my eyes. Well out of view, my face
grew hot and soon my cheeks were wet with tears.

Eventually I dozed, but even then there was no rest. In my dreams, I galloped uphill and down, my horse scrambling over rocky trails and thundering across the wide, flat valley on the way into the next rest station. I thought I saw Ma and Pa standing beside Sarah on a hill. I whipped my horse to go faster, but then two wagons, driven by my brothers, picked up Sarah and my parents and carried them away. No matter how fast I went I couldn't catch them.

I slept fitfully until late afternoon when I sat bolt upright, my heart scrambling to climb right out of my chest.

Crack-crack-crack

Gunfire!

I leapt out of bed and dropped to the floor, not caring that I was sprawled right in the mud.

My Lord, what was I gonna do now? Those crazy settlers had chased me here and right now as I hid inside, they were murdering Mr. Thomas, Arnie, James, and the other men!

Bang!

I jumped near out of my skin.

Bang! Bang!

Outside, men were shouting, but they didn't seem real worried. I
recognized Arnie's voice.

“Your grandmother could shoot better than that!”

Several men laughed and a dog barked.

“Git out of my way, you dumb mongrel,” James snarled.

“Come here boy,” I heard Mr. Thomas call.

Bang! Bang!

More laughter followed the gun-shots, and I slowly let out my breath. Shooting practice.

I sat at the table, my palms pressed flat against the rough grain of the planks until my hands stopped shaking. I had a few stern words to say to myself.

The fact of the matter was I was stuck. I thought of James's wild blue eyes and the red of his lips like a slash across his black, unkempt beard. The likes of him would not take kindly to finding out I was a girl.

Bang!

“Good shot, Thomas!”

What was the worst that could happen to me? I swallowed hard. If I ran
into more trouble I might not live to see my thirteenth birthday. I closed my eyes and imagined I could feel Ma's hand gently stroking my hair. At least we would be together again — me, Ma and Pa, and the baby, Grace — if it came to that.

My hand moved to the pistol at my side. I might not want to be here, but there was no need to be foolhardy about things. If I was going to do this job right, I had to be ready to shoot and shoot well. Pushing open the stationhouse door, I stepped outside, blinking in the late afternoon sun.

“Well, lookee here,” James said. It was all I could do not to turn tail and run.

Arnie, on one knee with his rifle to his shoulder, sighted down the bar rel and took aim at a scarred stump about forty paces away.

James's stare never left my face. Just as Arnie pulled the trigger, James gave him a sharp poke in the side with the tip of his boot. The gun jumped back and Arnie leaped to his feet. “Who the — ”

“Why, I bet even this young boy here could do better,” James said, because of course the bullet had missed the mark by a mile. “Right, Joe?”

I took a deep breath. The last thing I wanted was to be the brunt of James's jokes.

“Go on, Joe. Give it a try,” Mr. Thomas said kindly.

The stump hunkered there like a sullen dog, waiting for me to shoot. If I could just ignore James and the others, I might be all right. Pa had taught me to shoot. It would come back to me.

My pistol slid easily from its holster and I lifted it, feeling its weight in my hand. My arm straight, I leveled my hand and took aim. The tip of the pistol twitched ever so slightly from side to side and even as I pulled the trigger I knew I had missed the target.

“Shoots like a girl!” James crowed and I whirled around. “Just like you, Arnie!”

He was merely letting his cruel tongue wag, but I only just stopped myself
from saying something stupid.

“Who's next?” Mr. Thomas asked. James swaggered forward. He fired off two quick shots, both of which hit the stump dead center.

“That's how it's done, boys,” he said. “You keep on practicing and you might get the hang of it.”

There was much groaning and cussing after he said that, and we kept shooting at the stump out back of the corral until it grew too dark to see. James didn't bother me any more than he bothered everyone else. Hard though it was, I said nothing in answer to his taunts and jeers. I just kept shooting and gave silent thanks to Pa for teaching me how to handle guns.

Though I wasn't exactly excited to go, when the time came two days after that, I headed out again, this time westbound. After that, I had quite a few good runs working the section of the mail route between Ruby and Butte Stations and on as far as Egan Canyon and Schell Creek. The farthest west I rode was to Robert's Creek, but only
once when the westbound rider that was supposed to ride west from Ruby Valley fell ill from some bad meat.

I was starting to know the trail well. Each week for several weeks I added another twenty-five dollars to my California fund. But with the constant threat of ambush or being shot by confused settlers, the job didn't get any easier.

In fact, in the hottest part of the summer, things got a whole lot worse.

If I could have stopped my mind from wandering back to earlier times, I might have avoided the trouble I made for myself.

All too often I found myself thinking of Pa, the way he had with the stock, how his eyes lit up when Will first talked about California. Those memories were good, but others were sadder.

Ma and Baby Grace had died when I was but six. I didn't remember so much of Ma, but those things I could recall seemed as clear as if they'd
happened only a few weeks before. “Joselyn,” she'd say, pouring a large kettle of steaming water into a washtub, “Always remember: Cleanliness is next to Godliness.”

When a terrible incident happened in the river not far from Jacob's Well, I was reminded of those baths that Ma insisted we take each week.

Cookie Townsend got it into his head he was in need of a bath. He stripped off his clothes and waded into the river. Trouble was Cookie Townsend plumb forgot he couldn't swim! Story goes he slipped when he bent over to wet his head. He didn't wash up onto shore until he'd drifted two miles downstream.