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cavalry’d ridden out to stop it, but the Indians put up such a fight the cavalry’d had to retreat all the way back to the city. The Express was forced to shut down for three weeks. It’d only been operating again for about a week and a half when I come through.
    I still saw patches of snow when I would ride up into one of the ridges, and I wondered at that. But at one of the stations they told me it was a snowstorm that finally helped the army under Major Ormsby force the Paiutes back up in the mountains so the line could be opened again. That was something—a snowstorm in the middle of June! Must’ve been the same one that put all that snow in the Sierras.
    After the snowstorm, the Paiutes kept raiding further and further east, staying in the mountains. Some of the stories I heard were enough to make my hair stand on end. Nick Wilson at the Spring Valley relay station got a stone arrow-tip halfway into his skull. They got him to the Ruby Valley station, where a doctor tended him as best he could, but when I came through he was still in bed looking pretty bad. He’d been awake for about a week by then, and the only advice he had to give me was, “If you’re heading east, Hollister, keep both your eyes open and a gun handy. That’s just the direction the redskins are moving.”
    After talking with Nick, I found myself glancing around a lot more as I rode—and I made sure I got to a station every night. I wasn’t about to bed down out in the middle of the desert after hearing all those stories about the Paiutes, especially when I heard about all that Pony Bob Haslam had been through at every station between Reese River and Dry Creek. As far as I could tell, he was just about the most famous rider of all.
    I didn’t ride too hard, though, because I didn’t want to wear out my horse. I wasn’t changing mounts every ten miles, like I would when I started carrying the mail, so I didn’t want to gallop him too much. I reckon I could have used some of the Express ponies since I was an official rider.
    I hoped I could keep Gray Thunder with me once I got on the job. Little Wolf and I’d found him two years before up in the Sierras. I’d broken him and trained him myself, and he was the best horse I’d ever had. I figured he’d be about as much of a friend as I’d have out here. I wouldn’t ride him on the job, but I figured us two’d go scouting around the countryside when I was between rides.
    The further east I rode, like I said, the warmer it got, until halfway across the flatlands it was downright hot. The weather sure could change in a hurry in this country! There wasn’t no snow now, that was for sure!
    And that was some desolate country, I can tell you—especially in the month of June! It was so dry that if you didn’t have water with you, you’d die for sure trying to cross it.
    I had a map the man at the Sacramento office had given me. It showed the Express trail and all the relay stations and home stations and the places where there was supposed to be water. But by the time I was halfway across Nevada, most of the rivers and creek beds were all dried up. I reckoned they’d have water in them during the winter, but you’d never know it now.
    The ground itself was just rocks and sand, and the only plants was dried-up desert grasses and shrubs, looking like they wanted to be green but couldn’t keep from being mostly gray and brown. There weren’t no dirt to speak of, and it’s a mystery to me how even those wiry, prickly things could grow at all.
    I didn’t see how much of anything could survive out there, but I would later learn about all the hundreds of kinds of critters that made the desert their home—not all of them too friendly neither, like snakes and scorpions. It was the driest, hottest, unfriendliest patch of country I’d ever laid eyes on!
    Actually, I reckon I had laid eyes on