Three or four horsemen are waiting while a dozen pencils are rattling over paper. The burden of each despatch is the assassination. “Modoc treachery! Gen. Canby and Dr. Thomas killed; Meacham mortally wounded; Dyer and Riddle escape.” How much these hasty lines will tell, and how many hearts will feel a dark shadow fall over them when the
electric tongue of fire repeats this message to the world!
“Fifty dollars extra, if you get my despatch into the telegraph office ahead of the others,” says Bill Dad, as he hands the paper to his courier. Away goes the courier up the steep and rugged bluff.
“One hundred dollars if you get to the office in Y-re-ka, first,” says another reporter, in a whisper, to his courier, who dashes off close behind the first.
Another rider is mounted and waiting for the word to start. Gen. Gilliam’s adjutant hands this man a sealed envelope. It contains an official telegram for the authorities.
“Lose no time! Off with you!” says Adjutant Rockwell. And now three riders are urging their horses up the hill. Y-re-ka is eighty-three miles distant. A long race is before them. The evening is dark and gloomy, but the clouds pass away, and the moon shines on three men galloping together, mile after mile. Sunrise finds two of them still together. One of them, as they near a ranch, swings his hat and shouts. A man in shirt-sleeves runs to a stable and brings a fresh horse to the man who signalled him. The rider dismounts, and, while changing the saddle from his horse to the fresh one, tells the awful tidings. The other rider urges his horse on, on, for he, too, has a fresh horse but a few miles ahead. On he goes, and looking behind him sees his rival coming. He comes up and passes, saying, “Good-by, George!”
Twenty minutes more and both are mounted on fresh horses, one leading, but now in sight of each other. One is casting an eye backwards over his shoulder; the other is pressing the sides of his horse.
The gap closes up. Y-re-ka is now in sight, and they are galloping side by side. Both are sitting erect, and the music of jingling spurs is in harmony with the stride of the horses. One mile more, and somebody wins. It all depends on “bottom.” The spurs cease to jingle. They are muffled in the bleeding sides of the panting horses.
What a race! One is an iron-gray, the other a Pinto horse. The rider of the gray, reaching back with his spurs, rakes his horse from the flank forward, leaving a vermilion trail where the spurs have passed. With extended head and neck, and lengthened stride, he goes ahead a few yards. With another application of spurs, the switch of the horse’s tail touches his rider’s back.
“Ah, ha! I’ve got you now!” shouts the rider of the Pinto, as he comes up like the moving of a shadow, and leaves the gray and his rider behind. One hour more, and the lightnings of the heavens are repeating the messages, and sending them over mountains and plains, to almost the farthest ends of the earth.