RIDING A BUCKSKIN PONY from Virginia City to Carson City was not as I had imagined it.

I had pictured us trotting down a canyon road between yellow-leafed cottonwood trees with the winter sun warm on our backs & the tangy smell of wood smoke & the rhythmic thump of the quartz stamp mills around us & the drumming of the pony’s hooves & his life spirit making my life spirit happy.

Instead I found myself on a busy road full of mule trains, quartz wagons and stagecoaches. Business was booming in Virginia and that road was busier than a beehive with a bear outside. The air was full of blacksnaking & whip cracks, braying & cursing. Wagons were taking wood & whiskey up the mountain, and they were taking quartz & silver ore down. The general populace was going both ways, some on horseback and some footing it. There was even a sprinkling of dogs and goats.

Then there were the toll houses.

Every time I passed an overloaded stagecoach or full milk wagon and found a level place to stretch my pony’s legs, I would round a bend in the canyon road to find a line of pedestrians, pack animals and wagons all waiting to pay the toll keeper.

With all the coins those toll keepers were taking, I reckoned they were richer than some miners. And miners get paid a whole $4 a day.

Cheeya and I made our way through Gold Hill & Silver City & Devil’s Gate, and took the road to Carson. The road soon left the canyons behind and headed across mostly flat & scrubby terrain.

At the Half Way House between Virginia and Carson there were two toll roads to Carson, both charging 10¢ for a rider and horse. I paid my short bit for the left-hand fork, but the road was too clogged so I decided to be bold and set out across the sagebrush-dotted desert, like in my head-picture. I heard a few people yelling, “Hey! Come back! You cannot do that.”

I did not know why they were yelling at me, as I had paid my short bit.

I gave my pony a little kick with both heels and we were off. I put my head down and urged him on across that sagebrushy wasteland. We fairly flew and I gave a Lakota war whoop.

The sky was high and the ground was flat. We sped along like a bullet from a double-charged revolver.

As soon as we were out of sight of the roads, I reined him in to a walk.

At last. I could breathe! I inhaled the magnolia-polecat perfume of the sagebrush and let the sun warm my plug hat for a while. Presently I began to talk to the pony in Lakota, my mother tongue. I asked him which name he preferred to be known by: Butternut? Belongs to Himself? Freedom? Tawamiciya? Cheeya?

He snorted when I said “Cheeya” and turned his ears back towards me.

So Cheeya it was.

As we trotted beneath a big blue bowl of sky, I told him about my life so far. I told him how my real pa was a Railroad Detective who left my young Lakota ma with nothing but a button from his jacket, and me. I told Cheeya how my original ma and I had survived by begging & stealing & making medicine for the first nine years of my life. How in the spring of 1860 she had taken up with a man called Tommy Three and they had bought a covered wagon and headed west with a Chinaman named Hang Sung as our cook. I told Cheeya how our wagon got separated from the other wagons and how the Shoshone attacked our wagon & took our horses & killed everybody but me.

Cheeya made a snuffling sound and turned one ear towards me. I guessed he was asking me why the Shoshone did not kill me, too.

“I do not know why they let me live,” I said in Lakota. “That part is a Blank in my memory.”

I told him how another wagon train had passed by a few days later and found me all alone in a kind of trance. A kindly preacher and his English wife had adopted me. Pa Emmet and Ma Evangeline taught me to read & write, and also the Word of God. We lived near Salt Lake City for a time, until Pa Emmet started evangelizing the Mormons and they asked him to leave the region. After a day of prayer and fasting he felt the Lord was telling him to found a city called Temperance in the desert near Virginia City. So we set out and arrived in Nevada Territory last May. Pa started to build his town between Dayton and Como, but he got himself murdered before the church steeple was even finished.

I told Cheeya how it was partly my fault my foster parents had been murdered, because I had something their killers wanted. I had to flee to Virginia City, which Pa Emmet called Satan’s Playground, and there I avenged the murder of my foster parents.

I had been speaking Lakota all this time but I went back to English for the next part.

“One day,” I said to Cheeya, “I intend to head east to Chicago, to join the Pinkerton Detective Agency. My uncle Allan Pinkerton founded it and I hope to find my father there, also. But first I want to learn to be a good Detective. And to do that I need to learn about people. They confound me.”

Cheeya gave a little snort of sympathy and turned his head a little, as if to say, “Me, too.”

I said, “There is a Mississippi gambler, name of Poker Face Jace. He has been showing me how to understand people. What he is teaching me is worth all the gold and silver in the Comstock. He saved my life a couple of times, too. That is why we are going to Carson,” I added. “He might be in danger and I do not want to lose him.”

Cheeya snuffled sympathetically, even though he had never met Poker Face Jace.

I patted Cheeya on the non-mane side of his neck. I liked that Buckskin pony. I was happy riding him.

After a while I noticed the wasteland getting marshy, with little reeds and sheets of standing water reflecting the blue sky above. The air smelled more brackish than sagebrushy. A line of cottonwood trees showed we were close to water, maybe a bend of the Carson River.

I was carefully riding around the wet bits, for I did not know how deep the water was, when Cheeya came to a jolting halt that nearly tossed me over his neck. As I pulled myself upright, I felt a strange sensation.

My pony’s forelegs were sinking down.

Quicksand! I had ridden Cheeya right into quicksand!

I tried to rein him back but it was too late. I felt his muscles tighten and relax a few times. His nostrils flared. He twisted his head on his neck so I could see the whites of his rolling eyes. His forelegs were now sunk up to the knees.

Thinking quickly, I dived off his back and landed on my stomach. Quicksand will not suck you under as it does in them dime novels. But it can hold a man or an animal fast, and if nobody comes to help, you can starve.

I wormed forward and uncinched his saddle and pulled it off so he would not be weighed down. I managed to toss it behind me, onto solid ground. I tossed the saddle wallets, too. When I turned back, I saw Cheeya’s forelegs were now buried almost up to his chest. His hindquarters were on dry land so that he was tipped forward, as if kneeling in prayer. As I spoke calming words in Lakota, I could feel the water seeping into my woolen coat and soaking my best trowsers.

I needed something to put under him so he would not sink down farther. And I needed something like planks to help him walk back up out of the gluey sand.

But there was nothing out there but scrubby sagebrush and those big bulrush-type reeds they call “tule.” I rolled over like a rolling pin a few times to reach some tule reeds poking out of a rivulet & I cut them with my flint knife & hugged them to my chest & then rolled back to Cheeya. Then I stuck those reeds under his chest just behind his forelegs. That would hold him for a while. All the time speaking soothing words in Lakota, I used my flint knife to cut some sagebrush to pack around him so I could lie on it and stay close. I had stopped his downward progress but he was not happy. He was trembling all over.

I was trembling, too.

My vision was blurry and my breath was coming in rasps.

“Hold on, Cheeya!” I cried. “Do not despair.”

But I was in despair. There was nothing more I could do. Cheeya, the beautiful Buckskin mustang, was going to die. And it was my fault.