E RIPPED UP and down them hills just like the first time, running all day through chopped-down forests and lonely shantytowns and cricks lined with raggedy prospectors, till, just as the bloody-red sunball was sinking out a-front of us, we come to the end of the Hills and struck out on a broad grassy plain with a swelled-up river churning through it. We passed wagon trains and log cabins and tepees and herds of cattle and horses. “Look! It’s the Pony Express!” somebody shouted out. “No, it ain’t! That beardy coot ain’t no boy!”
Tongo favored running towards the setting sun to see if he could beat it to the horizon. Evenings did stretch out this time a year and seemed to give him a chance, but the sun was only teasing. It got there first like always and the night growed dark. The river valley deepened under ridges and bluffs all round, and up ahead, I could see big fires a-blazing up and a war party of dancing braves blowing war whistles and yipping like coyotes like they was getting ready for a friendly massacre, nor else they was having a holiday. It was exactly where I didn’t want to go, and I leaned back and tugged most desperately on the buckskin thong, but Tongo he charged right into the middle of them and they all fell back like they was seeing a ghost. They WAS seeing a ghost! It was Eeteh’s brothers and cousins, the ones who’d thronged Tongo into the pit to die, and here he was, come back to ha’nt them! They dropped their weapons and let loose a great warbling. They was wild-eyed and bloodied up and showing off scalps that they held up for us to see.
The tribe wailed out for us to stay and I let go one hand and give them a wave, but Tongo was already on a tear again, racing back by night the way he come by day, across the plain under the moon and stars and back up into the Hills again, just as the dawn beyond begun to turn them into silly-wets. Stead of going to where Eeteh was, though, I seen he was striking straight for the mining camp in the Gulch. I tried to guide him away from there with my knees and by jerking on the thong, but his mind was clean made up. He was the willfullest cretur I ever knowed. I was being delivered up to Tom and his pals, and there warn’t nothing I could do to stop him.
It was early morning when we rode into the mining camp. We hain’t stopped running since yesterday. The muddy street was packed with people, but Tongo galloped right through them, knocking down food stalls and tool racks and beer tents and sending citizens skaddling for their lives. Old cross-eyed Deadwood COULDN’T run nor even WALK, and when I seen him bumbling along cripple-crablike in his union suit and talking to himself, I was afeard for him. But Tongo jumped right OVER him whilst he had his nose down, consulting his fob watch. The picture-taker warn’t so lucky. He was trying to set up his camera, and Tongo, hammering straight ahead, sent him on a flying belly-flop into the mud, his camera tromped by the horse’s hoofs.
Tongo left the ground all of a sudden and up we rose onto the raised wooden sidewalk, the loafers setting in chairs up there leaping off into the mud not to get killed or worse. Tongo pranced down the boardwalk, stepping high as if to bang it louder, and neighed like he was blowing a trumpet. Tom busted out a the claims office as we passed it, a fat seegar poking out under his moustaches, Caleb and Bear right behind him. He says something to them and they all three went a-running.
Then off we jumped at t’other end, me most desperately hugging Tongo’s neck, my heels flying. Tongo went galloping through the screaming and yowling crowd again, heading down crickside. Shots was ringing out behind us. I hadn’t no cause to s’pose this was going to end well. When we passed Tom’s big tent, I did wish we could stop to pick up a couple a bottles a whisky and a hambone off one a the wild pigs a-roasting on the spit, but Tongo he was in a mighty hurry. We splashed through the crick, knocking over plasser miners and sluce boxes, and kept right on going.