Tom Sheehan

7:00 PM
Tudor Yarborough III rode into Calico as the first light snapped on in the saloon sitting directly ahead of him. He was as thirsty as he’d ever been and a ponderous sense of dryness came over him. Perhaps a bath at the hotel would do him well. It had been a while since he and his horse had forded the river just below Chico Corners, downriver a dozen miles and escaping the posse for the third day. And none of the posse knew they were on a fruitless mission.

Tom Sheehan

The wounded man came from nowhere, it seemed, was headed no place, had no horse, no gun and no money when he was found at the side of the trail by the Somerville Stage due hours earlier in Kellerton, Utah. And he had been mauled by someone or something, but was breathing when the driver and shotgun rider stuffed him in the coach, across the floor.

Tom Sheehan

He was bound hand and foot and believed he was off the ground, with the falling sensation a constant threat. It was dark, he was in the air and his bonds tied him to some kind of pole with his bare feet firmly on thin limbs. He heard the trickle of water as if it was 25 or 50 feet below him, and the awed sensation of being high in the air still working through him. A hum or dull whistle of an airy sound came around his ears like the moan in a barn with at least one door open and the wind at work on all the corners.

Tom Sheehan

They were lucky that the mule lasted long enough to haul in all the firewood from the forest, before he fell dead in his tracks. And there was little chance that there’d be any presents for the children, two boys. The snow had drifted in some places as high as 8-10 feet, and the path to the barn was treacherous when any wind was blowing.

Tom Sheehan

The crude cross was driven into the ground midway between two trees still wearing remnants of rusted barbed wire. The lone man had thrown the last shovelful of dirt on top on the mound before he set up the cross that he made from two branches broken off the trees. There’d been a swing hanging from one branch for the early years, and he recalled how the remnant barbed wire whistled when the wind was strong.

Tom Sheehan

Monroe Boxler and Madeleine Solari were married in Independence, Missouri on the last day of May, 1870, Boxler separated from the army and Madeleine free of a despotic family to which she was more slave than daughter. All she ever wanted was her own garden and Boxler, on their first late night meeting when she slipped out of the house, promised her that she’d have her own garden if she married him and they’d go west, to a new opportunity for both of them.

Tom Sheehan

“I’ll tell you, son, that you can’t go any higher than McAlister’s in Colorado, and you’ll go through hell to get there, and never on your own, never without some kind of map.”

Tom Sheehan

The baby boy was forgotten on the side of the trail by his drunken father in 1851, as they headed for the gold strikes in California. He was found a few hours later by a childless couple, and it was the wife who heard the cries first, saw the baby out on the trailside grass and yelled, “Eureka.”

Tom Sheehan

Former sergeant in the 1st Michigan Cavalry, twice decorated, often honored while serving the Union cause, Hector Threadlove slipped his right leg up over the horse, slipped the left leg out of the stirrup and slid to the ground as easy as a trick rider, landing lightly on his feet.

Tom Sheehan

He tossed a noose of thin wire over the head of the jailer when the jailer leaned too close to the bars of the cell. Moments earlier he’d unwound the wire from the heel of his boot, pulled it taught at the jailer’s throat, demanded the key to the cell, got it, unlocked the door and brought the jailer into the cell. Pulling the wire tighter until the jailer was dead, he walked off into the night taking his own weapons with him.