Free Tisha by Robert Specht

the road gently waving good-bye.
    I’d never seen her again after that. She’d died during the first year I’d been teaching. I hadn’t found out about it until three weeks after it happened. She had died in her sleep, my mother wrote me, and she had left me a legacy.
    She sure had, but it wasn’t the legacy my mother had written me about. It was one she’d given me a long time ago when I needed it most. And for that I’d never forget her.
    “You’d best keep a tight rein on him, madam,” Mr.Strong was saying. As soon as we’d broken into the open, just as he’d predicted, the pack train speeded up and so did Blossom. I pulled back on the reins.
    We’d descended into a small level valley. About a quarter of a mile ahead were maybe twenty-five or thirty buildings strung along the same side of the creek we were on.
    “Is that all of it?”
    “Just about.”
    I’d imagined it would be something like Eagle—a town—but from this distance it looked more like the Indian village we’d gone through. It couldn’t have been built in a better place, though, set down snug on the valley floor. Low hills ringed the valley, rolling away from it into a blue haze of high mountain peaks. The creek was deep and narrow here, spilling down from the slope behind us. It got wider as it went, and right smack in the middle of the settlement a wooden bridge arched across it.
    Blossom was just aching to break into a gallop and I had all I could do to hold him to a walk. It must have rained here recently, because halfway there we started winding around craters filled with muddy water.
    “Keep away from those holes, madam,” Mr. Strong cautioned me sharply when Blossom came close to one. “Some of them are deep. Fall in and you’re liable not to come out.”
    I told Chuck to be careful too, then I asked Mr. Strong what they were.
    “Prospect holes. Some of them go down forty feet. These miners don’t bother to fill them up after they’ve dug them.”
    The ground was pock-marked with them all the way into the settlement and the ground got muddier as we went.
    “Looks like everybody’s waiting for us,” I said. There was a whole crowd of people, maybe twenty or thirty, gathered in front of a tiny cabin. It wasn’t much bigger than a hut, but with the American flag fluttering over it I figured it for the post office.
    “They don’t have much else to do but wait. It’s abig day for them. The women curl their hair, everyone spruces up. Some of them even take a bath.”
    Whether he was being sarcastic or not, I started grinning. The sweet fragrance of wood smoke wafted over and I felt proud enough to burst. I’d really done it, I thought, I was really a caution. I’d traveled through the wilderness just the way Granny Hobbs had done. Now here I was riding toward a frontier settlement as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Mr. Strong saw the look on my face and he smiled.
    “What do you think of it?”
    “It looks wonderful,” I said.
    It wasn’t anything like the Indian village at all. The street between the creek and settlement was wide, with patches of late grass here and there, no tin cans, no trash. Even from here I could see vegetable gardens in a few backyards, along with dog kennels and stacks of corded wood. As soon as we neared the edge of the place the crowd started calling and waving. Between their hollering and sled dogs doing the same thing in their own way you’d have thought it was the Fourth of July.
    The whole place was about three city blocks long, the post office right in the middle, opposite the wooden bridge. The first couple of cabins were a letdown. They were in bad shape, one just a rotted skeleton, roof gone and weeds spilling out the door, the other all boarded up. As far as I could make out, a few others down the line weren’t lived in either. The ones that were lived in, though, were solid and sturdy, with traps, harness, washtubs and all kinds of stuff hanging from posts and