Dragons Teeth Crichton 2017 (WWT)

Deadwood for the winter, but said that he would ride with Wyatt and the stage as far as Custer City,
fifty miles to the south.
Tiny Tim leaned over the box. “You gents gonna palaver all day, or are you ready to crack
leather?”
“We are,” Earp said.
“Then climb aboard this item. Can’t go nowhere standing in the street, can you?”
Johnson climbed onto the stage with Miss Emily, and for the tenth time that morning attended to his
crates, cinching them down tightly. Morgan Earp climbed onto the top of the stage, and Wyatt rode
shotgun.
A Chinese boy in cowboy boots came running toward the stagecoach. It was Kang, with a worried
look on his face.
Johnson fished in his pocket and found a five-dollar gold piece.
“Kang!”
He leaned out the open door and flipped the glittering coin high into the air. Kang caught it on the
run with remarkable grace. Johnson nodded at him, knowing he would never see the boy again.
Tim snapped his whips, the horses snorted, and they galloped out of Deadwood in the swirling
snow.
It was a three-day journey to Fort Laramie: one day to Custer City, in the center of the Black Hills; a
second day through the treacherous Red Canyon to the Red Canyon stagecoach station at the southern
edge of the Black Hills; and the third day across the Wyoming plains to the newly built iron bridge
that crossed the Platte River at Laramie.
Earp assured him the trip would get safer as they went, and if they reached Laramie, they would be
entirely safe; from then on, the road from Laramie to Cheyenne was patrolled by cavalry.
If they reached Laramie.
“Three obstacles stood between us and our destination,” Johnson later wrote in his journal:
The first was Black Dick and his gang of ruffians. We could expect to meet them during the first day.
Second was Persimmons Bill and his renegade Indians. We could expect to meet them in Red Canyon on
the second day. And the third obstacle was the most dangerous of all—and wholly unanticipated by me.
Johnson had steeled himself for a dangerous journey, but he was unprepared for its sheer physical
hazards.
The Black Hills roads were bad, necessitating slow travel. Drop-offs were precipitous, and the
fact that the coach swayed ominously near the crumbling edge under its load of bones did not reassure
them. Several creeks—the Bear Butte, Elk, and Boxelder—were transformed from the recent snows
into swollen, raging rivers. The fact that the coach was so heavily laden made the crossings
especially dangerous.
As Tiny explained it, “This item gets stuck in the quicksand, middle of the river, we don’t go
anywheres less we ride back for an extra team, pull this item out, and that’s a fact.”
And along with the difficulties, they lived under the continuous threat of attack at any moment. The
tension was nerve-racking, for the smallest impediment could be dangerous.