The Pony Express

Chapter One

The dust moved across the barren land as the sun burned its rays down on the two passengers in the wagon. The sounds of the two horses moving their legs back and forth, with the sound of their hooves smacking the ground, making the dust appear, was all that was heard. The land was nothing but dried up grass that turned brown from the suns heat. No creature of God bear to walk the hot sands in the middle of the day, when the heat was unbearable even for the warm blooded folk who lived in such climates. It took a special kind of person to endure this type of climate, hot days that could melt your skin, and cold nights that chilled you straight to the bone. People lived off this land for only a few short years, white folk had taken it from their rightful owners, the Pawnee tribe. They knew this land better than anyone and yet, the white folk came, claiming it was theirs and they knew what was best for the land whom could not speak for who it wanted to be owned by.

Soft jingles of the reins that Doctor William McArty held in his old beat up hands, was also heard by the young lady next to him. Ann Grace Callan sat next to the doctor, a hat on her head that covered the suns deathly rays from her soft delicate skin, and kept its glare from her eyes.

The two had been travelling for a few hours now, from the little town in Iowa where they stopped to ask for directions to the Nebraska territory. The pair were headed to the middle of the the great western front. New lands with new people waited for them just over the hills where they travelled. Hopeful for their new home, Doctor McArty, wished only the best from Sweetwater. He had bought a shop in the middle of town where he would sell some medicine and help the folk of Sweetwater with any health troubles they had. It was his job, his living. Coming with him was the young bright eyed Ann Grace Callan, whose association with Doctor McArty was one with her mother, Ada Callan.

Ada Callan was a nurse in Davenport, where she would tend to those who needed it most. Grace remembered her mother well as her soft hands would help aid patients of all kinds. Graces memories of her mother were ones of love and belonging, the young girl always felt at peace when around her mother. She was like an angel sent from God to help the sick.

Doctor McArty had gotten ill from his travels around the territories, where he ended up in New York, the city that held many doctors but all too busy to help their fellow member. Ada Callan was the only other person left, and she being the only woman in the area who helped tend to anyone who asked, for a fee much less than the established aging white man, she cared for everyone and anyone who walked through her doors. Doctor McArty himself went to Ada, seeking help and aid for his sickness, he later learned it was just a bad cold, a cold that really took him down. Ada prescribed rest and lots of tea for then thirty year old man. Having just arrived, Ada offered her home for him to rest, which is where the friendly Doctor met a very young Grace, who was still sucking her thumb at the time.

Ada's bedside manner and caring attitude to a stranger drew the Doctor closer to the young nurse who had been widowed. In Ada's home, Doctor McArty and the mother of MaryAnne opened up their own office for the sick. The two worked like clockwork, moving around each other like they were meant to be around each other. McArty would go out to see his patients, tending to their minor wounds and sicknesses from a long hard travel from the west or over seas. The pair became very well known in the area of Davenport, the Doctor and his nurse.

Ann Grace, only a babe when first meeting Doctor McArty, took a liking to the older gentleman as her mother worked with him. He became a father figure for the fatherless girl, something she was very blessed to have. Grace would walk around the shop where her mother would sell medicine and aliments to those who would come off the busy street that held fancy dressed men and women, with carriages and horses, they would come in asking for help for an illness or problem they had. Ada, always with a smile on her face, would help the stranger, something that Grace carried into her teen years.