and strength
lent ardor to the ascent, and Bucks, soon forgetting everything below,
was scaling the granite pile that towered above him. For thirty
minutes, without a halt, he continued to climb, and reaching after a
while what seemed the highest ledge of the rocky spur, he walked out
upon it to the very edge and was rewarded for his labor with a
magnificent panorama of the mountain divide.

In the west the sky was still golden and, though clouds appeared to be
banking heavily in the north, the view of the distant peaks was
unobstructed. From where he sat he could almost have thrown a stone
into one tiny mountain stream that cut a silver path toward the
setting sun, and another, a hundred yards away, that flowed gently
toward the rising sun. And he knew--for Bill Dancing had told
him--that the one rill emptied at last into the Pacific Ocean, and the
other into the Atlantic Ocean. Alongside these tiny streams he could
plainly trace the overland trail of the emigrant wagons, and, cutting
in straighter lines, but following the same general direction, lay the
right-of-way of the new transcontinental railroad.

Beyond, in every direction, stretched great plateaus, and above these
rugged mountain chains, lying in what seemed the eternal solitude of
the vast desert. He was alone with the sunset, and stood for some
moments silenced by the scene before him. When a sound did at length
reach his ear as he sat spellbound, it brought him back to himself
with the suddenness of a shock.

At first he heard only distant echoes of a short, muffled blow,
irregularly repeated and seeming familiar to the ear. As he speculated
upon what the sound might be, it grew gradually plainer and came
seemingly nearer. He bent his eyes down the valley to the west and
scanned the wagon-trail and the railroad track as far as he could in
the dusk, but could see nothing. Then the muffle of the sound was at
once lifted. It came from the other direction, and, turning his eyes,
he saw emerging from a small canyon that hid the trail to the east, a
covered emigrant wagon, drawn by a large team of horses and driven by
a man sitting in front of the hood, making its way slowly up the road
toward the station.

The heavy play of the wheel-hubs on the axles echoed now very plainly
upon his ears, and he sat watching the outfit and wondering whether
the travellers would camp for the night near him and give him what he
craved most of all, a little human society. T