waiting and made their way on
foot across the muddy square to the building which served the new
railroad as a station and as division head-quarters. In Medicine Bend,
the town, the railroad, everything was new; and the broad, low pine
building which they entered had not yet been painted.

The public waiting-room was large, roughly framed, and lighted with
hanging kerosene lamps. Within the room a door communicated with the
agent's office, and this was divided by a wooden railing into a
freight office and a ticket and telegraph office.

It could be seen, as the two men paused at the door of the inner room,
that the first wore a military fatigue-cap, and his alert carriage as
he threw open his cape-coat indicated the bearing of an American army
officer. He was of medium height, and his features and eyes implied
that the storms and winds of the plains and mountains were familiar
friends. This was Park Stanley, charged at that time with the
construction of the first transcontinental railroad.

The agent's office, which he and his companion now looked into, was
half-filled with a crowd of frontiersmen, smoking, talking, disputing,
asking questions, and crowding against the fence that railed off the
private end of the room; while at the operator's table next to the
platform window a tall, spindling boy was trying in the confusion
behind him to get a message off the wire.

Stanley, eying the lad, noticed how thin his face was and what a bony
frame spread out under the roundabout jacket that he appeared already
to have outgrown. And he concluded this must be the new operator,
Bucks, who for some days had been expected from the East.

The receiver clicked insistently and Bucks endeavored to follow the
message, but the babel of talking made it almost impossible. Stanley
heard the boy appeal more than once for less noise, but his appeals
were unheeded. He saw symptoms of fire in the operator's eyes as the
latter glared occasionally at the crowd behind him, but for what
followed even Stanley was unprepared. Bucks threw down his pen and
coming forward with angry impatience ordered the crowd out of the
room.

He pushed the foremost of the intruders back from the rail and
followed up his commands by opening the wicket gate and driving those
ahead of him toward the door of the waiting-room. "Get out where you
belong," he repeated, urging the crowd on. Stanley turned to the man
at his side. "I will go upstairs to write my messag