railroad men was intimate and gracious, putting them at once
at their ease. His smooth-shaven face, bronzed with service, and his
brown eyes, were alive every moment. Whatever the enterprise, Stanley
could call forth the loyalty and the best in those under him, and in
Dancing and Scott he had two men that worked well together and had in
their chief the unquestioning faith that insures devotion.

To these two more experienced men was now to be added a third, Bucks.
The train started almost at once, and Oliver, the colonel's cook,
prepared supper in his box-like kitchen and chopped his potatoes, for
frying, in muffled ragtime, as the puffing engine slowly drew the
train up the long gorge into the mountains. Bucks sat down at table
with the engineers and Stanley asked him many questions. He wanted to
know where Bucks had gone to school, why he had quitted at fifteen,
and what had brought him away out on the Desert to begin railroading.

When it appeared that Stanley as well as he himself was from
Pittsburgh, and even that Bucks had been named after the distinguished
officer--John Stanley Bucks--Bucks was happier than at any time since
he had left home.

The talk went on till very late. Stanley and General Park, who also
had been a regular-army man, told stories of the Civil War, just then
ended, and the giant lineman, Dancing, entertained the company with
stories of adventure incurred in the mountains and on the plains in
building the first transcontinental telegraph line.

Bucks sat for hours in silence while the three men talked; but he had
good ears and was a close listener. All the adventure books of his
boyhood reading had been bound up with this very country and with
these rugged mountains through which they were riding. The tales of
the people all about him during his youth had been of the far and
mysterious West--of the overland trail and the gold seekers, of Pike's
Peak and California, of buffaloes and trappers and Indians, and of the
Mormons and the Great Salt Lake. These had been his day-dreams, and at
last he was breathing the very air of them and listening to men who
had actually lived them.

The sleeping-bunks in the car could hardly be called berths, but they
served to lessen the fatigues of the night, and when Bucks woke in the
morning he saw from his window a vast stretch of rough, desert country
bordered by distant mountain peaks, some black, some brown, some
snow-capped in the morning sun. The train