Pacific. That very night, in fact,
whilst the streets of Baltimore were still resounding with the yells of
contending _Belfasters_ and _Barbicanites_, a committee of four, Morgan,
Hunter, Murphy, and Elphinstone, were speeding over the Alleghanies in a
special train, placed at their disposal by the _Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad Company_, and fast enough to land them in Chicago pretty early
on the following evening.

Here a fresh locomotive and a Pullman car taking charge of them, they
were whirled off to Omaha, reaching that busy locality at about supper
time on the evening of December 16th. The Pacific Train, as it was
called though at that time running no further west than Julesburg,
instead of waiting for the regular hour of starting, fired up that very
night, and was soon pulling the famous Baltimore Club men up the slopes
of the Nebraska at the rate of forty miles an hour. They were awakened
before light next morning by the guard, who told them that Julesburg,
which they were just entering, was the last point so far reached by the
rails. But their regret at this circumstance was most unexpectedly and
joyfully interrupted by finding their hands warmly clasped and their
names cheerily cried out by their old and beloved friend, J.T. Marston,
the illustrious Secretary of the Baltimore Gun Club.

At the close of the first volume of our entertaining and veracious
history, we left this most devoted friend and admirer of Barbican
established firmly at his post on the summit of Long's Peak, beside the
Great Telescope, watching the skies, night and day, for some traces of
his departed friends. There, as the gracious Reader will also remember,
he had come a little too late to catch that sight of the Projectile
which Belfast had at first reported so confidently, but of which the
Professor by degrees had begun to entertain the most serious doubts.

In these doubts, however, Marston, strange to say, would not permit
himself for one moment to share. Belfast might shake his head as much as
he pleased; he, Marston, was no fickle reed to be shaken by every wind;
he firmly believed the Projectile to be there before him, actually in
sight, if he could only see it. All the long night of the 13th, and even
for several hours of the 14th, he never quitted the telescope for a
single instant. The midnight sky was in magnificent order; not a speck
dimmed its azure of an intensely dark tint. The stars blazed out like
fires; the Moon refused