end not without a moral.

CHAPTER IV

The Land of Many Leagues

It was a very "typical" stagecoach. That is, it was typical of the style
Broadway would have expected in the production of a _Girl of the Golden
West_ or _The Great Divide_. Very comfortably you may still see them in
moving picture land--a region where the old West lives far woolier and
wilder than it ever dared to be in actual life.

However, this stage was neither make-believe nor comfortable. It was
very real and very comfortless. The time was six years ago and the place
the one hundred miles of worse than indifferent road between Shaniko and
Bend, in Central Oregon.

"Do you chew?" asked the driver.

I who sat next to him, plead innocence of the habit.

"Have a drink?" said he later, producing a flask. And again I asked to
be excused.

"Don't smoke, neither, I suppose?" The driver regarded me with
suspicion. "Hell," said he, "th' country's goin' to the dogs. These here
civilizin' inflooences is playing hob with everythin'. Las' three trips
my passengers haven't been fit company for man or beast--they neither
drank nor chawed. Not that I mean to be insultin'"--I assured him he was
not--"but times certainly have changed. The next thing along 'll come a
railroad and then all this goes to the scrap heap."

His gesture, with the last word, included the battered stage, the
dejected horses, and the immediate surroundings of Shaniko Flats. For
the life of me I could see no cause for regret even supposing his
prophecy came true to the letter! Twenty hours later, when the
springless seat, influenced by the attraction of gravitation in
conjunction with the passage of many chuck holes, had permanently warped
my spinal column, I would have been even more ready to endorse the
threatened cataclysm.

[Illustration: Central Oregon travel in the old days]

[Illustration: A Central Oregon freighter. "You will find them
everywhere in the railless land, the freighters and their teams"]

Since that day when the old driver foresaw the yellow perils of
"civilizin' inflooences" they have indeed invaded the land for which,
until a couple of years ago, his four horses and his rattletrap stage
formed the one connecting link with the "outside." The "iron horse" has
swept his old nags into oblivion, and two great railroads carry the
passengers and packages which he and his brothers of the old Shaniko
line transported in the past.

The change has come in five