was little more than a big
corral, with a double row of low, wooden sheds for the storing of
clothing, camp and garrison equipage. There was a blacksmith and wagon
repair shop, and a brick office building. Some cottage quarters for the
officer in charge and his clerks, corral master, etc., stood close at
hand, while most of the employees lived in town outside the gates. A
single-track spur connected the depot with the main line of the Union
Pacific only five hundred yards away, and the command at Fort Emory, on
the bluff above the rapid stream, furnished, much to its disgust, the
necessary guard. A much bigger "plant" was in contemplation near a
larger post and town on the east side of the great divide, and neither
Fort Emory nor its charge--the quartermaster's depot--was considered
worth keeping in repair, except such as could be accomplished "by the
labor of troops," which was why, when he wasn't fighting Indians, the
frontier soldier of that day was mainly occupied in doing the odd jobs
of a day laborer, without the recompense of one, or his privilege of
quitting if he didn't like the job. That he should know little of drill
and less of parade was, therefore, not to be wondered at.

But what he didn't know about guard duty was hardly worth knowing. He
had prisoners and property of every conceivable kind--Indians, horse
thieves, thugs and deserters, magazines and medicines, mules and
munitions of war. Everything had to be guarded. The fort lay a mile to
the west of and two hundred feet higher than the railway hotel in the
heart of the town. It looked down upon the self-styled city, and most of
its womenkind did the same on the citizens, who were, it must be owned,
a rather mixed lot. The sudden discovery of gold in the neighboring
foothills, the fact that it promised to be the site of the division car
shops and roundhouse, that the trails to the Upper Platte, the
Sweetwater, the Park country to the south, and the rich game regions of
the Medicine Bow all centered there, and that stages left no less than
twice a week for some of those points, and the whole land was alive with
explorers for a hundred miles around--all had tended to give Gate City a
remarkable boom. Cheyenne and Laramie, thriving frontier towns with
coroners' offices in full blast from one week's end to the other, and a
double force on duty Sundays, confessed to and exhibited pardonable
jealousy. Yet there was wisdom in the warning of an old friend and