rneys by rail, and those forming part of an American
transcontinental trip are almost weird. From the windows of a night
express in Europe or the older portions of the United States, one looks
on houses and lights, cultivated fields, fences, and hedges; and, hurled
as he may be through the darkness, he has a sense of companionship and
semi-security. Far different is it when the long train is running over
those two rails which, seen before night sets in, seem to meet on the
horizon. Within all is as if between two great seaboard cities; the
neatly dressed people, the uniformed officials, the handsome fittings,
the various appliances for comfort. Without are now long dreary levels,
now deep and wild canyons, now an environment of strange and grotesque
rock-formations, castles, battlements, churches, statues. The antelope
fleetly runs, and the coyote skulks away from the track, and the gray
wolf howls afar off. It is for all the world, to one's fancy, as if
a bit of civilization, a family or community, its belongings and
surroundings complete, were flying through regions barbarous and
inhospitable.

From the cab of Engine No. 32; the driver of the Denver Express saw,
showing faintly in the early morning, the buildings grouped about the
little station ten miles ahead, where breakfast awaited his passengers.
He looked at his watch; he had just twenty minutes in which to run the
distance, as he had run it often before. Something, however, traveled
faster than he. From the smoky station out of which the train passed
the night before, along the slender wire stretched on rough poles at the
side of the track, a spark of that mysterious something which we call
electricity flashed at the moment he returned the watch to his pocket;
and in five minutes' time the station-master came out on the platform, a
little more thoughtful than his wont, and looked eastward for the smoke
of the train. With but three of the passengers in that train has this
tale especially to do, and they were all in the new and comfortable
Pullman "City of Cheyenne." One was a tall, well-made man of about
thirty--blond, blue-eyed, bearded, straight, sinewy, alert. Of all in
the train he seemed the most thoroughly at home, and the respectful
greeting of the conductor, as he passed through the car, marked him as
an officer of the road. Such was he--Henry Sinclair, assistant engineer,
quite famed on the line, high in favor with the directors, and a rising
man in all