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 set in, seemed
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 canons, 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, travelled
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 specially 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 ways. It was known on the road that he was expected in
Denver, and there were rumors that he was to organize the parties for
the survey of an important "extensi