e a notion that we in India are
exterminating the native in the same fashion, and I have been asked to
fix a date for the final extinguishment of the Aryan. I answer that it
will be a long business. Very many Americans have an offensive habit of
referring to natives as "heathen." Mahometans and Hindus are heathen
alike in their eyes, and they vary the epithet with "pagan" and
"idolater." But this is beside the matter, which is the Stampede
Tunnel--our actual point of crossing the Rockies. Thank Heaven, I need
never take that tunnel again! It is about two miles long, and in effect
is nothing more than the gallery of a mine shored with timber and
lighted with electric lamps. Black darkness would be preferable, for the
lamps just reveal the rough cutting of the rocks, and that is very rough
indeed. The train crawls through, brakes down, and you can hear the
water and little bits of stone falling on the roof of the car. Then you
pray, pray fervently, and the air gets stiller and stiller, and you dare
not take your unwilling eyes off the timber shoring, lest a prop should
fall, for lack of your moral support. Before the tunnel was built you
crossed in the open air by a switchback line. A watchman goes through
the tunnel after each train, but that is no protection. He just guesses
that another train will pull through, and the engine-driver guesses the
same thing. Some day between the two of them there will be a cave in the
tunnel. Then the enterprising reporter will talk about the shrieks and
groans of the buried and the heroic efforts of the Press in securing
first information, and--that will be all. Human life is of small account
out here.

I was listening to yarns in the smoking-compartment of the Pullman, all
the way to Helena, and with very few exceptions, each had for its point,
violent, brutal, and ruffianly murder--murder by fraud and the craft of
the savage--murder unavenged by the law, or at the most by an outbreak
of fresh lawlessness. At the end of each tale I was assured that the old
days had passed away, and that these were anecdotes of five years'
standing. One man in particular distinguished himself by holding up to
admiration the exploits of some cowboys of his acquaintance, and their
skill in the use of the revolver. Each tale of horror wound up with "and
that's the sort of man he was," as who should say: "Go and do likewise."
Remember that the shootings, the cuttings, and the stabbings were not
the outcome