THE DENVER EXPRESS
BY A. A. HAYES
[Footnote: From "Belgravia" for January, 1884]

Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way,
and heard the "shanty-songs" sung by the sailors as they toiled at
capstan and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but
melodious refrain--

"I'm bound to see its muddy waters,
Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters,
Yeo ho! the wild Missouri."

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the
adjective "wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river which,
tipsily bearing its enormous burden of mud from the far Northwest,
totters, reels, runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of
miles; and which, encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved
Mississippi at Alton, and forcing its company upon this splendid river
(as if some drunken fellow should lock arms with a dignified
pedestrian), contaminates it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather--as it has the
habit of abandoning and destroying said banks--at a safe distance
therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure,
for its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the
base of the mountains; hence the importance to this town of the large
but somewhat shabby building serving as terminal station. In its smoky
interior, late in the evening and not very long ago, a train was nearly
ready to start. It was a train possessing a certain consideration. For
the benefit of a public easily gulled and enamored of grandiloquent
terms, it was advertised as the "Denver Fast Express"; sometimes, with
strange unfitness, as the "Lightning Express"; "elegant" and "palatial"
cars were declared to be included therein; and its departure was one of
the great events of the twenty-four hours in the country round about. A
local poet described it in the "live" paper of the town, cribbing from
an old Eastern magazine and passing off as original the lines--

"Again we stepped into the street,
A train came thundering by,
Drawn by the snorting iron steed
Swifter than eagles fly.
Rumbled the wheels, the whistle shrieked,
Far rolled the smoky cloud,
Echoed the hills, the valleys shook,
The flying forests bowed."

The trainmen, on the other hand, used no fine phrases. They called it
simply "Number Seventeen"; and, when it started, said it had "pulled
out."

On the evening in que