find no better route than they had chosen. Thus
it was that "Barker's" became, during the construction period, an
important point, and the frontiersman's name came to figure on
time-tables. Meanwhile the place passed through a process of evolution
which would have delighted Darwin. In the party of engineers which
first camped there was Sinclair and it was by his advice that the
contractors selected it for division headquarters. Then came drinking
"saloons" and gambling houses--alike the inevitable concomitant and the
bane of Western settlements; then scattered houses and shops and a
shabby so-called hotel, in which the letting of miserable rooms
(divided from each other by canvas partitions) was wholly subordinated
to the business of the bar. Before long, Barker's had acquired a worse
reputation than even other towns of its type, the abnormal and uncanny
aggregations of squalor and vice which dotted the plains in those days;
and it was at its worst when Sinclair returned thither and took up his
quarters in the engineers' building. The passion for gambling was
raging, and to pander thereto were collected as choice a lot of
desperadoes as ever "stacked" cards or loaded dice. It came to be
noticed that they were on excellent terms with a man called "Jeff"
Johnson, who was lessee of the hotel; and to be suspected that said
Johnson, in local parlance, "stood in with" them. With this man had
come to Barker's his daughter Sarah, commonly known as "Sally," a
handsome girl, with a straight, lithe figure, fine features, reddish
auburn hair, and dark-blue eyes. It is but fair to say that even the
"toughs" of a place like Barker's show some respect for the other sex,
and Miss Sally's case was no exception to the rule. The male population
admired her; they said she "put on heaps of style"; but none of them
had seemed to make any progress in her good graces.

On a pleasant afternoon just after the track had been laid some miles
west of Barker's, and construction trains were running with some
regularity to and from the end thereof, Sinclair sat on the rude
veranda of the engineers' quarters, smoking his well-colored meerschaum
and looking at the sunset. The atmosphere had been so clear during the
day that glimpses were had of Long's and Pike's peaks, and as the young
engineer gazed at the gorgeous cloud display he was thinking of the
miners' quaint and pathetic idea that the dead "go over the Range."

"Nice-looking, ain't it, Major?"