le incident happened that I
am going to tell you about. After the strike of '77, I went into exile
in the wild and woolly West, mostly in "bleeding Kansas," but often in
Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona--the Santa Fe goes almost everywhere
in the Southwest.

One night in August I was dropping an old Baldwin consolidator down a
long Mexican grade, after having helped a stock train over the division
by double-heading. It was close and hot on this sage-brush waste,
something not unusual at night in high altitudes, and the heat and sheet
lightning around the horizon warned me that there was to be one of those
short, fierce storms that come but once or twice a year in these
latitudes, and which are known as cloudbursts.

The alkali plains, or deserts, as they are often erroneously called,
are great stretches of adobe soil, known as "dobie" by the natives. This
soil is a yellowish brown, or perhaps more of a gray color, and as fine
as flour. Water plays sad havoc with it, if the soil lies so as to
oppose the flow, and it moves like dust before a slight stream. On the
flat, hard-baked plains, the water makes no impression, but on a
railroad grade, be it ever so slight, the tendency is to dig pitfalls. I
have seen a little stream of water, just enough to fill the ditches on
each side of the track, take out all the dirt, and keep the ties and
track afloat until the water was gone, then drop them into a hole eight
or ten feet deep, or if the washout was short, leave them suspended,
looking safe and sound, to lure some poor engineer and his mate to
death.

Another peculiarity of these storms is that they come quickly, rage
furiously for a few minutes, and are gone, and their lines are sharply
defined. It is not uncommon to find a lot of water, or a washout,
within a mile of land so dry that it looks as if it had never seen a
drop of water.

All this land is fertile when it can be brought under irrigating ditches
and watered, but here it lies out almost like a desert. It is sparsely
inhabited along the little streams by a straggling off-shoot of the
Mexican race; yet once in a while a fine place is to be seen, like an
oasis in the Sahara, the home of some old Spanish Don, with thousands of
cattle or sheep ranging on the plains, or perhaps the headquarters of
some enterprising cattle company. But these places were few and far
between at the time of which I write; the stations were mere passing
places, long side-tracks, with pe