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Updated: May 5, 2025
His beefy face was flushed as red as his flannel shirt. His eyes were fixed boldly on the Texan. "The barkeeper tells me yuh were inquirin' fer me," he said heavily. "What's on yore mind?" Mullhall was directly behind him, insolent of face and bearing. The two seemed to be paying no attention to the trio of men behind The Kid.
While Mullhall pinioned the Texan, Steve Stacy planned to draw and shoot him down. The pair had worked together like the cogwheels of a machine, and all was perfectly timed. Stacy drew like a flash, cocking his .45 as it left the holster. The play, however, was not worked fast enough. Kid Wolf was not to be victimized by such a threadbare ruse. He was too fast, too strong.
And the white horse responded like a machine. There is a limit to the endurance of any animal, however strong. Blizzard could not keep up that pace forever. He had begun to pant. He was running on sheer courage now. Then The Kid mounted a rise. Ahead of him he saw two moving dots horsemen, bound toward the S Bar! They were Stacy and Mullhall, without a doubt! Kid Wolf's heart leaped.
In the matter of accidents the comparison with Great Britain is not so overwhelmingly unfavourable as is sometimes supposed. If, indeed, we accept the figures given by Mullhall in his "Dictionary of Statistics," we have to admit that the proportion of accidents is five times greater in the United States than in the United Kingdom. The statistics collected by the Railroad Commissioners of Massachusetts, however, reduce this ratio to five to four. The safety of railway travelling differs hugely in different parts of the country. Thus Mr. E.B. Dorsey shows ("English and American Railways Compared") that the average number of miles a passenger can travel in Massachusetts without being killed is 503,568,188, while in the United Kingdom the number is only 172,965,362, leaving a very comfortable margin of over 300,000,000 miles. On the whole, however, it cannot be denied that there are more accidents in American railway travelling than in European, and very many of them from easily preventable causes. The whole spirit of the American continent in such matters is more "casual" than that of Europe; the American is more willing to "chance it;" the patriarchal régime is replaced by the every-man-for-himself-and-devil-take-the-hindmost system. When I hired a horse to ride up a somewhat giddy path to the top of a mountain, I was supplied (without warning) with a young animal that had just arrived from the breeding farm and had never even seen a mountain. Many and curious, when I regained my hotel, were the enquiries as to how he had behaved himself; and it was no thanks to them that I could report that, though rather frisky on the road, he had sobered down in the most sagacious manner when we struck the narrow upward trail. In America the railway passenger has to look out for himself. There is no checking of tickets before starting to obviate the risk of being in the wrong train. There is no porter to carry the traveller's hand-baggage and see him comfortably ensconced in the right carriage. When the train does start, it glides away silently without any warning bell, and it is easy for an inadvertent traveller to be left behind. Even in large and important stations there is often no clear demarcation between the platforms and the permanent way. The whole floor of the station is on one level, and the rails are flush with the spot from which you climb into the car. Overhead bridges or subways are practically unknown; and the arriving passenger has often to cross several lines of rails before reaching shore. The level crossing is, perhaps, inevitable at the present stage of railroad development in the United States, but its annual butcher's bill is so huge that one cannot help feeling it might be better safeguarded. Richard Grant White tells how he said to the station-master at a small wayside station in England,
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