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Night or day the route was easily followed, and, in other years, the traveller was seldom for long out of sight of toiling wagons. Now scarcely a wheel turned in all that lonely distance. The west-bound stage left the station at Deer Creek at four o'clock in the afternoon with no intimation of danger ahead.
Among the more famous riders was Jim Moore who later became a ranchman in the South Platte Valley, Nebraska. Moore made his greatest ride on June 8, 1860. He happened to be at Midway Station, half way between the Missouri River and Denver, when the west-bound messenger arrived with important Government dispatches to California.
Nobody knew or cared in which one of the dozen houses of the Chinese quarter Wing's father and mother lived, nor whether his father had a laundry, a store, or a garden. They were nobodies; but Wing was a public character. Wing's chief daily function was to assist at the arrival of the east-bound passenger train. The west-bound, having only one engine, was of less consequence.
"When the wife did at last give in to the cold, the hunger, and the weariness, it was to collapse all at once. It happened in the mountain country. In the evening of a cold, dull day they were trudging along on the railroad ties, keeping on the west-bound track so they could face approaching trains and get off the track in time to avoid being run down.
If the passengers on the west-bound train that pulled up at the little red wooden station at Dry Bottom at the close of a June day in 18 , were interested in the young man bearing the two suit cases, they gave no evidence of it.
"Imperial Theater," he told the driver, giving the first address that occurred to him; it could be changed. For the moment the main issue was to get the girl out of the range of the detective's interest. He slipped into his place as the hansom wheeled into the turgid tide of west-bound traffic. So Calendar had escaped, after all! Moreover, he had told the truth to Kirkwood.
A month passed by in which the derelictions of Rimrock were capped by the machinations of a rival cattle buyer, who beat L. W. out of a buy that would have netted him up into the thousands. Disgusted with everything, L. W. boarded the west-bound at Bowie Junction and flung himself into a seat in the half-empty smoker without looking to the right or left.
It was undoubtedly safer than the northern mountain route at this season of the year. It seemed at least to be a new venture for west-bound emigrant trains, at least as to ultimate success, for we had no knowledge of any that had gone through safely.
At length, about ten o'clock, through Freight Number 73, to which car number 1160 was attached, received its "clearance," or order to start, from the train-dispatcher, and began to move heavily out from the yard, on to the main west-bound track.
As a beginning of hard times I could not afford to take a sleeper. I was on the fast West-bound express, and the emigrant sleepers are on the slow train, which takes nearly two days more. The high-toned Pullman was quite beyond me, so I stuck to the ordinary cars and put in a mighty rough time. After twenty-four hours of the Lehigh Valley Road, which runs into Canada, I came to Chicago.
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