Chapter 22

ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.

Leaving M'Connell and a few other Cambridge men to take charge of the
Great Telescope, Marston and Belfast in little more than an hour after
the receipt of the exciting dispatch, were scudding down the slopes of
Long's Peak by the only possible route--the inclined railroad. This
mode of travelling, however, highly satisfactory as far as it went,
ceased altogether at the mountain foot, at the point where the Dale
River formed a junction with Cache la Poudre Creek. But Marston, having
already mapped out the whole journey with some care and forethought, was
ready for almost every emergency. Instinctively feeling that the first
act of the Baltimore Gun Club would be to send a Committee to San
Francisco to investigate matters, he had determined to meet this
deputation on the route, and his only trouble now was to determine at
what point he would be most likely to catch them. His great start, he
knew perfectly well, could not put him more than a day in advance of
them: they having the advantage of a railroad nearly all the way, whilst
himself and Belfast could not help losing much time in struggling
through ravines, canyons, mountain precipices, and densely tangled
forests, not to mention the possibility of a brush or two with prowling
Indians, before they could strike the line of the Pacific Railroad,
along which he knew the Club men to be approaching. After a few hours
rest at La Porte, a little settlement lately started in the valley,
early in the morning they took the stage that passed through from Denver
to Cheyenne, a town at that time hardly a year old but already
flourishing, with a busy population of several thousand inhabitants.

Losing not a moment at Cheyenne, where they arrived much sooner than
they had anticipated, they took places in Wells, Fargo and Co.'s
_Overland Stage Mail_ bound east, and were soon flying towards Julesburg
at the rate of twelve miles an hour. Here Marston was anxious to meet
the Club men, as at this point the Pacific Railroad divided into two
branches--one bearing north, the other south of the Great Salt Lake
--and he feared they might take the wrong one.

But he arrived in Julesburg fully 10 hours before the Committee, so that
himself and Belfast had not only ample time to rest a little after their
rapid flight from Long's Peak, but also to make every possible
preparation for the terrible journey of more than fifteen hundred miles
that still lay before them.

This journey, undertaken at a most unseasonable period of the year, and
over one of the most terrible deserts in the world, would require a
volume for itself. Constantly presenting the sharpest points of contrast
between the most savage features of wild barbaric nature on the one