Chapter 22 - Page 2

hand, and the most touching traits of the sweetest humanity on the
other, the story of our Club men's adventures, if only well told, could
hardly fail to be highly interesting. But instead of a volume, we can
give it only a chapter, and that a short one.

From Julesburg, the last station on the eastern end of the Pacific
Railroad, to Cisco, the last station on its western end, the distance is
probably about fifteen hundred miles, about as far as Constantinople is
from London, or Moscow from Paris. This enormous stretch of country had
to be travelled all the way by, at the best, a six horse stage tearing
along night and day at a uniform rate, road or no road, of ten miles an
hour. But this was the least of the trouble. Bands of hostile Indians
were a constant source of watchfulness and trouble, against which even a
most liberal stock of rifles and revolvers were not always a
reassurance. Whirlwinds of dust often overwhelmed the travellers so
completely that they could hardly tell day from night, whilst blasts of
icy chill, sweeping down from the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
often made them imagine themselves in the midst of the horrors of an
Arctic winter.

The predominant scenery gave no pleasure to the eye or exhilaration to
the mind. It was of the dreariest description. Days and days passed with
hardly a house to be seen, or a tree or a blade of grass. I might even
add, or a mountain or a river, for the one was too often a heap of
agglomerated sand and clay cut into unsightly chasms by the rain, and
the other generally degenerated into a mere stagnant swamp, its
shallowness and dryness increasing regularly with its length. The only
houses were log ranches, called Relays, hardly visible in their sandy
surroundings, and separate from each other by a mean distance of ten
miles. The only trees were either stunted cedars, so far apart, as to be
often denominated Lone Trees; and, besides wormwood, the only plant was
the sage plant, about two feet high, gray, dry, crisp, and emitting a
sharp pungent odor by no means pleasant.

In fact, Barbican and his companions had seen nothing drearier or
savager in the dreariest and savagest of lunar landscapes than the
scenes occasionally presented to Marston and his friends in their
headlong journey on the track of the great Pacific Railroad. Here,
bowlders, high, square, straight and plumb as an immense hotel, blocked
up your way; there, lay an endless level, flat as the palm of your hand,
over which your eye might roam in vain in search of something green like
a meadow, yellow like a cornfield, or black like ploughed ground--a mere
boundless waste of dirty white from the stunted wormwood, often rendered
misty with the clouds of smarting alkali dust.