s and the ashes of Lone
Tree; but these soon blew away. There were no people living in the
country at this time, and the reason the road had been built was to
hold a grant of land made to the company by the government, which was
a foolish thing for the government to do, since a road would have been
built when needed, anyhow; but my experience has been that the
government is always putting its foot in it.

When I dropped off the train at Track's End I saw by the moonlight
that the railroad property consisted of a small coal-shed, a
turntable, a roundhouse with two locomotive stalls, a water-tank and
windmill, and a rather long and narrow passenger and freight depot.
The town lay a little apart, and I could not make out its size. There
were a hundred or more men waiting for the train, and one of them took
the two mail-sacks in a wheelbarrow and went away toward the lights of
the houses. There were a lot of mules and wagons and scrapers and
other tools of a gang of railroad graders near the station; also some
tents in which the men lived; these men were waiting for the train
with the others, and talked so loud and made such a disturbance that
it drowned out all other noises.

The train was left right on the track, and the engine put in the
roundhouse, after which Burrdock took me over town to the hotel. It
was called the Headquarters House, and the proprietor's name was
Sours. After I got a cold supper he showed me to my room. The second
story was divided into about twenty rooms, the partitions being lathed
but not yet plastered. It made walls very easy to talk through, and,
where the cracks happened to match, as they seemed to mostly, they
weren't hard to look through. I thought it was a good deal like
sleeping in a squirrel-cage.

The railroad men that I had seen at the station had been working on an
extension of the grade to the west, on which the rails were to be laid
the next spring. They had pushed on ten miles, but, as the government
had stopped making a fuss, the company had decided to do no more that
season, and the train I came up on brought the paymaster with the
money to pay the graders for their summer's work; so they all got
drunk. There were some men from Billings in town, too. They were on
their way east with a band of four hundred Montana ponies, which they
had rounded up for the night just south of town. Two of them stayed to
hold the drove, and the rest came into town, also to get drunk. They
had goo