s got off, the sun
was setting, and though the thin, clear air brought the distant
mountains very close, the prospect was not a cheerful one. In every
direction mountain ranges, some brown and others snow-capped, rose
upon the horizon. Where the railroad line made a tortuous way among
the barren buttes that dotted the uneven plain all about, there was
not a spear of grass nor a living thing except the stunted sage-brush
of the alkali plain. In the midst of this desert a great upheaval of
granite rock thrown squarely across the direct path of the railroad
opposed its straight course and made a long reverse curve necessary.
This was Point of Rocks.

"You," said Stanley once to Bucks, "may live to see this railroad
built across these mountains as it should be built. There will be no
sharp curves then, no heavy grades such as these our little engines
have to climb now. Great compound locomotives will pull trains of a
hundred cars up grades of less than one per cent and around two and
three degree curves. These high wooden bridges will all be replaced
by big rock and earth fills. Tunnels will pierce the heights that
cannot be scaled by easy grades, and electric power supplied by these
mountain streams themselves will take the place of steam made by coal
and hauled hundreds of miles to give us costly motive power. You may
live, Bucks, to see all of this; I shall not. When it comes, think of
me."

But there was no thought now in Bucks's mind of what the future might
bring to that forbidding desert. He saw only a rude station building,
just put up, and as the train disappeared, he dragged into this his
trunk and hand-bag, and in that act a new outpost of civilization was
established in the great West.

He called up Medicine Bend, reported, lighted a fire in the little
stove, and the spot in the desert known now to men as Point of Rocks
for the first time in the story of the world became a part of it--was
linked to the world itself.

But the place was lonely beyond words, and Bucks had a hard time to
keep it from being too much so for him. He walked at different times
over the country in every direction, and one night after a crudely
prepared supper he strolled out on the platform, desperate for
something to do. Desolation marked the landscape everywhere. He
wandered aimlessly across the track and seeing nothing better to
interest him began climbing Point of Rocks.

The higher he climbed the more absorbed he became. Youth