aloons tucked into cowhide boots, half-buttoned vest, flannel shirt
open at the throat, and upon his red hair a flaring-brimmed black slouch
hat) we were making a fair average of twenty miles an hour across the
greatest country on earth. It was a flat country of far horizons, and for
vast stretches peopled mainly, as one might judge from the car windows, by
antelope and the equally curious rodents styled prairie dogs.

Yet despite the novelty of such a ride into that unknown new West now
being spanned at giant's strides by the miraculous Pacific Railway, behold
me, surfeited with already five days' steady travel, engrossed chiefly in
observing a clear, dainty profile and waiting for the glimpses, time to
time, of a pair of exquisite blue eyes.

Merely to indulge myself in feminine beauty, however, I need not have
undertaken the expense and fatigue of journeying from Albany on the Hudson
out to Omaha on the plains side of the Missouri River; thence by the
Union Pacific Railroad of the new transcontinental line into the Indian
country. There were handsome women a-plenty in the East; and of access,
also, to a youth of family and parts. I had pictures of the same in my
social register. A man does not attain to twenty-five years without having
accomplished a few pages of the heart book. Nevertheless all such pages
were--or had seemed to be--wholly retrospective now, for here I was,
advised by the physicians to "go West," meaning by this not simply the
one-time West of Ohio, or Illinois, or even Iowa, but the remote and
genuine West lying beyond the Missouri.

Whereupon, out of desperation that flung the gauntlet down to hope I had
taken the bull by the horns in earnest. West should be full dose, at the
utmost procurable by modern conveyance.

The Union Pacific announcements acclaimed that this summer of 1868 the
rails should cross the Black Hills Mountains of Wyoming to another range
of the Rocky Mountains, in Utah; and that by the end of the year one might
ride comfortably clear to Salt Lake City. Certainly this was "going West"
with a vengeance; but as appeared to me--and to my father and mother and
the physicians--somewhere in the expanse of brand new Western country, the
plains and mountains, I would find at least the breath of life.

When I arrived in Omaha the ticket agent was enabled to sell me
transportation away to the town of Benton, Wyoming Territory itself, six
hundred and ninety miles (he said) west of the Mi