The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Denver Express, by A. A. Hayes

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Title: The Denver Express
From "Belgravia" for January, 1884

Author: A. A. Hayes

Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23180]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DENVER EXPRESS ***

Produced by David Widger

THE DENVER EXPRESS

By A. A. Hayes

From "Belgravia" for January, 1884

I

Any one who has seen an outward-bound clipper ship getting under way,
and heard the "shanty-songs" sung by the sailors as they toiled at
capstan and halliards, will probably remember that rhymeless but
melodious refrain--

"I'm bound to see its muddy waters,
Yeo ho! that rolling river;
Bound to see its muddy waters,
Yeo ho! the wild Missouri."

Only a happy inspiration could have impelled Jack to apply the adjective
"wild" to that ill-behaved and disreputable river which, tipsily bearing
its enormous burden of mud from the far Northwest, totters, reels,
runs its tortuous course for hundreds on hundreds of miles and which,
encountering the lordly and thus far well-behaved Mississippi at Alton,
and forcing its company upon this splendid river (as if some drunken
fellow should lock arms with a dignified pedestrian), contaminates it
all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

At a certain point on the banks of this river, or rather--as it has
the habit of abandoning and destroying said banks--at a safe distance
therefrom, there is a town from which a railroad takes its departure,
for its long climb up the natural incline of the Great Plains, to the
base of the mountains; hence the importance to this town of the large
but somewhat shabby building serving as terminal station. In its smoky
interior, late in the evening and not very long ago, a train was nearly
ready to start. It was a train possessing a certain consideration. For
the benefit of a public easily gulled and enamored of grandiloquent
terms, it was advertised as the "Denver Fast Express"; sometimes, with
strange unfitness, as the "Lightning Express"; "elegant" and "palatial"
cars were declared to be included therein; and its departure was one of