ay a camp. To this point
these unjoined pieces were heading, and here at length they met. Camp
Separation it had been fitly called, but how should the American
railway man afford time to say that? Separation was pretty and apt,
but needless; and with the sloughing of two syllables came the brief,
businesslike result--Separ. Chicago, 1137-1/2 miles. It was labelled on
a board large almost as the hut station. A Y-switch, two sidings, the
fat water-tank and steam-pump, and a section-house with three trees
before it composed the north side. South of the track were no trees.
There was one long siding by the corrals and cattle-chute, there were
a hovel where plug tobacco and canned goods were for sale, a shed where
you might get your horse shod, a wire fence that at shipping times
enclosed bales of pressed hay, the hotel, the stage stable, and the
little station--some seven shanties all told. Between them were spaces
of dust, the immediate plains engulfed them, and through their midst
ran the far-vanishing railroad, to which they hung like beads on a great
string from horizon to horizon. A great east-and-west string, one end
in the rosy sun at morning, and one in the crimson sun at night. Beyond
each sky-line lay cities and ports where the world went on out of
sight and hearing. This lone steel thread had been stretched across the
continent because it was the day of haste and hope, when dollars seemed
many and hard times were few; and from the Yellowstone to the Rio Grande
similar threads were stretching, and little Separs by dispersed hundreds
hung on them, as it were in space eternal. Can you wonder that vigorous
young men with pistols should, when they came to such a place, shoot
them off to let loose their unbounded joy of living?

And yet it was not this merely that began the custom, but an error of
the agent's. The new station was scarce created when one morning Honey
Wiggin with the Virginian had galloped innocently in from the round-up
to telegraph for some additional cars.

"I'm dead on to you!" squealed the official, dropping flat at the sight
of them; and bang went his gun at them. They, most naturally, thought
it was a maniac, and ran for their lives among the supports of the
water-tank, while he remained anchored with his weapon, crouched behind
the railing that fenced him and his apparatus from the laity; and some
fifteen strategic minutes passed before all parties had crawled forth
to an understanding, and the