truck downward at almost the same instant, severing St.
Johns' left arm near the shoulder.

Then the white man got his right hand on his rifle and the three
murderers fled. They had killed one of the Americans who was sleeping
in the enclosure, left another dying near him and the third gasping
his last outside the gate.

St. Johns staunched the blood from his wounds and crawled to the top
of a pile of grain-sacks whence he could see over the unroofed wall.
Here he stayed for three days and three nights. With every sunrise the
magpies and buzzards came in great flocks, to sit upon the wall after
they had sated themselves in the corral, and watch him. With every
nightfall the wolves slunk down from the mountains and fought over the
body outside the gate. Night and day the thirst-tortured mules kept
up a pandemonium.

A road-grading party came along on Sunday morning. They gave him such
first aid as they could and sent a rider to Fort Buchanan for a
surgeon. The doctor amputated the arm nine days after the wound had
been inflicted. Three weeks later St. Johns was able to ride a horse
to Tucson.

Silas St. Johns is offered as a sample of the men who built and
operated the overland mail lines. Among the drivers, stock-tenders,
and messengers there were many others like him. Iron men, it was not
easy to kill them, and so long as there was breath in their bodies
they kept on fighting.

John Butterfield and his associates were made of the same stuff as
these employees.

How many hundred thousand dollars these pioneer investors put into
their line before the turning of a single wheel is not known; it must
have been somewhere near a cool million, and this was in a day when
millions were not so common as they are now; a day, moreover, when
nothing in the business was certain and everything remained to be
proved.

They established more than a hundred stage-stations along that
semicircle through the savage Southwest. They bought about fifteen
hundred mules and horses, which were sent out along the route. To feed
these animals, hay and grain were freighted, in some cases for two
hundred miles, and the loads arrived at the corrals worth a goodly
fraction of their weight in silver. There was a station in western
Texas to which teamsters had to haul water for nine months of the
year from twenty-two miles away. At every one of these lonely outposts
there were an agent and a stock-tender, and at some it was necessary
to maintai