careering through the mesquite or greasewood,
while the stage followed, sometimes on two wheels, sometimes on one,
he counted himself lucky. There was many a station from which the road
led over broken country--along steep side hills, across high-banked
washes, skirting the summits of rocky precipices; and on such
stretches it was the rule rather than the exception for the coach to
overturn.

The bronco stock was bad enough but the green mules were the worst. It
was often found necessary to lash the stage to a tree--if one could be
found near the station, and if not to the corral fence--while the
long-eared brutes were being hooked up. When the last trace had been
snapped into place the hostlers would very gingerly free the vehicle
from its moorings and, as the ropes came slack, leap for their lives.

They called the route a road. As a matter of fact that term was a
far-fetched euphemism. In some places approaches had been dug away to
the beds of streams; and the absolutely impassable barriers of the
living rock had been removed from the mountain passes. But that was
all. What with the long climbs upgrade and the bad going through loose
sand or mud, it was always necessary for the driver to keep his six
animals at a swinging trot when they came to a level or a downhill
pull. Often he had to whip them into a dead run for miles where most
men would hesitate to drive a buckboard at a walk.

During the rainy seasons the rivers of that Southwestern land
proceeded to demonstrate that they had a right to the name--to which
they never pretended to live up at other times--by running bank full.
These coffee-colored floods were underlaid by thick strata of
quicksands. Occasionally one of them simply absorbed a coach; and,
unless the driver was very swift in cutting the traces, it took unto
itself two or three mules for good measure.

The Comanche Indians were on the war-path during these years in
western Texas. On the great Staked Plain they swooped down on many a
stage, and driver and passengers had to make a running fight of it to
save their scalps. The Indians attacked the stations, two or three
hundred of them in a band. The agents and stock-tenders, who were
always on the lookout, usually saw them in time to retreat inside the
thick adobe walls of the building, from which shelter they sometimes
were able to stand them off without suffering any particular damage.
But sometimes they were forced to watch the enemy go whoopi