enterprise.

Russel went back to Leavenworth, Kansas, the headquarters of the firm,
and put the matter up to Majors and Waddel. They showed him in a very
few minutes that he had been talked into a sure way of losing several
hundred thousand dollars. But he reminded them that he had committed
himself to the undertaking. They said that settled it; they would
stand by him and make his word good.

Their stage line had stations every ten or twelve miles as far as Salt
Lake; beyond that point there was not a single building; but within
two months from the day when Russel had that talk with Senator Gwinn,
the firm had completed the chain of those stations clear to
Sacramento, purchased five hundred half-breed mustang ponies which
they apportioned along the route, hired eighty riders and what
stock-tenders were necessary, and hauled feed and provisions out
across the intermountain deserts. They had droves of mules beating
down trails through the deep drifts of the Sierras and the Rockies.

On April 3, 1860, Henry Roff swung into the saddle at Sacramento and
Alexander Carlyle leaped on a brown mare in St. Joseph, Missouri.
While cannon boomed and crowds cheered in those two remote cities, the
ponies came toward each other from the ends of that two-thousand-mile
trail on a dead run.

At the end of ten miles or so a relay mount was waiting for each
rider. As he drew near the station each man let out a long coyote
yell; the hostlers led his animal into the roadway. The messenger
charged down upon them, drew rein, sprang to the earth, and while the
agent lifted the pouches from one saddle to the other--as quickly as
you read these words describing the process--gained the back of his
fresh horse and sped on. At the end of his section--the length of
these intervals varied from seventy-five to a hundred and twenty-five
miles--each rider dismounted for the last time and turned the pouches
over to a successor.

In this manner the mail went across prairie and sage-brush plain,
through mountain passes where the snow lay deep beside the beaten
trail and across the wide silent reaches of the Great American Desert.
And the time on that first trip was ten days for both east and west
bound pouches.

The riders were light of weight; they were allowed to carry no weapons
save a bowie-knife and revolver; the letters were written on
tissue-paper; the two pouches were fastened to a leathern covering
which fitted over the saddle, and the thin