ll of the eastbound rider sounded up the road.

It was up to Moore to take the sick man's place now. While the
hostlers were saddling a pony and leading it out in front of the
station, he snatched some cold meat from the table, gulped down a cup
of lukewarm coffee, and hurried outside. He was just in time to swing
into the saddle. He clapped spurs to the pony and kept him on a run.
So with each succeeding mount; and when he arrived at Midway he had
put the two hundred and eighty miles of the round trip behind him in
twenty-two hours.

In western Nevada, where the Paiute Indians were on the war-path,
several of the stations were little forts, and riders frequently raced
for their lives to these adobe sanctuaries. Pony Bob Haslam made his
great three hundred and eighty mile ride across this section of
scorching desert.

He rode out of Virginia City one day while the inhabitants were
frantically working to fortify the town against war-parties whose
signal-fires were blazing at the time on every peak for a hundred
miles.

When he arrived at the Carson River, sixty miles away, he found that
the settlers had seized all the horses at the station for use in the
campaign against the savages. He went on without a relay down the
Carson to Fort Churchill, fifteen miles farther. Here the man who was
to relieve him refused to take the pouches.

Within ten minutes Haslam was in the saddle again. He rode thirty-five
miles to the Carson sink; got a fresh horse and made the next thirty
miles, without a drop of water; changed at Sand Springs and again at
Cold Springs; and after one hundred and ninety miles in the saddle
turned the pouches over to J. G. Kelley.

Here, at Smith's Creek, Pony Bob got nine hours' rest. Then he began
the return trip. At Cold Springs he found the station a smoking
shambles; the keeper and the stock-tender had been killed, the horses
driven off by Indians. It was growing dark. He rode his jaded animal
across the thirty-seven-mile interval to Sand Springs, got a remount,
and pressed on to the sink of the Carson. Afterward it was found that
during the night he had ridden straight through a ring of Indians who
were headed in the same direction in which he was going. From the sink
he completed his round trip of three hundred and eighty miles without
a mishap, arriving at the end within four hours of the schedule time.

Nine months after the opening of the line the Civil War began, and the
pony express carri