owboy could conceive than riding abreast of
a laboring freight engine, the sulky engineer crowding every pound of
power into the cylinders, the sooty fireman humping his back throwing in
coal. Only one triumph would have been sweeter--to outrun the big
passenger train from Chicago with the brass-fenced car at the end.

No man ever had done that yet, although many had tried. The engineers
all knew what to expect on a Sunday afternoon when they approached
Misery, where the cowboys came through the fence and raced the trains on
the right-of-way. A long, level stretch of soft gray earth, set with
bunches of grass here and there, began a mile beyond the station,
unmarred by steam-shovel or grader's scraper. A man could ride it with
his eyes shut; a horse could cover it at its best.

That was the racing ground over which they had contended with the
Chicago-Puget Sound flier for many years, and a place which engineers
and firemen prepared to pass quickly while yet a considerable distance
away. It was a sight to see the big engine round the curve below, its
plume of smoke rising straight for twenty feet, streaming back like a
running girl's hair, the cowboys all set in their saddles, waiting to
go.

Engineers on the flier were not so sulky about it, knowing that the race
was theirs before it was run. Usually they leaned out of the window and
urged the riders on with beckoning, derisive hand, while the fireman
stood by grinning, confident of the head of steam he had begun storing
for this emergency far down the road.

Porters told passengers about these wild horsemen in advance, and eager
faces lined the windows on that side of the cars as they approached
Misery, and all who could pack on the end of the observation car
assembled there. In spite of its name, Misery was quite a comfortable
break in the day's monotony for travelers on a Sunday afternoon.

Amid the hardships and scant diversions of this life, Lambert spent his
first winter in the Bad Lands, drinking in the noisy revels at Misery,
riding the long, bitter miles back to the ranch, despising himself for
being so mean and low. It was a life in which a man's soul would either
shrink to nothing or expand until it became too large to find
contentment within the horizon of such an existence.

Some of them expanded up to the size for ranch owners, superintendents,
bosses; stopped there, set in their mold. Lambert never had heard of
one stretching so wide that he was dra