000,000 annually,
while their earnings amount to the tidy sum of $2,500,000,000 in the
same length of time. They carry somewhat more than 800,000,000
passengers every twelve months, and 2,200,000,000 tons of freight. These
figures do not include the several million tons of trunks, sachels,
grips, hat boxes and carpet bags that the average traveler considers it
necessary to load him or herself down with on starting on a journey of
any distance, and which comes in such large quantities sometimes as to
make life a burden for us porters.

Read these figures again, dear reader, they are a conservative estimate
of the business transacted by the railroads of this fair land of ours.
You can count a million, can you count a billion? Immense, isn't it? It
seems to show that the people of this country are great travelers,
forever on the move, yet they tell us this is a country of homes and
that the average American loves his home and home life above all things.
These figures seem to show there are a few people who havn't any home or
if they have they are looking for one they like better, which, like the
will of the wisp, evades them always, but they continue to shift around,
always hopeful, never satisfied, and they will continue to shift around
until Gabriel blows on his little tin horn.

But this class of people make but a small percentage of the traveling
public. Business in this latter day of strife and competition makes long
journeys necessary, and as the business of the world grows apace and the
countries of the earth crowd closer together in the struggle for the
almighty dollar, there will be need of more railroads to make the globe
smaller and to cut off the hours and minutes of precious time that means
money to the man of today. And as a man makes and saves money so will he
spend it for the pleasure of himself and family, and as he must travel
to find pleasure there must be railroads to carry him, and hence these
figures I write now will look insignificant beside the magnificent total
that will be put before the reader of that day, because if they increase
in the next century as they have in the past, walking will be out of
fashion and every body will ride and I hope sleep in a Pullman sleeping
car.

[Illustration: With Wm. Blood, My Old Cowboy Friend, and Other Friends
at the Close of My Railroad Career]

CHAPTER XXII.

A FEW REMINISCENCES OF THE RANGE. SOME MEN I HAVE MET. BUFFALO BILL. THE
JAMES BROTHERS. Y