k. Once, in
the Rocky Mountains, when I found a driver sound asleep on the box, and
the mules going at the usual break-neck pace, the conductor said never
mind him, there was no danger, and he was doing double duty--had driven
seventy-five miles on one coach, and was now going back over it on this
without rest or sleep. A hundred and fifty miles of holding back of six
vindictive mules and keeping them from climbing the trees! It sounds
incredible, but I remember the statement well enough.

The station-keepers, hostlers, etc., were low, rough characters, as
already described; and from western Nebraska to Nevada a considerable
sprinkling of them might be fairly set down as outlaws--fugitives from
justice, criminals whose best security was a section of country which was
without law and without even the pretence of it. When the
"division-agent" issued an order to one of these parties he did it with
the full understanding that he might have to enforce it with a navy
six-shooter, and so he always went "fixed" to make things go along
smoothly.

Now and then a division-agent was really obliged to shoot a hostler
through the head to teach him some simple matter that he could have
taught him with a club if his circumstances and surroundings had been
different. But they were snappy, able men, those division-agents, and
when they tried to teach a subordinate anything, that subordinate
generally "got it through his head."

A great portion of this vast machinery--these hundreds of men and
coaches, and thousands of mules and horses--was in the hands of Mr. Ben
Holliday. All the western half of the business was in his hands. This
reminds me of an incident of Palestine travel which is pertinent here, so
I will transfer it just in the language in which I find it set down in my
Holy Land note-book:

No doubt everybody has heard of Ben Holliday--a man of prodigious
energy, who used to send mails and passengers flying across the
continent in his overland stage-coaches like a very whirlwind--two
thousand long miles in fifteen days and a half, by the watch! But
this fragment of history is not about Ben Holliday, but about a
young New York boy by the name of Jack, who traveled with our small
party of pilgrims in the Holy Land (and who had traveled to
California in Mr. Holliday's overland coaches three years before,
and had by no means forgotten it or lost his gushing admiration