Constantly presenting the sharpest points of contrast
between the most savage features of wild barbaric nature on the one
hand, and the most touching traits of the sweetest humanity on the
other, the story of our Club men's adventures, if only well told, could
hardly fail to be highly interesting. But instead of a volume, we can
give it only a chapter, and that a short one.
From Julesburg, the last station on the eastern end of the Pacific
Railroad, to Cisco, the last station on its western end, the distance is
probably about fifteen hundred miles, about as far as Constantinople is
from London, or Moscow from Paris. This enormous stretch of country had
to be travelled all the way by, at the best, a six horse stage tearing
along night and day at a uniform rate, road or no road, of ten miles an
hour. But this was the least of the trouble. Bands of hostile Indians
were a constant source of watchfulness and trouble, against which even a
most liberal stock of rifles and revolvers were not always a
reassurance. Whirlwinds of dust often overwhelmed the travellers so
completely that they could hardly tell day from night, whilst blasts of
icy chill, sweeping down from the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains,
often made them imagine themselves in the midst of the horrors of an
Arctic winter.
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