In a few minutes the train was off, and its living freight—the just and the unjust, the reformed and the rescued, the happy and the anxious. With many of the passengers the episode of the night was already a thing of the past. Sinclair sat by the side of his wife, to whose cheeks the color had all come back; and Sally Johnson lay in her berth, faint still, but able to give an occasional smile to Foster. In the station on the Missouri the reporters were gathered about the happy superintendent, smoking his cigars, and filling their note-books with items. In Denver, their brethren would gladly have done the same, but Watkins failed to gratify them. He was a man of few words. When the train had gone, and a friend remarked: “Hope they'll get through all right, now,” he simply said: “Yes, likely. Two shots don't most always go in the same hole.” Then he went to the telegraph instrument. In a few minutes he could have told a story as wild as a Norse saga, but what he said, when Denver had responded, was only—“No. 17, fifty-five minutes late!”