“What are you doing here, Bill?”
“I? Well, I may go to the diggin’s myself, and I may drive stage. To-day’s stage westbound is due now. That’s what we’re looking for.”
“She’s a comin’,” remarked one of the other men, with a nod.
Sure enough, up the trail from the east, along the north bank of the Smoky Hill Fork, in the dusk and the dust came at a gallop the Leavenworth stage for the Pike’s Peak country, drawn by its four fine mules. It halted before the Junction House Hotel, and the passengers clambered stiffly out from under the canvas top that arched over the wagon box.
They were only two, and one from the driver’s box. The two plainly enough were Easterners. The first was a rather young man, with a thin sandy beard and a soft slouch hat; the second was a stoutish, elderly man, with a round rosy face and a fringe of white whiskers under his chin. He wore a rather dingy whitish coat; the younger man wore a regulation duster. They both gazed about them alertly before entering the hotel.
“Hello, Bill,” nodded the stage driver, descending, after tossing his lines to the hostler from the stage stable—for Junction City was Station Number Seven on the stage route.
“Who’s yore load, Tom?” queried somebody.
“That old fellow in the white coat, he’s Horace Greeley. Other fellow’s named Richardson—Albert D. Richardson.”
“Where they from?”
“N’ York, I reckon.”