I heard a gusty sigh, an exclamation from the lieutenant. My Lady had fainted again.
“The reaction, sir,” I apologized, to the lieutenant, as we worked.
“Naturally,” answered he. “You’ll both go back to Benton?”
“Certainly,” said I.
CHAPTER XXII
STAR SHINE
It was six weeks later, with My Lady all recovered and I long since healed, and Fort Bridger pleasant in our memories, when we two rode into Benton once more, by horse from the nearest stage point. And here we sat our saddles, silent, wondering; for of Benton there was little significant of the past, very little tangible of the present, naught promising of its future.
Roaring Benton City had vanished, you might say, utterly. The iron tendrils of the Pacific Railway glistened, stretching westward into the sunset, and Benton had followed the lure, to Rawlins (as had been told us), to Green River, to Bryan—likely now still onward, for the track was traveling fast, charging the mountain slopes of Utah. The restless dust had settled. The Queen Hotel, the Big Tent, the rows of canvas, plank, tin, sheet metal, what-not stores, saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, human habitations—the blatant street and the station itself had subsided into this: a skeleton company of hacked and weazened posts, a fantastic outcrop of coldly blackened clay chimneys, a sprinkling of battered cans. The fevered populace who had ridden high 315 upon the tide of rapid life had remained only as ghosts haunting a potter’s field, and the turmoil of frenzied pleasure had dwindled to a coyote’s yelp mocking the twilight.