“An’ while they’re a-comin’ down we’re a-comin’ up, aye? We’ll see if thray-dollar-a-day Christians can’t bate a-dollar-a-day haythen.”
Before the next noon, from the Sherman Summit they craned eagerly to catch the first view of the wide land before. Gradually it unfolded, as they wound over and entered the downward trail—and on a sudden Terry uttered a sharp cry of amazement.
“Great Cæsar’s ghost! Look at Cheyenne.”
“Where?”
“Down yonder. See that bunch of whity dots and rusty roofs, away, ’way off. It’s Cheyenne, I bet. Gee! And when we came through in July there wasn’t anything.”
The air was still and marvelously clear; in straight line as the crow flies, one might see miles and miles—seemed as though one could see to Omaha, the beginning of track—and one probably could, “if,” as Sol Judy would say, “he only looked far enough!”
At any rate, on the brownish plain twenty-five miles by air-line there was smoke, black and blue, and a collection of the whity and browny dots betokening a town.
“Yes, sir; there’s what they call Cheyenne, the ‘Magic City of the Plains,’” quoth Corporal Williams. “Two months old, with a thousand people, and a town government already, and a daily paper being started, and the telegraph almost through up from Denver, and coal mines staked off, and lots that the railroad company sold for $150 fetching $2000 and better. She’s a hummer.”
“How near are the rails?” demanded Terry. That was the important matter.
“Fifty miles out yet. The Injuns have bothered a heap—corralling the graders and crews and running off stock. But those Irish keep at it, between times. Maybe if your eyes are good you can see the smoke of the construction-train, against the horizon.”