As Buck’s straining eye followed the movement, the second Indian struck the club down.[Frontispiece]
It was only after a moment that the lineman could be seen to gain.[92]
“Let that gate alone or I’ll brain you,” he cried.[250]
For Scott to draw and fire was but one movement.[300]

1

THE MOUNTAIN DIVIDE

CHAPTER I

Night had fallen and a warm rain drifting down from the mountains hung in a mist over the railroad yards and obscured the lights of Medicine Bend. Two men dismounting from their drooping horses at the foot of Front Street threw the reins to a man in waiting and made their way on foot across the muddy square to the building which served the new railroad as a station and as division head-quarters. In Medicine Bend, the town, the railroad, everything was new; and the broad, low pine building which they entered had not yet been painted.

The public waiting-room was large, roughly framed, and lighted with hanging kerosene lamps. Within the room a door communicated with the agent’s office, and this was divided by a wooden 2 railing into a freight office and a ticket and telegraph office.

It could be seen, as the two men paused at the door of the inner room, that the first wore a military fatigue-cap, and his alert carriage as he threw open his cape-coat indicated the bearing of an American army officer. He was of medium height, and his features and eyes implied that the storms and winds of the plains and mountains were familiar friends. This was Park Stanley, charged at that time with the construction of the first transcontinental railroad.

The agent’s office, which he and his companion now looked into, was half-filled with a crowd of frontiersmen, smoking, talking, disputing, asking questions, and crowding against the fence that railed off the private end of the room; while at the operator’s table next to the platform window a tall, spindling boy was trying in the confusion behind him to get a message off the wire.