"'Yes, sir; that's me.'
"'Have you a young lady here named Rachel R—'
"The old lady didn't wait for me to finish the name, she just turned her head fifteen degrees, put her open hand up beside her mouth, and shouted upstairs:
"'Rachel! Rachel! Come down here, quick! Here's your young man from America!'"
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S TRIP
It is all of twenty years now since the little incident happened that I am going to tell you about. After the strike of '77, I went into exile in the wild and woolly West, mostly in "bleeding Kansas," but often in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona—the Santa Fé goes almost everywhere in the Southwest.
One night in August I was dropping an old Baldwin consolidator down a long Mexican grade, after having helped a stock train over the division by double-heading. It was close and hot on this sage-brush waste, something not unusual at night in high altitudes, and the heat and sheet lightning around the horizon warned me that there was to be one of those short, fierce storms that come but once or twice a year in these latitudes, and which are known as cloudbursts.
The alkali plains, or deserts, as they are often erroneously called, are great stretches of adobe soil, known as "dobie" by the natives. This soil is a yellowish brown, or perhaps more of a gray color, and as fine as flour. Water plays sad havoc with it, if the soil lies so as to oppose the flow, and it moves like dust before a slight stream. On the flat, hard-baked plains, the water makes no impression, but on a railroad grade, be it ever so slight, the tendency is to dig pitfalls. I have seen a little stream of water, just enough to fill the ditches on each side of the track, take out all the dirt, and keep the ties and track afloat until the water was gone, then drop them into a hole eight or ten feet deep, or if the washout was short, leave them suspended, looking safe and sound, to lure some poor engineer and his mate to death.