“Wait till you wake up tomorrow,” said the brakeman, who overheard them, “and you’ll see snow.”
“You look sort of honest,” Bennie laughed, “but I don’t believe you.”
“All right,” said the brakeman. “Want to bet?”
“Can’t,” said Bennie. “All my money’s in hundred dollar bills.”
“We cross the height of land in Wyoming before you’re awake,” the trainman went on. “We’re up 7,000 feet or more there—in Wyoming.”
“You mean the Rocky Mountains? Do we cross ’em at night?” cried Spider. “Gee, what tough luck.”
“Not much mountains where we cross. But you’ll see mountains, all right, if you don’t sleep all the morning—and snow, too.”
“Bring me some now, I want to take it to bed with me,” said Bennie.
Spider, whose turn it was to sleep in the lower berth that night, pulled up the curtain as soon as it was daylight, and looked out. He gave a jump, reached up and poked Bennie awake, and began to dress. In ten minutes the boys were out on the observation platform, staring hard. The train was in Wyoming now, on a vast, high plateau, a country that didn’t look like anything they had ever seen. It rolled away to the horizon in every direction, like a tossing, oily gray sea, without a tree on it, apparently without any grass on it worth mentioning, but covered with pale green sage bushes in clumps here and there. It was a naked, desolate looking land, and yet they saw great droves of cattle wandering over it, and now and then a white strip of road, and finally, all of a sudden as the train rounded a bend, seemingly right beside the track a couple of miles away, a huge blue mountain covered completely on top with a cap of white snow, and streaked with snow all down the ravines on its northern side.
The scouts gave a yell of joy at the sight. “A snow mountain!” they cried.