Once—it was while 'Demus Blake was still with
me—I had a long and most delicious period
of slumber, an interrupted by jerks or concussions;
and whenI awoke, quite a new man, and
revived to an extent at which I now wonder, I
found myself supported by the strong patient
arm of my conductor, who had been galloping
by my side for miles, managing both
bridles with his disengaged hand. "I thought it
would fresh you up, colonel!" said the brave
fellow.

Not all my mentors throughout that phantom
ride across prairieland were as frank as Blake, nor
as merry as Shem. But the mail-bag riders turned
out good fellows in all main points, and I can safely
say that I found but two or three surly or ill-
natured persons among all those who garrisoned
the block-houses: while fortunately it fell to my
lot on no occasion to be accompanied by one of
these. In the prairie, as in the world at large,
I found good-feeling the rule, cynicism or malice
the exception, though I am bound to say that
the ill-conditioned individuals made twice as
much noise and stir as their more amiable mates.
The first start had been difficult, but at each
succeeding station I received my remount without
much delay or parley. The "privilege of the
post" was conceded to me, while I was always
welcome to a share of the rations in each little
community. On the whole, I found the men
cheerful in their strange isolation. They were
liberally paid and not ill-fed, and they looked
forward to a pension in the event of becoming
crippled by some Indian hatchet-stroke or arrow-
shot. Planted in the wilderness, with the
prospect of being presently encompassed by deep
drifts of snow, over whose frozen surface the
wolves would come to howl and scratch at their
doors, like dogs seeking admittance, they were
in fair spirits and undismayed. Their habitual
talk was of the wild adventures that formed the
every-day life of that frontier of Christendom;
of Indian stratagems and cruelty, of panthers
and "grizzlies," pronghorns and buffaloes.
Several of them had consorted familiarly with the
painted tribes of the desert, and spoke sundry
Indian dialects as fluently as their mother tongue.
I found these hardy men kind hosts enough;
they would hush their talk, not to disturb me
as I lay down on a heap of skins and blankets,
to sleep, while the guide saddled the horses;
and they soon ceased to ridicule my apparently
capricious refusal of whisky. "Mebbe the
colonel's right!" (Colonel is the Western title
of courtesy), they would say in their blunt politeness.
Once I found the inmates of a station,
built on swampy ground, quite helpless and
prostrate with fever. The fever had abated when
the healthy norther began to blow, but the poor
fellows were cramped with pains, and very
feeble, and only one of the party could crawl
about to cook and feed the fire. I had need to
fix my mind on the reward of success, on the
distant goal glittering far ahead, for it was no
light task that I had undertaken. The thought
of Emma nerved me, and I felt an Englishman's
dogged resolve to win, to fight on, and
to break sooner than bend. But the fatigues
of that journey surpassed all my conceptions.
By day and night, under a glaring sun or through
the frost and cutting northerly winds, on we
pressed, fording streams, threading the way
through marshes, stumbling among the burrows
of prairie dogs, or dashing across boundless
plains. I almost learned to hate the long
terraces of turf, the illimitable sweeps of dark
green surface, the blue horizons, the swells of
gently sloping earth, smooth enough for the
passage of wheeled carriages. On we went, till
the long grass, mixed with flowers and wild
tufts of the flax-cotton, gave place to a shorter
and crisper herbage, the true "buffalo grass"
that the bisons love; or till water became
scarce, and the sage plant replaced the
blossomed shrubs of the west, and the springs were
brackish, and here and there our horses' hoofs
went cranching over a white stretch of desert,
strewn with crystals of salt that glittered in the
sun. We saw little of Indians, and of game
still less. The latter, my guides told me, had
been chiefly scared away, by the constant
passage of emigrants. As for the savages, we
sometimes saw the plumed heads, the tapering
lances, and the fluttering robes, of a troop of
wild horsemen, against the crimson sky of evening;
but they offered us no molestation, and the
riders said they were Utahs on the look-out for
"buffler droves" returning from the south. Of
the fatigue of that interminable ride, the aching
joints, the stiffened sinews, the pains that
racked my overstrained muscles, I can give no
just idea. Still less can I convey any sense
of the continual strain upon the intellect and
the perceptive faculties, or how my brain grew
as weary as my limbs.

I shall never forget the evening of my arrival
in Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah territory,
and New Jerusalem of the Mormons. I had
been encouraged by the guides, to look upon this
town in the deserts as a turning-point in the
journey, beyond which I should be in less peril
from Indians, and after which a comparatively
short ride would carry me to more civilised
regions. But, to my surprise, I found the
inmates of the station at Salt Lake City quite
as lonely as, and more suspicious and moody than,
in the far-off posts among the prairies. They
were Gentiles in the midst of a fanatic
population, wholly swayed by the hierarchy of that
strange creed whose standard had been set up
in the lawless wastes of the west. Nor was it
long before I heard the cause of their dark
looks and low spirits.

"Where's Josh Hudson?" asked the rider
who had come with me, when the first greetings
had been exchanged.

"Who knows?" answered the man
addressed; " I don't. Seth said he went to the
town, while I were in the corral with the hosses.
If so, all I can say is, he never come back."

"When was that, Seth?" asked the newly-
arrived rider.

"Two days agone," answered Seth, as he
scraped the surface of a half-exhausted quid of