Neither of the couple took their eyes from him as long as he was within sight. One was Ben Fickland, superintendent of the stage line to Denver, known as “Pike’s Peak Express,” the uncle of the horseman. The other was Mr. Russell of the firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell, who had been running for years a daily coach from the Missouri River to Salt Lake City. The two were thrilled not so much by what they saw as by their knowledge of what it meant. On the afternoon that I have named, the first “Pony Express” left St. Joseph, Missouri, on the long westward trip to San Francisco. The four small leather sacks holding the mail were each six by twelve inches, one being fastened at the front and the other at the rear of the saddle, so that the rider sat between them. The pouches were impervious to rain, and for further protection, the letters were wrapped in oiled silk and then sealed. The pouches themselves were locked, not to be opened until they reached their destination. It was ordered from the first that they and their contents should never weigh more than twenty pounds. A rider might carry several hundred letters on each trip, for all were written on the finest of tissue paper. The postage at first was five dollars for each letter, later reduced as the building of the telegraph line progressed, to one dollar an ounce. In addition to this enormous postage, the merchants who were awaiting the important missives joined in paying the carrier a liberal fee, when he maintained the schedule or made quicker time than usual. Mr. Russell had been persuaded by Senator Gwin of California to start the Pony Express. He had made an arrangement with the railways between New York and St. Joseph to run a fast train; the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad used a special engine, and the boat which made the crossing of the Missouri was held so that not a minute would be lost in transferring the mail. A piercing whistle notified the horseman that the boat was waiting for him. About the same time, Harry Roff, mounted on a mettled half-breed broncho, galloped eastward from Sacramento. He, too, did his part in opening one of the most romantic episodes in the history of our country. Two sets of mail bags were approaching each other from points two thousand miles apart, and there were times when this approach was at the astounding speed of forty and even fifty miles an hour! The average daily rate was two hundred and fifty miles a day, but where everything was favorable, or when an express rider was fleeing from the vengeful red men, his pony struck a gait of twenty-five miles and maintained it, when an untrained horse would have dropped in his tracks.