Our engine was perpetually screaming to the cattle to get off the track, a series of short, sharp screams that ought to have sufficed to have warned even cattle to get out of the way. As a rule they recognized the advisability of leaving the rails, but one wretched cow, whether she was deaf, or whether she was stupid, or whether, like Cole's dog, she was too proud to move, I cannot say, but in spite of the screams of the engine she held her ground and got the worst of the collision. The cow-catcher struck her, and as we passed her, the poor beast lay in the blood-mottled snow-drift at the bottom of the bank, still breathing, but almost dead. As for the train, the cow might have been only a fly. And so we went on climbing--herds of cattle grazing on the slopes, and in the splendid "parks" which lay stretched out beneath us wherever the hills stood far apart--with frequent snow-sheds interrupting all conversation or reading with their tunnel-like intervals, till we reached the Red Granite canyon, with great masses of that splendid stone fairly mobbing the narrow course of a mountain stream, and beyond them snow--snow--snow, stretching away to the sky-line without a break. And then Sherman, the highest point of the mountains upon the whole line--only some 8000 feet though, all told--with a half-constructed monument to Oakes Ames crowning the summit. When finished, this massive cone of solid granite blocks will be sixty feet high. And then on to the Laramie Plains, with some wonderful reaches of grazing-ground, and almost fabulous records of ranching profits, And here is Laramie itself, that will some day be a city, for timber and minerals and stock will all combine to enrich it. But to-day it is desolate enough, muffed up in winter, with snowbirds in great flights flecking the white ground. And so out again into the snow wilderness, here and there cattle snuffing about on the desolate hill-sides, and snow-sheds--timber-covered ways to prevent the snow drifting on to the track--becoming more frequent, and the white desolation growing every mile more utter. And the moon got up to confuse the horizon of land with the background of the sky. And so to sleep, with dreams of the Arctic regions, and possibilities, the dreariest in the world, of being snowed up on the line.