Next I decided to wander down the Platte and see what that section was like. Ranches extended some fifty odd miles below Denver, about to the point where the South Platte River makes its big bend eastwards, and at this point a new town was just being started. It was named Evans in honour of the man who had been Governor of Colorado before McCook, and its _raison d’être_ was that the first railroad into Colorado was now being opened so far for traffic. This railroad was the Denver Pacific R. R. running from Cheyenne to Denver, and Evans was the half-way house. The city was just three weeks old when I got there, and the site of it was on the north bank of the Platte, across which a bridge was going to be built. I put up at the ranch of a very friendly old ranchman, Godfrey, no relation to the other Godfrey down at Saguache; he had a bunch of American cattle, and a wife and son, the latter a very fine young fellow. Godfrey let me use his rifle, an old-fashioned small-bored muzzle-loader with a heavy octagon barrel nearly four feet long, I should say. Armed with this wondrous weapon I sallied out after antelopes, of which there were any number around there, and I got my first lessons in stalking. Stalking antelope, like everything else, was quite new to me, and I was as keen as possible to take lessons in whatever thing there was to be learnt. There was something, though, to be learnt in that little mushroom city of Evans which I most certainly did not anticipate. When I rode over there I found that it consisted of some forty or fifty houses of raw boards, mostly half-finished or with their roofs in process of being “shingled,” stuck down here and there on the bare prairie. The parched yellow bunch-grass, over which wild Texas cattle had grazed a month before, grew up to, and under, the little frame buildings which were raised for the most part six inches or a foot off the ground on stone or brick props; the earth was cut up in every direction by the ruts of waggon-wheels, and piles of newly sawn lumber lay about. In the middle of all snorted the locomotive, the earliest that ever ran on the plains of Colorado--for the railroad had come at last, and this was the end of the track, the first completed section of the iron road, in Colorado Territory. I was riding past a bar-room where there were some men with whisky bottles and glasses set out before them, when one of them sung out to me: “Come ’n hev’ a drink.” “No, thank you,” I replied without pulling up. In a moment out flashed a revolver pointed straight at my head. “Yes, you will,” said the same voice with emphasis, “or else----” What “else” meant was left to the imagination, but I didn’t find it hard to guess. My reply was: “Oh, certainly,” and I sprang from my saddle saying, “I’d rather drink than be shot any day.” And without more ado I took my dose. But I can’t say I liked my society.