And then Sam gasped and acted like maybe he might pull a gun, thinking me an impostor; because when Sam saw me the last time, stretched out in his caboose on the old mountain division of the U. P., and the train sailing down the toboggan that slid us into Laramie City, past Tie Siding and old Fort Saunders, my hair was black, and I had a different look. Maybe I looked bad. I guess I did, for I carried a gun and a belt of forty rounds, and a butcher knife in a scabbard, just as we all did, for it was the custom of the country; and I had long hair, too, and it was matted and dirty, mixed with pitch that came from camp-fires in the hills. No doubt I looked wretched, but, old Pard, I didn't even feel that way. I felt good, and I was as harmless as a pigeon. But I said something about a hatband of rattlers' rattles that I gave his little girl at Cheyenne, as I rode up to his door aboard a cayuse, and that settled it. We talked about snow-sheds, the Sherman hill, once the highest railroad point in the world, and of old times in general. But what's the use? When you come to New York, I'll meet you at the Waldorf and we'll talk about it all night, and wish the buffalo were still there, and the sagebrush, and the bull-trains, and the other things undisturbed by civilization. So long.... _BILL._ New York, August, 1917. [NOTE--The above letters are from the author's files. "Van" is a multi-millionaire manufacturer living in a middle-western state. For several years his pastime was buffalo hunting and "roughing it" in the wild and woolly west. The author, when a boy of 16, was developing a case of tuberculosis of the lungs, and to escape the fate that had overtaken other members of his family, took Horace Greeley's advice, went west, and grew up with the country. He had been a clerk in a railroad office, and still is in the railroad business in New York City, more than forty years after the events related in the following chapters. He is the only survivor of a family of fourteen, including all of his own children, eight in number.] CHAPTER II TRAINS THAT RAN WITHOUT RAILS. Before railroads were built in the country west of the Missouri River there was, nevertheless, considerable doing in the transportation line. And even after the Union Pacific was built from Omaha to Ogden to connect with the Central Pacific, which carried the rails to the Golden Gate, most of the transportation of the then great Wild West, in the mountains, on the plains and the "Great American Desert," was done by ox-teams. These were run in trains of from ten to fifty or sixty teams, the teams consisting usually of from five to seven yokes of oxen and lead and trail wagons built for the purpose.