The Sunday before the 22d was a warm bright day, and promised well for the morrow. Soldiers and deputy marshals were the only living beings in sight around the station, and those who tried to descend from passing trains were pushed back again at the point of the bayonet. The course was being kept clear for the coming race. But freight cars loaded with raw lumber and furniture and all manner of household goods, as well as houses themselves, ready to be put together like the joints of a trout rod, were allowed free entry, and stood for a mile along the side-track awaiting their owners, who were hugging the border lines from fifteen to thirty miles away. Captain D. F. Stiles, of the Tenth Infantry, who had been made provost marshal of the new Territory, and whose soldiers guarded the land before and maintained peace after the invasion, raised his telescope at two minutes to twelve on the eventful 22d of April, and saw nothing from the station to the horizon but an empty green prairie of high waving grass. It would take the first horse (so he and General Merritt and his staff in their private car on the side-track decided) at least one hour and a quarter to cover the fifteen miles from the nearest border. They accordingly expected to catch the first glimpse of the leaders in the race with their glasses in about half an hour. The signal on the border was a trumpet call given by a cavalryman on a white horse, which he rode in a circle in order that those who were too far away to hear the trumpet might see that it had been sounded. A like signal was given at the station; but before it had died away, and _not_ half an hour later, five hundred men sprang from the long grass, dropped from the branches of trees, crawled from under freight cars and out of cañons and ditches, and the blank prairie became alive with men running and racing about like a pack of beagles that have suddenly lost a hot trail.