“Any restaurants open at this time of night?” he asked of the solitary “cabby” outside the station. “Plenty of them, sir,” the man replied; “step right in and I’ll take you to one.” The train for Little Rock started at six, so he had four hours to eat his supper and take a look at Memphis by moonlight. He had been “roughing it” so long on the boat that the sight of paved streets and substantial city houses seemed almost strange. At half-past five he was in the Little Rock train with some vague, shadowy impressions of Memphis in his mind. What was clearest to him was a high bluff, and at the foot of the bluff a broad sheet of silver that narrowed down to a ribbon in the distance. The silver ribbon was the Mississippi River by moonlight. Dick’s train was ferried across the river on a large steamboat, and soon after daylight the journey across the eastern part of Arkansas began. It was a hundred miles of dismal swamp, the railroad running on an embankment through the swamp. Here and there were log cabins, inhabited by people with skins turned deep yellow by their diet of salt pork, quinine, and vile whiskey. This at least was the train conductor’s explanation of their remarkable color. “They have one advantage over the rest of us,” Dick exclaimed with a shudder; “they must be awfully glad to die!” At Forest City the train began to ascend to higher lands, and the young correspondent soon had his first look at a prairie. It was miles and miles across, without a fence or a tree. But there were some cultivated fields and comfortable homes that were a relief after the depressing swamp. At Little Rock, Dick changed to the Iron Mountain train that was to carry him to Malsem, where he must change again to a little narrow-gauge road for the Hot Springs. There were only men in his car in the Iron Mountain train; men mostly of the cowboy, “dead drop” sort; and all the conversation he heard around him was about shooting and fighting. “I’d ’a’ licked that feller in less than two minutes, if they hadn’t ’a’ pulled me off,” he heard a one-eyed man in the seat in front of him say. “I had the dead drop on him, an’ he knowed it!” came from the seat behind. “Well,” Dick quietly laughed to himself; “here’s another phase of the great American people. I’ve left the superstitious ones and now I’ve fallen in with the fighters. But if they shoot and fight as much as they talk about it, I wonder that any of them are still alive.” CHAPTER XII. A NARROW ESCAPE IN ARKANSAS. “Are you going over to Hot Springs?” It was decidedly the most civilized-looking man in the car who sat down beside Dick and asked the question. He was a young man of twenty-eight or thirty, who proved afterward to be a cotton planter from Georgia. “Can you tell me of a good place to stay there?” the stranger went on, after Dick had answered his question in the affirmative. “I have never been there and know nothing about the place.”