The company now began to prepare the way for stage-coaches. During the latter part of November, St. Johns and two companions drove a herd of stock from Jaeger's Ferry to Maricopa Wells. The latter point had been selected for a relay station because of water and the presence of the friendly Pima and Maricopa Indians, who kept the Apaches at a distance. During that drive of something like two hundred miles the pack-mule lost his load one night in the desert. The men went without food for three days, and for thirty-six hours traveled without a drop of water in their canteens. The first stage left San Diego for the East in December with six passengers. Throughout the trip a hostler rode behind herding a relay team. The driver kept his six horses to their utmost for two hours; then stock and wearied passengers were given a two hours' rest, after which the fresh team was hooked up and the journey resumed. In this manner they made about fifty miles a day. Luck was with them. There were several runaways along the route; at Port Davis, Texas, they found the garrison, whom they had expected to supply them with provisions according to orders from Washington, short of food, and they subsisted for the next five days on what barley they felt justified in taking away from the horses; they arrived at Camp Lancaster just after the departure of a Comanche war-party who had stolen all the stock, and were obliged to go two hundred miles further before they could get a relay. But these incidents, and a delay or two because of swollen rivers, were accounted only small mishaps. They came through with their scalps and the mail-sacks--only ten days behind the schedule. Thereafter the Birch line continued its service; and letters came from San Francisco to St. Louis in about six weeks. Occasionally Indians massacred a party of travelers; now and then renegade whites or Mexicans robbed the passengers of their belongings and looted the mail-sacks. But such things were no more than any one expected. James Birch had proved his point. The southern route was practical, and in 1858 the government let a six years' contract for carrying letters twice a week between St. Louis and San Francisco, to John Butterfield of Utica, New York. Thus the Wells-Butterfield interests scored the first decisive victory. Butterfield's compensation was fixed at $600,000 a year and the schedule at twenty-five days. The route went by way of Fort Smith, Arkansas, El Paso, Tucson, and Jaeger's Ferry. Tie one end of a loose string to San Francisco and the other to St. Louis on your wall-map; allow the cord to droop in a semicircle to the Mexican boundary, and you will see the general direction of that road, whose length was 2760 miles. Of this nearly two thousand miles was in a hostile Indian country.