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The train moved across the vast sea of burgeoning grass like a stub-tailed and languorous snake. The single track, put down a little over ten years earlier, was still unsettled especially in those parts where the foundations had been washed out and repaired each year or heaved up by a climate in which the temperature ranged from thirty degrees below zero in winter to over a hundred and ten degrees above in summer and violent floods alternated with burning drouths.

For nearly two days the train had been moving through dead flat country, treeless and covered by the green of early summer grass which rippled as the wind played over it like the waters of the ocean itself. For nearly two days the passengers of the train, save at watering stations and maintenance camps where a few Irish or Chinese gathered around it when it stopped, had seen but three human creatures animating the vast and monotonous landscape—a man and a woman standing outside a sod hut shading their eyes to watch the train pass, and a lone rider on a spotted cayuse picking his way up the dry bed of a stream toward the sunset. Once there appeared on the crest of a low rise in an endless sea of grass a dozen buffalo, last remnants of a dying race. The air, if it moved at all, was like the breath of heat from the opened door of an oven.

This was the vast world of the Great Plains which somehow had been passed over by settlers hurrying farther west to the bonanza country of the Rockies and the Pacific Coast where gold and silver were to be had for the effort of picking it up and orange trees grew wherever a passer-by dropped a seed.

The valiant, puffing little engine, with its great oversized funnel, drew a train of eleven cars. One was given over to the United States Post Office, two to freight of a wide assortment, ranging from mining equipment to new gadgets for Mrs. P. J. Meaney, wife of the King of Silver City, and eight coaches for passengers. Of the eight, seven were crowded to overflowing by a wild assortment of people—miners, peddlers, whores, laborers, loafers, cheap gamblers and immigrants only recently arrived on the far distant Atlantic shores. None of them carried much money; they were all bound for the Promised Land to get rich. They were going west toward the setting sun with a little small change in their pockets and a few bank notes hidden in a shoe or sewed into the lining of a jacket or the lining of a bustle. Among them was an eternally optimistic old man of eighty making his twentieth fresh start in life and there was a baby which passed its third-month birthday in a wooden-seated railway coach filled with dust and the smell of sweat, overflowing spittoons and fragments of sandwiches which with coffee was the only food the passengers had seen since leaving Kansas City. By the second day neither the train nor the passengers smelled very good and as the train crawled across the hot, endless plain it left behind it a clouded aroma which sent gophers scurrying into their holes.

They were fleeing the crowded East and the particular Great Depression of their times. They had had enough of the East and the filthy, overcrowded cities and the farms where you worked your life out fourteen hours a day for gains that were not worth the effort. They were all going west into that country where the mountains were filled with gold and silver and copper, where there was sunlight and oranges and you didn’t have to buy coal to keep warm, westward into that land of opportunity, of wealth, of freedom, into the New Country of which the handouts scattered by the railroads sang as angels sing of Paradise.

The eleventh railroad car was different from the others, so different that the car itself and the people in it seemed to belong to another world. It was higher than the others and wider so that it made the train from certain angles resemble a combination of a caterpillar and a fat-tailed North African sheep as much as a stub-tailed copperhead viper. On the outside were painted the words PARLOR-SALOON, and from the outside the Chinese and Irish laborers, who peered through the windows at each watertank stop, saw the passengers through wide sheets of plate glass bordered by looped-up curtains of red plush hung with ball fringe. The Parlor-Saloon car was the effort of a new and rich nation feeling its way toward the luxury which was appropriate to a country bursting at the seams with coal and gold and silver and oil and timber and rich black prairie land, a country divided between the wealth of an industrialist East and the incredible, scarcely touched wealth of a fabulous West.

There wasn’t any royalty in the car. There wasn’t even any nobility; but the Parlor-Saloon car was an expression of hunger for such institutions and of a groping for civilization in terms of mechanical and material expression. Today people, living in a world of streamlined luxurious continental trains and planes which cross the whole continent in a few hours, laugh at the old engravings of such things as the Parlor-Saloon car but at that time it was looked upon as fabulous and breath-taking in its elaborate vulgarity.

Inside, the car was certainly as luxurious as the red and gilt outside and the ball-fringed curtains implied. Also it was stuffy and dusty, especially for travel across vast plains shimmering with the fierce heat of late June and clouded by the dust that rose in clouds from the roadbed, rushing upward through every crevice and crack of the car. The Parlor-Saloon car was an experiment in design, one of the latest, and put on the Kansas City-Denver run because P. J. Meaney, the great magnate of Silver City, Colorado, owned a large share in the railroad. At one end there were sleeping compartments for six people who, among them, paid twice the fare of a whole carload of the shabby and hopeful adventurers in the cars ahead. Not only did they pay well, the passengers in the Parlor-Saloon car, unlike the anonymous mob in the cars ahead, were important enough to have their names recorded on a card, carefully hand lettered, in the possession of the conductor.

They read:

Professor Alonzo da Ponte

Mademoiselle La Belle da Ponte

Mr. Richard Meaney

Mr. Cecil M. Chatsworthy

Mr. Jonathan Wright

Mr. Cyrus L. Laidlaw

Five men and one woman, or rather five men and one girl.

In addition to the six sleeping compartments, the Parlor-Saloon car had seats for twelve people with tables between them upholstered in green baize for the benefit of those who wished to pass the time at cards. These were covered when not in use for gambling by red plush “throws” bordered by ball fringe which matched the elegant red plush curtains. At the far end of the car there was a compartment six by ten feet in size in which lived, ate, slept and cooked a fat, rather squat negro with a bald head and a fringe of curly white wool, who looked rather like an elderly monk in black-face. It was his duty to cook and serve food to the six distinguished passengers and at frequent intervals to go through the car with a broom, a feather duster and a cloth to stir up the dust that settled over everything in thick clouds—clothes, red plush, brasswork, spittoons and mahogany.

The people huddled like cattle in the cars between the freight wagons and the Parlor-Saloon have little part in the story, save as background—that background of milling, hopeful, gambling, breeding, pathetic, tragic, unruly humanity—which was crowding into the West at a time when the East seemed to be already overcrowded. They will be there all along, working deep under the earth in mines, running saloons and gambling establishments, herding cattle, building railroads and digging ditches and dams to hold and release the sweet waters that would turn millions of acres of desert country into fertile land, the people who changed the whole of the West from a wilderness to a cornucopia of fertility and wealth. They will be with us all along, working in P. J. Meaney’s mines and on P. J. Meaney’s ranches, in P. J. Meaney’s general stores, on P. J. Meaney’s railroads, watering and plowing P. J. Meaney’s land and setting out his orchards.

In the Parlor-Saloon the six passengers did not get on too well. Perhaps this was so because among them there was very little conversation, even less indeed that was of common interest. But there were other elements as well, of personality, of ambition, of secrecy, of suspicion and of fear which set people apart even on a miserable, hot, and dusty journey in a parlor car deluxe across the vast unsubdued plains of the western Mississippi Basin during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Cyrus L. Laidlaw was a small man with a potbelly and a chin beard. He carried with him a metal-bound wooden box filled with papers which were mostly contracts or covered with column upon column of figures. He had no lips to speak of and his eyes were an indeterminate shade of cold grey-blue. He appeared to have no interest in the other passengers but spent most of his time at one of the green baize-covered tables poring over the papers or writing letters of which he made many copies in a small machine which required the dampening of the paper each time a copy was made. He was a combination of banker and lawyer and had important connections with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk in the East as well as P. J. Meaney in the West.

Mr. Jonathan Wright was a lawyer for the railroad company and kept mostly to his room. When he came out of it to eat he sometimes talked with Mr. Richard Meaney and Mr. Cecil M. Chatsworthy. He was traveling on a pass with all his expenses paid and was a tired, grey man of about sixty-five, with a full black beard which in relation to his greying hair was like an exclamation point.

Both of these gentlemen will disappear from the story for a time at Denver, a bustling city, half-metropolis, half-frontier, full of silver dollars, gilt and plush, fast women and fabulous yet commonplace stories of the rise from pick and shovel to palace. Their only importance is that they too are very much a part of the background, along with the sweating, dirty people in the coaches ahead, for they too played a big part in the manipulations which brought about the opening of the fabulous West. They helped to provide the capital and to make and break the laws which made possible the wild, swift development of the riches which lay within the earth and in the forests and the streams of the new El Dorado.

Mr. Cecil Chatsworthy was a thin young man of perhaps twenty-seven or eight, rather owlish in appearance, who wore heavy gold-rimmed spectacles. His clothes made of obviously good tweed, a material rare in America, set him apart and made him seem a foreigner, which indeed he was. His bearing during the crossing of the whole continent had been marked by behavior notable for an excitement which seemed strange in a man so delicately built and so apparently bloodless, for his skin had a waxlike pallor and usually he preserved a rather bored and studious calm. Early each morning he rose and left his room to sit at the window of the Parlor-Saloon, looking out, sometimes talking in a low voice and with a very odd accent to his friend and traveling companion, Mr. Richard Meaney. He and Mr. Meaney, alone among the gentlemen on the Parlor-Saloon, did not make use of the spittoons. He retired late, only when the sun had gone down and the landscape fell into darkness. The baggage he carried with him consisted of two Gladstone bags made of heavy plaid material. In his own room, after he had retired, he read by the light of the brass-plated kerosene lamp at the head of his bed, long and thick volumes with strange names and written in an obsolete tongue. But for the glasses and the pallor, he would have been a good-looking fellow, with his slim figure and curly dark hair. He had nice, full-curving lips and a straight nose and the general look of what was considered in the Eighties distinguished and well bred.

Mr. Richard Meaney was the son of P. J. Meaney and was recognized as such and treated with great, if somewhat reserved, civility by Mr. Laidlaw, the banker, and Mr. Wright, the lawyer. He was a big fellow with curly, sandy hair and a freckled face. He too was dressed in tweeds which would have made him, like Mr. Chatsworthy, seem foreign but for something unmistakably rugged and American in his walk and bearing, in the big shoulders and in the grin that from time to time illumined the friendly face. You felt that the big strong hands could straighten a horseshoe or that the big fists could in short order clear a barroom filled with brawling men. An expression and manner of obvious good humor made it evident that he had no quarrel with life nor any part of it. On his young face, life had as yet left no record. It was a face filled with the light of health, of friendliness, of eagerness—a face whose brilliance and charm was likely to warm any heart, and certain to arouse tenderness in the hearts of all women, especially older women.

Professor da Ponte was what might be called a flashy dresser. Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Wright, the banker and the lawyer, regarded him with distaste. Mr. Laidlaw saw in him a certain resemblance to Jim Fisk, a friend of Mr. Gould’s who liked champagne and the French opera and had come to an untimely end at the foot of the grand stairway of the Astor Hotel when he was shot in a brawl over a fancy trollop called Josie Mansfield.

The Professor wore striped trousers and a long frock coat with a fancy checked vest crossed by a heavy gold watch chain from which hung a heavy seal of agate engraved with the figure of a naked woman. When he got down at the water stops for a bit of air he put on a grey top hat over a curled and fancy reddish-brown toupee which no longer matched the greying fringe of hair which surrounded it. His face was pitted with much drinking and his nose was bulbous and cherry-colored between two twinkling very bright blue eyes. He was, he said, a professor both of music and of phrenology, which meant the analysis of character by feeling the bumps of the head. He had offered his services free to Mr. Laidlaw and Mr. Wright and had been coldly rejected by both.

Miss La Belle da Ponte remained during the whole of the trip from Omaha to Denver somewhat of a mystery. She was only seen twice, both times when she emerged from her compartment to take the air on the arm of the Professor—once at Cotchecatche, Nebraska and once at Hangman’s Leap, Kansas. Each time she was regarded with silent and celestial awe and admiration by the Chinese track workers who had never seen a woman so upholstered in bustles, passementerie, tassels and feathers, and with frank, loud, and vulgar admiration by the Irish; and small wonder it was, for it had been months since many a man at the water stops had seen any woman at all and it is probable that never in all their lives had any of them seen a woman so lush and so stimulating at so tender an age.

For it was clear despite the sophistication of her modish clothes and the elaborate and intricate structure of puffs, braids, and curls which adorned her small head, that she was young—very young indeed. Also it was clear to the most cynical and experienced eye that she had, even beneath all the upholstery, a superlative figure—a waist that could be encircled by two fairly good-sized masculine hands, with voluptuous swellings both above and below, the latter exaggerated by an elaborate bustle adorned with long fringe which swung and swayed tantalizingly as she walked up and down the rough path that separated the train from the watertank. Atop the elaborate coiffure, she wore a tiny hat adorned with cherries and tilted slightly forward at a pert angle. The hair was a tawny gold color and the large eyes were blue with long dark lashes. The mouth was curved and generous and even voluptuous and the snub nose tilted a little.

To a young man, she was an awesome spectacle which made him feel hot and awkward. To an experienced man she was all that was desirable save that her obvious youth and unlined face augured an uninteresting lack of experience. To the old lecher, she was the type which induced drooling. In any case, one could not fail to notice her. The sauciness, the costume, the false demureness of the modestly downcast gaze, the flamboyance of the costume were all designed to attract, startle and excite. It was then small wonder that the Chinamen were struck dumb and the Irish were rendered vocal and demonstrative.

This then was the group which occupied the Parlor-Saloon car that was the latest contribution of designers of luxurious travel in the largest and richest country in the world. It was an ill-assorted group. Mr. Laidlaw, the banker, had long ago become more susceptible to columns of figures and crooked manipulations than to the charms of women and Mr. Wright, the lawyer, got more pleasure at his age out of torturing phrases of the legal code than in studying the female form. Both regarded Miss da Ponte once, put her into the dusty mental pigeon-hole where trollops had once been filed away, and went back to the work in which had been sublimated long since whatever interest in females they had ever possessed.

The two brief glimpses of Miss da Ponte merely terrified the Englishman, Mr. Chatsworthy, and his young American friend, Mr. Richard Meaney. In all their experience, even on rare visits to London in the past, they had never encountered anyone quite so stimulating and so frightening. It was clear that Professor da Ponte was guarding her with all the strictness of a Spanish duenna, from what the whistling of the Irish track workers made clear but for what they did not know. Both young men, being shy and inexperienced, did not discuss her even with each other. The most they learned about her came from the Professor who, unasked, explained that he was her uncle, that she was a singer of remarkable talents and that she was going west on a tour and would appear presently at several grand concerts in the Denver Opera House.

“She has sung,” the Professor said, “in all the great opera houses of Europe. Kings and Princes have thrown pearls and diamonds at her feet.” He added, “She is very sensitive—a real artiste—very full of temperament.” Then he sighed and rubbing his hands and looking away into the distance out of the plush and ball-fringed bordered windows, he observed, “I sometimes wish that she was less sensitive and more sociable. I am certain that you young gentlemen would find her stimulating company. But I cannot induce her to live in the world, among people.” Again he sighed and added philosophically, “I suppose that is the way artistes are.”

Then he pulled out a silver flask from his hip pocket, summoned the old negro who brought glasses and offered both young men drinks of Bourbon. “Good Bourbon,” he said, “from my brother’s ancestral home in Kentucky.”

Meaney and Chatsworthy accepted the drink but did not like it very much. Chatsworthy had never tasted Bourbon and young Meaney, who had only recently begun to drink anything at all, had tasted only Scotch which he did not like very much. The Bourbon he liked even less. Then the Professor took out a pack of cards, shuffled them in a professional way and asked, “Would you gentlemen be interested in a little game of cards to pass the time?”

But neither Mr. Meaney nor Mr. Chatsworthy had ever played cards. Mr. Chatsworthy returned to reading Suetonius and Mr. Meaney and the Professor continued a rather stilted conversation which led nowhere. Mr. Chatsworthy only looked up from his reading now and then to regard the vast, inhuman, terrifying expanses of flat country lying beyond the windows and to murmur to Meaney, “What a country! What a huge country! What can anybody do with it?”

Once, early in the evening of the third day sounds of discord came from the compartment of Mademoiselle da Ponte. The voices were those of the Professor and of the oversensitive Mademoiselle. Clearly they were quarreling but very little of what they said could be overheard. It was only when the train stopped for a moment at a watertank, that a phrase or two became audible as the Professor opened the door to descend from the train for air. As the door opened, the two young men heard the voice of the fragile Mademoiselle da Ponte saying, “Well, I’m goddam sick of being shut up in here!”

As the Professor turned and saw them and knew that they had heard, he said, “The diva is having a little temperament. It means nothing—nothing at all.”

He swept airily off as if he would be through forever with the two young men once they arrived at the end of the journey. He had found them difficult and uncommunicative and at last was ready to dismiss them as two young men of moderate means going west like himself to make their fortunes and so of no use or interest to him. He did not at the moment know that he was passing up a great opportunity for he did not know that young Dick was the son of the great P. J. Meaney, King of all the Calamares Country. Indeed, he was not quite sure who P. J. Meaney was, although he had heard the name or read it somewhere many times.

Nothing much of interest happened during the remainder of the trip. Presently at ten in the evening the train drew into the depot of Denver, a great sprawling, new city built where the vast expanse of the Great Plains rises, at first imperceptibly, into the terrifying vastness of the Rockies. Mr. Laidlaw, the banker, and Mr. Wright, the lawyer, disappeared into the noisy, vulgar depths of the city. The two young men went to the biggest and newest hotel and the Professor and his niece disappeared in a horse-drawn hack with four trunks loaded on the roof. They made no mention of their destination.

Beyond Denver lay the western world—that new world toward which men, women and children were trekking like ants across the Great Plains. Already there were thousands of them settled here and there, in ramshackle cities, in rich valleys, on the edges of the vast forests, in watered places in the desert. Deep in the mountain there were mines and indeed whole cities which had grown up around the mines, yet close at hand just beyond the limits of the towns there were vast wildernesses where one could journey for days without ever seeing a house or indeed a human creature. There were deserts where prospectors and immigrants sometimes lost themselves to be discovered later, if at all, merely as a heap of bones picked clean and white in the dry air by birds and wild animals. The white man was filtering into the huge wilderness, wandering along trails in streambeds, always a little startled by the grandeur and color and beauty of this new country where the sky seemed bigger than anywhere else in the world, and the stars more brilliant and the air more clear and tangy. Even the most coarse and sodden experienced a new feeling of dignity and breathed a little more freely in the presence of the great mountains, reaching snow-capped into the blueness of the sky, of the brilliant walled canyons, the clear rushing streams, the deep, dark forests and the still, high lakes mirroring the deep cobalt skies.

In all that mountain-desert wilderness there was not much man-made order, not too much law and sometimes little more than a rude and primitive justice.

Young Mr. Meaney, home from three years spent in England, was returning to his native country, his heart overflowing with nostalgia for the mountains, the streams, the high mountain meadows. In his heart, although he never mentioned it even to his tutor, Mr. Chatsworthy, he felt a little as if he had spent the last three years in a cramped hall bedroom, for he belonged to this wild, free country. He was among the first white men born there. All his brothers and sisters had been born farther east—in Pittsburgh, in Chicago, in Omaha, in St. Louis, during the wanderings of a father who was always trying something new, always hoping to strike it rich.

Young Meaney was the youngest of the family, younger than his nearest sister by ten years, born after his father P. J. Meaney had struck it rich, and so he was different from the others, as his father had wanted him to be. P. J. Meaney had long had an ambition to be a gentleman and when it became evident, even to himself, that he never would be, he had concentrated all his desires for gentility upon his youngest son. That was why he had sent young Dick east to school and later to England to continue his studies at Oxford. Young Dick, the old man had determined, was to be educated so that he would know how to get the most out of his money, instead of just spending it to buy things.

But young Dick hadn’t liked the plan too well. He had submitted to it but all the time he felt cramped and uneasy at the school in the East and later on at Oxford. More perhaps than any of his brothers and sisters, he belonged in the West.

And now in a hotel bedroom in Denver which he shared with Mr. Chatsworthy he was on his way home, so happy and so excited that he could not sleep all the night before the final leg of the long, slow journey from England. He would have gone out to explore the garish splendors of the new city but for the fact that his companion was exhausted and wanted only to sleep. Unused to the rocky swaying and bumping of the long train journey across the plains, Mr. Chatsworthy had scarcely slept at all. But he was suffering too from an exhaustion of the spirit brought on by the fact that since his arrival in the barbarous New World he had been constantly overwhelmed and stunned by the vast size of the United States, by the great cities, the endless expanse of rich farms, but most of all by the terrifying emptiness and size of the vast grass-covered plains. Very plainly Mr. Chatsworthy, who had spent most of his life in a sleepy, ancient university town in little England, was so flabbergasted by the grandeur, the size, the noisiness of this new and growing world, that he was completely exhausted.

In background he was about as far away from young Dick as it was possible to be, for he had been born in the vicarage of St. Dunstan’s Church at Cowperdown, a village in the neat, tight, ordered parklike country of Gloucestershire where he was never out of sight of a house and on each hill there was a neat compact little village of ancient houses. The vicarage itself had been built in 1691 and the church had been there since the thirteenth century. And during all the time that intervened there had been a tight human continuity of installations, of habits, of customs, even of incomes. Mr. Chatsworthy was the son of the Vicar, who in turn was the youngest cousin of the Earl of Cantwell. There had always been a living from church and state and a small income from the Earl’s estate. Nobody in that world had ever thought of adventure or making a fortune or even of money, for money was always there in sufficient quantities to provide for sturdy and good solid English food and an occasional modest trip to London or the Continent. Whatever spirit of adventure there was in Mr. Chatsworthy had been confined up to now to the exploration of Greek and Latin literature or the finding of sympathetic “diggings” in the town of Oxford. He had been a little startled when one day he had found himself tutoring a big, rather awkward American boy called Richard Meaney from a place with the outlandish name of Silver City, Colorado, and even more astonished to find that he liked the boy and his quick, eager mind and that there was a remarkable sympathy between the two of them, perhaps because each wanted to be, at least a little, what the other already was. But the astonishment of Mr. Chatsworthy knew no bounds when at the end of three years young Dick said, “I am going home next month, back to Colorado. How about going along with me?” And Mr. Chatsworthy was even more astonished to hear himself saying, “Yes, I’d like to. That new country must be very interesting.”

From that moment on Mr. Chatsworthy blew hot and cold regarding the tremendous project of a voyage into the barbaric wilderness. One moment the quiet, ancient peace and security of Oxford and the vicarage drew him back and the next some obscure strain of that adventurous spirit which lies buried, however deep, in every Englishman, drove him on. Now in the hotel bedroom with the sounds of a wild, new city which never slept rising from the streets below his window—the screams, the laughter, the drunken shouting, once even the sound of gunfire—the struggle still went on. Trembling a little he thought, “Maybe I don’t belong here. Perhaps I have made a serious error. Perhaps I should turn back.”

The terror and astonishment of the long journey still clung to him and the memory of the strange rough people packed like cattle in the part of the train ahead of the Parlor-Saloon car, the sight of the Chinese and the Irish at the tank stops. At home laborers like the Irish knew their places. They did not make mocking remarks about people’s clothes nor bawdy sounds at the sight of someone like Mademoiselle da Ponte. In this new country there didn’t seem to be any distinctions of class except, of course, those of money which created the colossal gap between the people in the railway carriages ahead and those in the Parlor-Saloon car.

Both Professor da Ponte and Mademoiselle da Ponte had disturbed him, for in the narrow circle of life at the vicarage, in the sleepy scholastic life at Oxford, or even in the rare trips to London, he had never seen anything like them. He had actually found himself unable to speak in response to the overcordial, loquacious sallies of the glib-tongued Professor himself. He had tried to rationalize them and protect himself psychologically by telling himself that the pair—the Professor and the young diva—were something out of Dickens like the Crummles family in Nicholas Nickleby.

The pair had made an impression on both young men. This was especially so of Mademoiselle da Ponte, although neither young man was quite certain of the implications of the impression. Like most virginal Anglo-Saxon young men they did not understand the full implications of love until they had actually experienced it. Although they never mentioned the subject of Mademoiselle da Ponte, they both felt strongly the effect of that strange combination of freshness and provocation, of innocence and voluptuousness, of which she was an extraordinary example. Young Meaney fell asleep thinking of her and Mr. Chatsworthy found in the end, when he at last fell asleep, that her image far outweighed his terror and astonishment at the size, noisiness and crudeness of the New World.

At eight the next morning, the train for Silver City, Leadville, Meeker’s Gulch, McGovern’s Peak and “points west” stood in the Denver depot taking aboard passengers. A good many of them, like young Meaney and Mr. Chatsworthy, had been passengers on the train west across the plains and were simply using Denver as a junction and transfer point.

The Silver City train resembled very much the train that had crossed the plains, save that for one car it was infinitely more dilapidated. That one car outdid in elegance even the Parlor-Saloon car in which the young men had traveled across the dusty prairies. It was painted a bright blue and inside all the fittings were of mahogany and gold plate, even to the spittoons. The curtains were also blue, not the blue of plush but of expensive velvet and were ornamented with gold fringe. On the outside in gold letters was the legend, “The Colorado Blue Bell, P. J. Meaney, Silver City, Colorado.” It had been sent all the way down the valleys, mountains and canyons, past Indian encampments and prospectors’ diggings to meet the youngest son of the Meaney family on his return from England to the domain of the regal Meaneys.

It was toward this car that the two young men, having overslept, made their way at the last minute. Indeed they were actually late, but the train dispatcher was holding the train for them on the pretense that there was something wrong with the engine, although the real reason was that P. J. Meaney owned the whole of the railroad and the train dispatcher would catch hell and probably be fired if he allowed the train to depart without Meaney’s youngest son.

On the platform bedlam reigned. Families pushed mattresses and bags through the windows. Babies squalled. Men fought for seats. The platforms were jammed with people and the train dispatcher was kept busy shoving people and baggage off the roofs with the warning that at the first tunnel (known as Ma Meeker’s Diggins) all would be swept off.

In the midst of the bedlam stood the Professor and Mademoiselle da Ponte surrounded by six large trunks and several bags and paper parcels obviously containing hats. The Professor, already a little under the weather, kept shouting in a regal manner for aid with the trunks but in all the confusion no one paid him any heed. Beside him Mademoiselle da Ponte, elegantly dressed, enveloped in the now familiar air of innocence and voluptuousness, stood quietly with downcast eyes.

It was young Meaney who spied them first. He said to Chatsworthy, “Look! There’s the Professor and Mademoiselle!” And Mr. Chatsworthy in his turn spied them with a sensation of alarm.

“They must be taking this train. I thought they were staying in Denver.”

Then young Meaney went up boldly and addressed them saying, “Good morning. May I help you?”

The agitated demeanor of the Professor changed with the speed of lightning to one of suavity and cordiality.

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “You could help me to get someone to load us on the train.”

The train dispatcher, a tough red-faced Irishman, who had worked his way up from the lowly station of pick-and-shovel man by knowing on which side his bread was buttered, interrupted them. He took off his hat and addressed young Meaney, “Good morning, sir. I’m glad to see you back. We’ve been holding the train for you.”

Young Meaney held out his hand and the train dispatcher took it with a glow of pleasure. Young Meaney said, “You can get someone to help us get our luggage aboard and help out this gentleman and lady. The train looks full.”

“Full, sir,” said the train dispatcher, “there’d be more room in a can of sardines.”

“Better put them and their trunks in our car.” He turned to the Professor. “How far are you going?”

“To Silver City,” said the Professor.

“That works out fine,” said young Meaney. “We’re going to the same place.” To the train dispatcher he said, “Better get started. We’re late already and Pop’ll be mad if it’s my fault.”

“All right, sir. Don’t worry! I’ll tell the engineer to make it up. You’ll be there on the dot or ahead of time. Don’t you worry, sir.”

He turned away and out of nowhere appeared a half-dozen men who shouldered the trunks and bags and swept them aboard the Colorado Blue Bell.

Then for the first time, Mademoiselle da Ponte raised her downcast eyes (at least openly she raised them, for from under the dark lashes she had been observing the two young men all the while with stealthy sidelong glances). She said prettily, “Thank you, sir. I don’t know what we would have done without you.”

Young Meaney took off his hat and bowed slightly. “It’s nothing at all,” he said. “From now on you needn’t worry. This is my father’s territory.”

Despite the liquor the Professor had already consumed—the early morning drinks which he described as “phlegm-cutters”—his senses became astonishingly alert. He regarded the young man in a new light.

“Come along,” said young Meaney. “We’d better get aboard.” And he bowed again to permit the young lady to lead the way toward the Colorado Blue Bell.

He followed and then came the Professor and finally the pale Mr. Chatsworthy with misgivings in his heart. For two thousand miles across the vast continent he had watched the demeanor of his young charge gradually changing from one of dignity and reticence to one of gusto and greater freedom and cordiality. It was as if, like an artichoke in the process of being consumed, layer after layer of reserve had been peeled off. The whole slow progress from the spires of Oxford to the bawdy noisiness of Denver had worked so remarkable a change that for a moment Mr. Chatsworthy stared through his thick spectacles at young Meaney as at a stranger.

Suddenly the engine gave out a series of shrill blasts and the small army which had been carrying the luggage aboard the glittering Colorado Blue Bell took up positions in formation along the side of the train and went to work on that element of the prospective passengers which had not yet found places in the crowded train. They pulled some off the roofs of the cars, some off the platforms. Others they beat back to a safe distance so that the train could start without running over any disappointed passengers. One woman separated from her children who were already aboard the train, screamed and beat two of the guards over the head indiscriminately with her umbrella and then made a dash for it. Two tough customers received bloody noses and one man was knocked out. Finally with another series of shrill blasts, the wheezy engine got under way, carrying those who were lucky enough to find places aboard and make the second stage of their journey into that fabulous new country where all of them planned to make a fresh start in life and become millionaires.

The train moved slowly, gradually picking up speed, until the sound of the wails and imprecations of the travelers stranded on the platform were no longer audible.

Inside the Colorado Blue Bell the four passengers settled down among the blue velvet and gold-plated spittoons to the routine of drinking and fighting the heat. The Professor had Bourbon, the young men Scotch and soda and Mademoiselle da Ponte contented herself with a glass of barley water tinctured with lemon. The drinks were prepared by a colored boy called Esau, dressed in a strange costume of blue velvet with gold buttons and yellow lapels. It was part of his duties to meet and welcome young Meaney and Mr. Chatsworthy but his first descent in costume from the private car had aroused such a sensation among the bawdy, noisy immigrants on the platform that he had retreated quickly and remained under cover while the station master and his strong-arm squad had welcomed the young gentlemen and taken care of their baggage.

Now that the train had pulled out and he was no longer greeted by the shouts and hoots of the white trash in the coaches ahead, he was enjoying once more the color and cut of his celestial blue uniform.

At first the conversation was somewhat strained. Even the Professor, knocked out by all the splendor of the blue velvet and gold-plated spittoons, found his usual loquacity dried for a time at the source. It was not until he had taken out a pair of canary yellow gloves, a little worn at the seams and donned them, did he completely recover his composure. Then he explained the misunderstanding which had caused him and his niece to pause only for a night in Denver and then go on to Silver City.

The misunderstanding, he said, concerned dates. There had been some confusion about months. In one contract, he said, the month mentioned for Mademoiselle da Ponte’s appearance at the Denver Opera House had been noted as July, in the other, August. So they now had a month to spare and having heard that there was a splendid Opera House in Silver City, he had decided to go there and seek an engagement for his niece during the extra month.

“Why, yes,” said Dick Meaney. “My father owns and operates the Opera House there.”

Again the Professor brightened perceptibly. “Perhaps he would give my niece an audition?”

“I’m sure it can be arranged,” said young Meaney.

Now that he had left Denver, he had begun, to Mr. Chatsworthy’s alarm, to expand even more and to shed more and more of the artichoke leaves of reticence and dignity.

In his corner, like an alarmed and watchful mouse, Mr. Chatsworthy was in his heart growing more and more terrified. Outside the window as the train began to climb, this way and that along the swift flowing rivers, on the edge of deep canyons, through low and suffocating tunnels, the country grew steadily more magnificent and awful and frightening. There were mountains alone bigger than a whole English county. The scenery became more and more savage and overwhelming. Even the colors struck him as crude, violent and even terrifying. There were whole mountains of blue and purple and red, splotched with the bright green of the summer foliage of the hardwood trees and the black green of pines which seemed to grow out of nothing as if they were glued precariously to the sides of the brilliant precipices which rose straight up and up into infinity by the side of the train.

But these things alarmed him perhaps even less than the behavior of the Professor which became steadily more and more intimate under the pressure of P. J. Meaney’s excellent Bourbon. Mr. Chatsworthy was also alarmed by those warm glances which shone out every time the dark lashes of Mademoiselle da Ponte fluttered over her barley water, and by the extraordinary costume of the negro boy, Esau. He was accustomed to the white stockings and powdered wigs worn on state occasions by the innumerable footmen of his cousin, the Earl at the big house in London, but they seemed mediocre and insignificant in comparison with Esau’s habillements. The only time he had ever seen such costumes, they were worn by the end men of an American minstrel show giving performances on the quay at Brighton.

But what troubled him even more was the spectacle of the Professor’s skill as a spitter. Not only did the Professor keep himself well elevated with Bourbon, he began, as he warmed up and the atmosphere grew more cordial, to chew tobacco as well. The action, new to Mr. Chatsworthy, appeared to produce incredible quantities of saliva of which the Professor relieved himself at frequent intervals by spitting a considerable distance into one of the gold-plated spittoons. When Esau proposed to move the spittoon a little nearer to him, the Professor waved the colored boy away with a grandiose gesture of his yellow-gloved hands, saying, “No! It’s just the right distance for me. That’s my best distance.”

It seemed to Mr. Chatsworthy that as rapidly as the Professor absorbed Bourbon and water, he rid himself of the excessive moisture by spitting. Mr. Chatsworthy, like all Englishmen, had an admiration for skill in sports and could not but admire grudgingly the accuracy with which the Professor landed a stream of tobacco juice across Mademoiselle da Ponte, straight into the opening of the gold-plated spittoon, an action which the young lady accepted with the calm and confidence of a female target in a knife-throwing act.

As the train wound through the mountains, higher and higher up canyons and through tunnels, Mr. Chatsworthy noticed something else from the windows of the Colorado Blue Bell. At each stop and at every small cluster of houses set precariously on the edge of the canyons or in a clearing of mountain pines, Mr. Chatsworthy discovered the name P. J. Meaney. It adorned the fronts of the ramshackle general stores, grocery stores, and meat markets. It even appeared painted on at least two shacks that served as depots—Meaneytown and Meaneyville. It seemed to him that the name Meaney in this wild, vast country was like the crown and the coat-of-arms which marked buildings, institutions and palaces and post boxes belonging to the King.

“King P. J. Meaney,” Mr. Chatsworthy reflected, trying the sound over in his head. “King P. J. Meaney, the First,” and looking at his friend he thought, “Richard, Duke of Silver City.”

But his friend, by now, was deep in animated conversation with the Professor and Mademoiselle da Ponte. They were planning Mademoiselle da Ponte’s first appearance in Silver City at the Opera House as Violetta in La Traviata. It was one of the two roles which she knew. The engagement would fill in nicely during the wait for the opening of what the Professor referred to as “The Denver season.” Young Dick, enthusiastic by now, was sure he could arrange the engagement.