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As the train entered these cañons of the West where there seems hardly room for aught but the rivers that foam through them, though engineers have found a way, I felt again the fatuity of much of life. Restrictions and constrictions seemed a great part of life; also misunderstandings.

The train screamed on through the mountains; hummed, on a hollow note, across trestles; roared through cañons; and I was glad when we emerged at last, mounting upward, at Black Kettle which I had selected, looking on the great map in the railway booking-hall back East, because its name appealed to me, in the centre of a string of appealing names, thus: Placer, Antelope Spring, Adobe, Black Kettle, Lone Tree, Fort Lincoln, Montezuma. But by the time that we reached Black Kettle I had quite decided that there was nothing for me to do in that country but to help to keep the railway in repair!

Take Black Kettle for example. It consisted of seven houses: one hotel, one store, one boarding-house, four residential houses with their vegetable patches. The inhabitants were: the hotel proprietor, the store-keeper, the store-keeper's wife, the barman, the Chinese cook, four section men (including the section boss), a telegraph operator (who was also station agent).