At noon on the fifth day out, we arrived at the “Crossing of the South Platte,” alias “Julesburg,” alias “Overland City,” four hundred and seventy miles from St. Joseph—­the strangest, quaintest, funniest frontier town that our untraveled eyes had ever stared at and been astonished with.

CHAPTER VII.

It did seem strange enough to see a town again after what appeared to us such a long acquaintance with deep, still, almost lifeless and houseless solitude!  We tumbled out into the busy street feeling like meteoric people crumbled off the corner of some other world, and wakened up suddenly in this.  For an hour we took as much interest in Overland City as if we had never seen a town before.  The reason we had an hour to spare was because we had to change our stage (for a less sumptuous affair, called a “mud-wagon”) and transfer our freight of mails.

Presently we got under way again.  We came to the shallow, yellow, muddy South Platte, with its low banks and its scattering flat sand-bars and pigmy islands—­a melancholy stream straggling through the centre of the enormous flat plain, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel rank of scattering trees standing on either bank.  The Platte was “up,” they said—­which made me wish I could see it when it was down, if it could look any sicker and sorrier.  They said it was a dangerous stream to cross, now, because its quicksands were liable to swallow up horses, coach and passengers if an attempt was made to ford it.  But the mails had to go, and we made the attempt.  Once or twice in midstream the wheels sunk into the yielding sands so threateningly that we half believed we had dreaded and avoided the sea all our lives to be shipwrecked in a “mud-wagon” in the middle of a desert at last.  But we dragged through and sped away toward the setting sun.

Next morning, just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles from St. Joseph, our mud-wagon broke down.  We were to be delayed five or six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt.  It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree.  He was very sullen about the matter for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and finally he said: 

“Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making themselves so facetious over it.  I tell you I was angry in earnest for awhile.  I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crippling six or seven other people—­but of course I couldn’t, the old ‘Allen’s’ so confounded comprehensive.  I wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they