Both dismounted at the parade-ground gate, and he kissed her again when she was not looking, upon which she very properly slapped him; and he took the horses to the stable.  He sat down to tea at the hotel, and found the meal consisted of black potatoes, gray tea, and a guttering dish of fat pork.  But his appetite was good, and he remarked to himself that inside the first hour he was in Boston he would have steamed Duxbury clams.  Of Sabina he never thought again, and it is likely that she found others to take his place.  Fort Washakie was one hundred and fifty miles from the railway, and men there were many and girls were few.

The next morning the other passengers entered the stage with resignation, knowing the thirty-six hours of evil that lay before them.  Lin climbed up beside the driver.  He had a new trunk now.

“Don’t get full, Lin,” said the clerk, putting the mail-sacks in at the store.

“My plans ain’t settled that far yet,” replied Mr. McLean.

“Leave it out of them,” said the voice of the bishop, laughing, inside the stage.

It was a cool, fine air.  Gazing over the huge plain down in which lies Fort Washakie, Lin heard the faint notes of the trumpet on the parade ground, and took a good-bye look at all things.  He watched the American flag grow small, saw the circle of steam rising away down by the hot springs, looked at the bad lands beyond, chemically pink and rose amid the vast, natural, quiet-colored plain.  Across the spreading distance Indians trotted at wide spaces, generally two large bucks on one small pony, or a squaw and pappoose—­a bundle of parti-colored rags.  Presiding over the whole rose the mountains to the west, serene, lifting into the clearest light.  Then once again came the now tiny music of the trumpet.

“When do yu’ figure on comin’ back?” inquired the driver.

“Oh, I’ll just look around back there for a spell,” said Lin.  “About a month, I guess.”

He had seven hundred dollars.  At Lander the horses are changed; and during this operation Lin’s friends gathered and said, where was any sense in going to Boston when you could have a good time where you were?  But Lin remained sitting safe on the stage.  Toward evening, at the bottom of a little dry gulch some eight feet deep, the horses decided it was a suitable place to stay.  It was the bishop who persuaded them to change their minds.  He told the driver to give up beating, and unharness.  Then they were led up the bank, quivering, and a broken trace was spliced with rope.  Then the stage was forced on to the level ground, the bishop proving a strong man, familiar with the gear of vehicles.  They crossed through the pass among the quaking asps and the pines, and, reaching Pacific Springs, came down again into open country.  That afternoon the stage put its passengers down on the railroad platform at Green River; this was the route in those days before the mid-winter catastrophes of frozen passengers led to its abandonment.  The bishop was going west.  His robes had passed him on the up stage during the night.  When the reverend gentleman heard this he was silent for a very short moment, and then laughed vigorously in the baggage-room.