He got but little frivolous correspondence to carry—­his bag had business letters in it, mostly.  His horse was stripped of all unnecessary weight, too.  He wore a little wafer of a racing-saddle, and no visible blanket.  He wore light shoes, or none at all.  The little flat mail-pockets strapped under the rider’s thighs would each hold about the bulk of a child’s primer.  They held many and many an important business chapter and newspaper letter, but these were written on paper as airy and thin as gold-leaf, nearly, and thus bulk and weight were economized.  The stage-coach traveled about a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five miles a day (twenty-four hours), the pony-rider about two hundred and fifty.  There were about eighty pony-riders in the saddle all the time, night and day, stretching in a long, scattering procession from Missouri to California, forty flying eastward, and forty toward the west, and among them making four hundred gallant horses earn a stirring livelihood and see a deal of scenery every single day in the year.

We had had a consuming desire, from the beginning, to see a pony-rider, but somehow or other all that passed us and all that met us managed to streak by in the night, and so we heard only a whiz and a hail, and the swift phantom of the desert was gone before we could get our heads out of the windows.  But now we were expecting one along every moment, and would see him in broad daylight.  Presently the driver exclaims: 

“Here he comes!”

Every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider.  Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.  Well, I should think so!

In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling—­sweeping toward us nearer and nearer—­growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined—­nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear—­another instant a whoop and a hurrah from our upper deck, a wave of the rider’s hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!

So sudden is it all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for the flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail-sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man at all, maybe.

We rattled through Scott’s Bluffs Pass, by and by.  It was along here somewhere that we first came across genuine and unmistakable alkali water in the road, and we cordially hailed it as a first-class curiosity, and a thing to be mentioned with eclat in letters to the ignorant at home.  This water gave the road a soapy appearance, and in many places the ground looked as if it had been whitewashed.  I think the strange alkali water excited us as much