We had never seen him before.  He wore in his belt an old original “Allen” revolver, such as irreverent people called a “pepper-box.”  Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol.  As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball.  To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an “Allen” in the world.  But George’s was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, “If she didn’t get what she went after, she would fetch something else.”  And so she did.  She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it.  Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow.  It was a cheerful weapon—­the “Allen.”  Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.

We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains.  In the matter of luxuries we were modest—­we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco.  We had two large canteens to carry water in, between stations on the Plains, and we also took with us a little shot-bag of silver coin for daily expenses in the way of breakfasts and dinners.

By eight o’clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the river.  We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled away and left “the States” behind us.  It was a superb summer morning, and all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.  There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away.  We were spinning along through Kansas, and in the course of an hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great Plains.  Just here the land was rolling—­a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far as the eye could reach—­like the stately heave and swell of the ocean’s bosom after a storm.  And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land.  But presently this sea upon dry ground was to lose its “rolling” character and stretch away for seven hundred miles as level as a floor!