a plain with gaping gullies in it, for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road, and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses still.  With the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor.  As soon as he touched bottom he sang out frantically: 

“Don’t come here!”

To which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had disappeared, replied, with an injured air:  “Think I’m a dam fool?”

The conductor was more than an hour finding the road—­a matter which showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking.  He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two places.  I have always been glad that we were not killed that night.  I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad.  In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine, large, limpid stream—­stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail-bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep bank.  But it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any fresh place on us to wet.

At the Green River station we had breakfast—­hot biscuits, fresh antelope steaks, and coffee—­the only decent meal we tasted between the United States and Great Salt Lake City, and the only one we were ever really thankful for.

Think of the monotonous execrableness of the thirty that went before it, to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a shot-tower after all these years have gone by!

At five P.M. we reached Fort Bridger, one hundred and seventeen miles from the South Pass, and one thousand and twenty-five miles from St. Joseph.  Fifty-two miles further on, near the head of Echo Canyon, we met sixty United States soldiers from Camp Floyd.  The day before, they had fired upon three hundred or four hundred Indians, whom they supposed gathered together for no good purpose.  In the fight that had ensued, four Indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but nobody killed.  This looked like business.  We had a notion to get out and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four hundred of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians.

Echo Canyon is twenty miles long.  It was like a long, smooth, narrow street, with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, four hundred feet high in many places, and turreted like mediaeval castles.  This was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would “let his team out.”  He did, and if the Pacific express trains whiz through there now any faster than we did then in the stage-coach, I envy the passengers the exhilaration of it.  We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly—­and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution!  I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.