Star Shine

: Desert Dust

It was six weeks later, with My Lady all recovered and I long since

healed, and Fort Bridger pleasant in our memories, when we two rode into

Benton once more, by horse from the nearest stage point. And here we sat

our saddles, silent, wondering; for of Benton there was little significant

of the past, very little tangible of the present, naught promising of its

future.



Roaring Benton City had vanished, you
might say, utterly. The iron

tendrils of the Pacific Railway glistened, stretching westward into the

sunset, and Benton had followed the lure, to Rawlins (as had been told

us), to Green River, to Bryan--likely now still onward, for the track was

traveling fast, charging the mountain slopes of Utah. The restless dust

had settled. The Queen Hotel, the Big Tent, the rows of canvas, plank,

tin, sheet metal, what-not stores, saloons, gambling dens, dance halls,

human habitations--the blatant street and the station itself had subsided

into this: a skeleton company of hacked and weazened posts, a fantastic

outcrop of coldly blackened clay chimneys, a sprinkling of battered cans.

The fevered populace who had ridden high upon the tide of rapid life had

remained only as ghosts haunting a potter's field, and the turmoil of

frenzied pleasure had dwindled to a coyote's yelp mocking the twilight.



"It all, all is wiped out, like he is," she said. "But I wished to see."



"All, all is wiped out, dear heart," said I. "All of that. But here are

you and I."



Through star shine we cantered side by side eastward down the old, empty

freighting road, for the railway station at Fort Steele.



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