CHAPTER VI.
Our new conductor (just shipped) had been without sleep for twenty hours.
Such a thing was very frequent.

From St.Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, by stage-coach, was nearly nineteen hundred miles, and the trip was often made in fifteen days (the cars do it in four and a half, now), but the time specified in the mail contracts, and required by the schedule, was eighteen or nineteen days, if I remember rightly.

This was to make fair allowance for winter storms and snows, and other unavoidable causes of detention.

The stage company had everything under strict discipline and good system.

Over each two hundred and fifty miles of road they placed an agent or superintendent, and invested him with great authority.