Page:Edward Ellis--Alden the Pony Express Rider.djvu/22

14 which made the crossing of the Missouri was held so that not a minute would be lost in transferring the mail. A piercing whistle notified the horseman that the boat was waiting for him.

About the same time, Harry Roff, mounted on a mettled half-breed broncho, galloped eastward from Sacramento. He, too, did his part in opening one of the most romantic episodes in the history of our country. Two sets of mail bags were approaching each other from points two thousand miles apart, and there were times when this approach was at the astounding speed of forty and even fifty miles an hour! The average daily rate was two hundred and fifty miles a day, but where everything was favorable, or when an express rider was fleeing from the vengeful red men, his pony struck a gait of twenty-five miles and maintained it, when an untrained horse would have dropped in his tracks.

When Harry Roff dashed out from Sacramento, he made one change and covered the first twenty miles in fifty-nine minutes. He changed again at Folsom and headed for Placerville, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada range, fifty-five miles away. At that point,