Later we found the comet we had seen was the famous Halley’s Comet and were sorry some of our astronomers had not been with us, as probably very few of them had an opportunity of seeing both the eclipse of the moon and the comet under such favorable circumstances.
We go to sleep looking at the heavens and in the morning, after the train has gone by, we start east again. We come to a section house about a mile down the track, at which we find a section foreman. He tells us it is twenty miles to Kelso, and the sand is “just as deep as you can stick down a cane.” This is not very encouraging, but we keep on the track, and finally, near time to make camp for the night, we reach Glasgow, another section house, where we find a water car.
We had to drive off the track here to get by the switches, and pulled through the sand up to the water car in front of the section house. We very nearly put the horses out of business, so to speak, pulling only a hundred yards at a time, but got all the water we wanted.
The foreman told us we could not drive on the track any farther as we were cutting up the ties and the oil which held the sand down. We told him that suited us; we wanted to be boarded until he could get a car and haul us out, and that we were about out of horse feed. He admitted that we could not pull through the sand and if we could not drive on the track we would have to stay there, but, as the railroad was not open for regular business and he had no facilities for feeding us, he changed the subject by asking us if we had got what water we wanted. When we told him we had, he said, “Why don’t you fellows go on then?” which we promptly did, after thanking him for the water.
We made only about two miles more before camping for the night, and were still thirteen miles from Kelso. It did not seem possible that we could have made only about eight miles that day, but as I looked back over the road and remembered the number of times we had driven off the track to get around trestle work, and how hard we had labored to get back on again, and how slow we had to go to keep from jolting our wagon to pieces, I concluded that there was sufficient excuse and only hoped the horses’ shoulders would not get sore with the jerking before we could get off the railroad for good. Besides, we must get to a town soon as we are about out of feed for the horses. With a firm determination to reach Kelso the next day we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep looking at the stars.