The Denver Express / From "Belgravia" for January, 1884

A short story follows a westbound express train as it readies to climb from a river town toward the mountains, contrasting the commercial puffery around the service with the blunt language of railway hands. The train carries a cross-section of frontier society while news of recent vigilante action—an outlaw band dispersed, a suspected collaborator's suicide, and a young woman whose testimony figures in the affair—travels with the passengers. Tension from that episode and the practicalities of telegraph and schedule-making shape a closing mood of uneasy relief and wary vigilance.