more than you could have shot your
kid that day he up-ended the gravy-dish in your lap."

"Hell!"

"That's right! I hope I never have to kill any one, Lew, no matter _how_
much I got a right to. I reckon it always leaves uneasy feelings in a
man's mind."

* * * * *

Eight days later a tall, bronzed young man with yellow hair and quick
blue eyes, in what an observant British tourist noted in his journal as
"the not unpicturesque garb of a border-ruffian," helped a dazed but
very pretty young woman on to the rear platform of the Pullman car
attached to the east-bound overland express at Ogden.

As they lingered on the platform before the train started they were
hailed and loudly cheered, averred the journal of this same Briton, "by
a crowd of the outlaw's companions, at least a score and a half of most
disreputable-looking wretches, unshaven, roughly dressed, heavily
booted, slouch-hatted (they swung their hats in a drunken frenzy), and
to this rough ovation the girl, though seemingly a person of some
decency, waved her handkerchief and smiled repeatedly, though her face
had seemed to be sad and there were tears in her eyes at that very
moment."

At this response from the girl, the journal went on to say, the ruffians
had redoubled their drunken pandemonium. And as the train pulled away,
to the observant tourist's marked relief, the young outlaw on the
platform had waved his own hat and shouted as a last message to one
"Lew," that he "must not let Dandy get gandered up," nor forget "to tie
him to grass."

Later, as the train shrieked its way through Echo Canon, the observant
tourist, with his double-visored plaid cap well over his face,
pretending to sleep, overheard the same person across the aisle say to
the girl:--

"Now we're on our own property at last. For the next sixty hours we'll
be riding across our own front yard--and there aren't any keys and
passwords and grips here, either--just a plain Almighty God with no
nonsense about Him."

Whereupon had been later added to the journal a note to the effect that
Americans are not only quite as prone to vaunt and brag and tell big
stories as other explorers had asserted, but that in the West they were
ready blasphemers.

Yet the couple minded not the observant tourist, and continued to
enlarge and complicate his views of American life to the very bank of
the Missouri. Unwittingly, however, for they knew him not nor saw him
nor