Follett, mounted on Dandy, rode beside her wagon.

“Better get some sleep yourself, Rool,” urged Steffins.

“Can’t, Lew.  I ain’t sleepy.  I’m too busy thinking about things, and I have to watch out for my little girl there.  You can’t tell what these cusses might do.”

“There’s thirty of us watching out for her now, young fellow.”

“There’ll be thirty-one till we get out of this neighbourhood, Lew.”

He lifted up the wagon-cover softly a little later; and found that she slept.  As they rode on, Steffins questioned him.

“Did you make that surround you was going to make, Rool?”

“No, Lew, I couldn’t.  Two of them was already under, and, honest, I couldn’t have got the other one any 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.