This produces questions from Erma, and she learns a good deal of Lawrence's early life; how his father emigrated from Massachusetts, being a nephew of that celebrated seaman Lawrence, whose words are still remembered—"Don't give up the ship"—and of this relationship and memory the young man seems very proud.
He tells her that his father is now a large farmer in Eastern Iowa, and the girl drawing him out by deft suggestions, learns that he was educated for a civil engineer, but at the breaking out of the war, left college and went to soldiering, and became, after a year or two of fighting, captain of an Iowa battery.
The conversation goes on very pleasantly until he suddenly cries out, "The Rocky Mountains!" and shows her snow-clad peaks looming up amid the blue sky to the west, just as the train is running into Cheyenne, where something occurs that gives Miss Travenion a great shock, and makes her change her opinion considerably about this young gentleman, to whom she has devoted so much of her thoughts in the last twenty-four hours.
Like most of the sensations of this life, it comes unexpectedly.
She has just finished a comfortable sort of dinner in the Cheyenne eating-house, and is sauntering about, watching the change of locomotives, and trying to get a good look at Long's Peak, which is so distant that she can hardly tell whether it is snow or cloud, when she is joined by Mr. Ferdinand, who shocks her by whispering these astonishing words: "Come around the corner and I'll show you a telegraph pole where Captain Lawrence hung a man."
"Hung a man? You are crazy," returns the young lady indignantly; then she sneers, "Buck Powers invents silly stories to incite you to buy more candy."
"Not at all crazy, but rather up to the snuff," retorts Ferdie, who apparently is strongly excited and profoundly impressed. "Besides, Buck didn't tell me this. I have just met a gambler in that barroom over there"—he points to a shanty drinking saloon, some hundred yards down the track—"and he says Cap Lawrence hung his pard, Nebraska Bill, to a telegraph pole."
"Impossible," remarks Erma in angry scorn.
"So I thought at first, but the man showed me the telegraph pole and said that was where Lawrence had murdered his pard."
"And you believe this gambler's likely story," sneers Miss Travenion.