“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.