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 Cañon, 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 heard him, being occupied with the matter of themselves.
“You’ll have to back me up when we get to Springfield,” he said to her one late afternoon, when they neared the end of their exciting journey. “I’ve heard that old Grandpa Corson is mighty peppery. He might take you away from me.”
Her eyes came in from the brown rolling of the plain outside to light him with their love; and then, the lamps having not yet been lighted, the head of grace nestled suddenly on its pillow of brawn with only a little tremulous sigh of security for answer.
This brought his arm quickly about her in a protecting clasp, plainly in the sidelong gaze of the now scandalised but not less observant tourist.