A murder by the roadside, and the consequent trial, conviction, and execution of the murderer by a “provisional government” temporarily organized for the purpose received a painstaking record, as did also a difficulty with some thieving and beggarly Indians, whose hostility was awakened by the rashness of one of a trio of bachelors, who were encamped one night near the Ranger wagons. Captain Ranger made the Indians a pacifying speech, but only by the aid of some trifling present among the women of the tribe, and a gift of a pair of blankets to their chieftain, was the impending danger averted. A double guard was placed outside that night; and, for several nights following, a corral was made of the wagons in the shape of a hollow square, into which the cattle were driven to rest and sleep. The now famous Soda Springs, known to the commercial world as Idanha, next caught the coloring of Jean’s pen. The different geysers rising from the tops of the gutter-sided mounds of soda-stone were carefully and graphically described. The crater of a long-extinct volcano received special mention. The bad water of alkali-infected streams and swamps, left by slowly evaporating pools and ponds, through which cattle and wagons labored with the greatest difficulty; the dreary wastes of sagebrush, sand, and rock, through which everybody who was able to walk at all was compelled to trudge on foot; the devastations of prairie fires; the endless wastes of stunted sage and greasewood; the struggling aspens on the margins of tiny streams,—all met graphic and detailed delineation, such as nobody can appreciate to the full who to-day traverses these vast and wondrous wilds in a railway coach, or gazes upon them from a Pullman car. * * * * * “Captain Ranger,” said Sally O’Dowd one evening, “do you notice that Jean is growing strikingly beautiful?” They were halting for the night after a day’s hard drive; and the jaded oxen, weak and sick from the combined effects of hard labor, cruel whippings, and an insufficient supply of grass and water, were necessarily the chief objects of his attention and solicitude. A broken wagon-tongue added to his perplexities, as good timber for repairs was not available; and the mileage of the day’s travel had been much shortened by the necessity of stopping to mend the break, or, as the Little Doctor not inaptly said, “to reduce the compound fracture of a most important part of the wagon’s anatomy.” “All my girls are handsome,” said the Captain, as he tested the strength of a splice on the broken tongue by jumping upon it with both feet. “But Jean has been transformed, Captain. The change has been growing upon her daily since the date of that Green River episode. The child is hopelessly infatuated with that young Englishman.”