Gazing at these, her eyes full of expectant happiness and hope, Miss Travenion murmurs, "At the end of these, one thousand and odd miles away, my father," and the green prairies of Nebraska grow very beautiful to her, and the soft southern wind, as it enters the car windows, seems very pleasant to her, and the rays of the setting sun make the green grass lands and the long reaches of the Platte River flowing over its yellow quicksands and dotted with its little cottonwood islands seem like a landscape of Heaven to her. Then Ferdie comes in, looking eagerly out of the car window, and whispers: "Do you see any buffaloes yet? I have got a revolver and a sporting rifle to kill them." A second after he ejaculates, "What's that!" And Erma starts and echoes "What's that?" For it is a sound these two have never heard the like of before--the shriek of the Western train book agent--not the pitiful note of the puny Eastern vender, but the wild whoop of the genuine transcontinental fiend, who in the earlier seventies went bellowing through a car like a calliope on a Mississippi River boat. "Bre-_own's_ prize candies! Twenty-five cents a box, warranted fresh and something that'll make you feel pleased and slick in every one of 'em--Bre-own's prize candies." Being of a speculative turn of mind, Ferdie invests in one or two of these, and he and Erma open them together and laugh at their bad luck, for Ferdie has won a Jew's harp, worth about a cent, and she is the happy possessor of a brass thimble, and the candies, apparently, have been manufactured before Noah's Ark put to sea. While joking about this, a new idea seems to strike Ferdie. The news-boy, who has gathered up his packages after making his trades on the sharpest of business principles, is leaving the car. Mr. Chauncey asks him if he has any Western literature. "I always have everything," cries the young man. "Give you 'The Scout of the Plains,' or 'Long Har, the Hermit of the Rockies,' for twenty-five cents." "I don't want fiction; facts are what I'm after," says Ferdie, interrupting him. "Then I'll accommodate also," remarks the youth, and going away, he returns after a few minutes bearing four or five bound volumes, entitled, "The Oatman Girls' Captivity among the Apaches," "The Construction of the Union Pacific Railway," "The Life and Adventures of Jim Beckworth, the Naturalized Crow Chief," "Kit Carson, the Pioneer," "Fremont's Explorations" and "Female Life among the Mormons, by the Wife of an Elder of the Latter-Day Saints." "Facts come higher," he says, "than lies. These are bound books, and will cost you all the way from $1.50 up to $4. But you can turn 'em in at the end of the trip, if you want, and I will let you have fifty per cent. on them. I had sooner you did it that way, because then _I'll_ bag the profit, not my boss."