She hears expressions of admiration on all sides, and one man, a miner from Colorado, and at present interested in the workings of a big coal property near Evanston, says: "That fellow who risked his life to save that foolish news-boy is 'clean-grit.' He and a few others like him, made some of the towns on this railroad habitable. A man's life wasn't safe in Cheyenne, but they wiped out every desperado, cut-throat and bunco-steerer in that town, and now it is comfortable to live in." A moment after expressing this opinion, this gentleman is rather astonished to find the beautiful young lady from the East sitting beside him and saying in anxious voice: "You think Vigilance Committees right? You have had experience. Tell me all about them." "They are right, if self-preservation is," he answers. Then, being a man of wide Western experience, and noting the anxious look on the girl's face, he tells her that the average frontier desperado is very careful of his own life, though very careless of that of others, and if he is certain of dying twenty-four hours afterwards, he will do no murder. And he gives her a little history of Vigilance Committees in general, and tells her how at White Pine, the first rush into that mining camp being composed of old California and Nevada miners, they had said, "This will be a red-hot place for cut-throats, bullies and blacklegs," and had organized a Vigilance Committee _before_ they built the town of Hamilton; and there had never been a murder in it, until long after the Vigilance Committee and nearly all other inhabitants left it; and that Pioche, one hundred and thirty miles away, with a population similar to Hamilton, had averaged eighteen homicides a day, most of them wilful murders, simply because the men who committed them knew that they would not be avenged, there being no Vigilance Committee in that place; then, warming to his subject, he goes on with the history of early Montana, when it was impossible for any man to carry gold from Helena to Salt Lake City and live through the trip; and people wondered why none of the highwaymen who robbed, looted and murdered on that trail through Southern Idaho to Utah were never brought to justice, and that a Vigilance Committee was formed, and the first man they hung in the Territory was the sheriff, and that after that they continued their work with such success that for eight years thereafter no homicide was committed in all Montana. Next getting excited, he winds up by saying, "The best citizens of these places were Vigilance men. There was no law, but they made peace; there was no justice, but they made the land free from blood," and is astonished at the end of this discourse to receive a grateful "Thank you," from the young lady, whose eyes seem to have grown happier during his lecture upon the morality of Lynch law.