rode that afternoon to Detroit.

"If you were ever in Idaho," she said, "you would soon hear the story of
"King" Plummer and Sylvia. It is a tragedy of our West; that is, it
began in a great tragedy, one of those tragedies of the plains and the
mountains so numerous and so like each other that the historians forget
to tell about them. Sylvia's mother was Mr. Grayson's eldest sister,
much older than he. She and her husband and children were part of a
wagon-train that was going up away into the Northwest where the
railroads did not then reach.

"It was long ago--when Sylvia was a little girl, not more than seven or
eight--and the train was massacred by Utes just as they reached the
Idaho line. The Utes were on the war-path--there had been some sort of
an outbreak--and the train had been warned by the soldiers not to go on,
but the emigrants were reckless. They laughed at danger, because they
did not see it before their faces. They pushed on, and they were
ambushed in a deep canyon.

"There was hardly any fight at all, the attack was so sudden and
unexpected. Before the people knew what was coming half of them were
shot down, and then those awful savages were among them with tomahawk
and knife. Mr. Harley, I've no use for the Indian. It is easy enough to
get sentimental about him when you are away off in the East, but when
you are close to him in the West all that feeling goes. I heard Sylvia
tell about that massacre once, and only once. It was years ago, but I
can't forget it; and if I can't forget it, do you think that she can?
Her father was killed at the first fire from the bushes, and then an
Indian, covered with paint and bears' claws, tomahawked both her mother
and her little brother before her eyes--yes, and scalped them, too. He
ran for the girl next, but Sylvia--I think it was just physical
impulse--dashed away into the scrub, and the Indian turned aside for a
victim nearer at hand.

"Sylvia lay hid until night came, and there was silence over the
mountain, the silence of death, Mr. Harley, because when she slipped
back in the darkness to the emigrant train she found every soul that had
been in it, besides herself, dead. Think, Mr. Harley, of that little
girl alone in all those vast mountains, with her dead around her! Do you
wonder that sometimes she seems hard?"

"No, I don't," replied Harley. Despite himself a mist came to his eyes
over this pathetic tragedy of long ago.

"Sylvia has never said much ab