The mystery of it is that Ed. connected up with these people, and that he lived and experienced events that transpired many years before he had come into the west. About the silence of the wagons, and about the solitude of Sixty-Six mountain, there is wrapped one of the great tragedies of the west ; and one person only can tell that story in all its graphic details. It forms one of the most interesting unwritten chapters of adventure, and frightful consequence, that has ever painted red spots on the frontier.

The story begins on the banks of the Ohio, where lived an orphan boy, a little fellow whose father and mother were gone. He ran about

and played, and made boon companions of trees and flowers, of dogs and cats, of bees and butterfles. Children who have not the things that other children have, things that are necessary to childlife, will conjure them from the elements at hand : -- "make believe people," identities created from the animate and inanimate creatures about them.

The woods, the brook, the river bank with its myriad life, became his friends. But, one day they missed him from the familiar haunts, and for many days thereafter. The lady slipper, that rare wild flower, grew unplucked beside the trails that he had made. The people interested in him, his relatives, had many children of their own ; he was as a fifth wheel to a wagon, and they thought that he might make a place for himself in the west. So, at the age of fifteen or sixteen years, they sent him out to the far wilderness of Cheyenne, "to find work upon a ranch."