choking, "don't count one way or the other when you get down to the
facts. It was this here dangerous devil that done that wicked deed,
and he done it all alone by his dangerous self. At the risk of my
life, gentlemen, I've got a-hold of him to bring him to justice, and
here he is. And I guess the sooner we yank him up to the usual
telegraph-pole, and so get shut of him, the sooner it'll be safe for
folks to travel these roads. He's the most dangerous I ever see," said
Hill, and by that time Hill was so near busted with his laughing he
was purple; "and what makes him such a particular holy terror is he
goes disguised!" And then--choking so he could hardly speak
plain--Hill whipped round to the little Mexican and says to him: "Get
your disguise off of you, you murdersome critter! Get it off, I say,
and give these gentlemen a look at the terrible wicked face of
you--before you and that telegraph-pole gets to being friends!"
And then the little Mexican switched his big black beard off--and
right smack there before us was the Sage-Brush Hen! You never heard
such a yell as the boys give in all your born days!
* * * * *
And you never in all your born days saw such goings on as there was
that night at the Forest Queen! Everybody in Palomitas was right
there. The other banks and bars hadn't a soul left in 'em but the
dealers and the drink-slingers--and they, not having nothing to do at
home, just shut up shop and come along too. All the girls from all the
dance-halls showed up, the Hen being real down popular with 'em--which
told well for her--and they wanting to see the fun. Cherry happened to
be down from his ranch that night; and Becker got wind of what was up
and footed it across from Santa Cruz de la Cañada; and word was sent
to the Elbogen brothers--they was real clever young fellows, them two
Germans--and over they come a-kiting on their buck-board from San
Juan. I guess it was about the biggest jam the Forest Queen ever had.
Hart's nephew was the only one around the place who hung back a
little, but he got there all right--being fished out of an empty
flour-barrel, where he'd hid under the counter in his uncle's store,
and brought along by the invitation committee sent to look for him all
dabbed over with flour.
Some thought the way they used Hart's nephew that night was just a
little mite too hard lines--he not being let to have as much as a
single drink in him, and so kept plumb sober while the Hen give him
his medicine; but all hands allowed--after his sassy talk to her--he
didn't get no more'n she'd a right to give. She just went at him like
a blister, the Hen did; and she blistered him worse because she did it
in her own funny way--telling him she did just dote on stage-drivers,
and if he really wanted to please her he'd take Hill's job regular;
and leading the boys up to him and introducing him, lady-like, as "the
hold-up hero"; and asking him to please to tell her all about that
fourteen-foot road-agent he'd killed; and just rubbing the whole thing
in on him every way she knowed how. Before the Hen got done with him
he was about the sickest man, Hart's nephew was, you ever seen! But I
guess it learned him quite a little about how when he talked to ladies
he'd better be polite.
Fun wasn't no name that night for that Hen! She kept on wearing her
Mexican clothes, and she did look real down cute in 'em; and she'd got
a God-forsaken old rusty pepper-box six-shooter from somewheres, and
went flourishing it about saying it was what she'd held up the coach
with; and in between times, when she wasn't deviling Hart's nephew,
she'd go round the room drawing beads on the boys with her pepper-box,
and making out she was dangerous by putting her big black beard on,
and standing up in attitudes so the boys might see, she said, how
road-agenty she looked and bad and bold! Why, the Hen did act so
comical that night all hands pretty near died with their laugh!
IV
SANTA FÉ CHARLEY'S KINDERGARTEN
When Bill Hart, who was a good fellow and kept the principal store in
Palomitas, got word his aunt in Vermont was coming out to pay him a
visit--it being too late to stop her, and he knowing he'd have to
worry the thing through somehow till he could start her back East
again--he was the worst broke-up man you ever seen.
"Great Scott! Joe," Hart said, when he was telling Cherry about
it, "Palomitas ain't no sort of a town to bring aunts to--and it's
about the last town I know of where Aunt Maria'll fit in! She's
the old-fashioned kind, right up to the limit, Aunt Maria is.
Sewing-societies and Sunday-schools is the hands she holds
flushes in; and she has the preacher once a week to supper; and
when it comes to kindergartens--Hart was so worked up he talked
careless--she's simply hell! What's a woman like that going to
do, I want to know, in a place like this--that's mainly made up
of saloons and dance-halls and faro-banks, and everybody mostly
drunk, and shooting-scrapes going on all the time? It just makes
me sick to think about it." And Hart groaned.
Cherry swore for a while, sort of friendly and sociable--he was a
sympathetic man, Cherry was, and always did what he could to help--and
as Hart was too far gone to swear for himself, in a way that amounted
to anything, hearing what Cherry had to say seemed to do him good.
"I'd stop her, if there was any stop to her," he went on, in a minute
or two, speaking hopeless and miserable; "but there ain't. She says
she's starting the day after she writes--having a chance to come
sudden with friends--and that means she's most here now. And there's
no heading her off--because she says the friends she's hooked fast to
may be coming to Pueblo and may be coming to Santa Fé. But it don't
make any difference, she says, as she's told she can get down easy by
the railroad from Pueblo, or she can slide across to Palomitas by 'a
short and pleasant coach-ride'--that's what she calls it--from Santa
Fé.
"That's all she tells about her coming. The rest of what's in her
letter is about how glad she'll be to see me, and about how glad she
knows I'll be to see her--being lonely so far from my folks, and
likely needing my clothes mended, and pleased to be eating some of her
home-made pies. It's just like Aunt Maria to put in things like that.
You see, she brought me up--and she's never got out of her head I'm
more'n about nine years old. What I feel like doing is going out in
the sage-brush and blowing the top of my fool head off, and letting
the coyotes eat what's left of me and get me out of the way!"
Hart really did look as if he meant it, Cherry said afterwards. He was
the miserablest-looking man, he said, he'd ever seen alive.
Cherry said he begun to have a notion, though, while Hart was
talking, how the thing might be worked so there wouldn't be no real
trouble if it could be fixed so Hart's aunt wouldn't stay in
Palomitas more'n about a day; and he come right on down to the
Forest Queen to see if he could get the boys to help him put it
through. He left Hart clearing out the room he kept flour and meal
in--being the cleanest--trying to rig up for his aunt some sort of
a bunking-place. He was going to give her his own cot and mattress,
he said; and he could fit her out with a looking-glass and a basin
and pitcher all right because he kept them sort of things to sell;
and he said he'd make the place extra tidy by putting a new
horse-blanket on the floor. Seeing his way to getting a grip on that
much of the contract, Cherry said, seemed to make him feel a little
less bad.
Cherry waited till the deal was over, when he got to the Forest Queen;
and then he asked Santa Fé Charley if he'd let him speak to the boys
for a minute before the game went on. He was always polite and
obliging, Santa Fé was, and he said of course he might; and he rapped
on the table with his derringer for order, and said Mr. Cherry had the
floor. Charley was old-fashioned in his ways of fighting. He always
had a six-shooter in his belt, same as other folks; but he said he
kept it mainly for show. Derringers, he said, was better and
surer--because you could work 'em around in your pocket while the
other fellow was getting his gun out, and before he was ready for
business you could shoot him right through your pants. Later on, it
was that very way Santa Fé shot Hart. But he always was friendly with
Hart till he did shoot him; and it was more his backing than anything
else--'specially when it come to the kindergarten--that made Cherry's
plan for helping Hart out go through.
When the game was stopped, and the boys was all listening, Cherry told
about the hole Hart was in and allowed it was a deep one; and he said
it was only fair--Hart having done good turns for most everybody, one
time and another--his friends should be willing to take some trouble
to get him out of it. Hart's aunt, he said, come from a quiet part of
Vermont, and likely would be jolted bad when she struck Palomitas if
things was going the ordinary way--she being elderly, and like enough
a little set in her ways, and not used much to crazy drunks, and
shooting-matches, and such kinds of lively carryings-on. But she'd
only stay one day, or at most a day and a half--Hart having agreed to
take her right back East himself, if she couldn't be got rid of no
other way--and that gave 'em a chance to fix things so her feelings
wouldn't be hurt, though doing it was going to be hard on all hands.
And then, having got the boys worked up wondering what he was driving
at, Cherry went ahead and said he wanted 'em to agree--just for the
little while Hart's aunt was going to stay there--to run Palomitas
like it was a regular back-East Sunday-school town. He knew he was
asking a good deal, he said, but he did ask it--and he appealed to the
better feelings of the gentlemen assembled around that faro-table to
do that much to get Bill Hart out of his hole. Then Cherry said he
wasn't nobody's orator, but he guessed he'd made clear what he wanted
to lay before the meeting; and he said he was much obliged, and had
pleasure in setting up drinks for the crowd.
As was to be expected of 'em, all the boys--knowing Hart for a
square-acting man, and liking him--tumbled right off to Cherry's plan.
Santa Fé said--this was after they'd had their drinks--he s'posed he
was chairman of the meeting, and he guessed he spoke the sense of the
meeting when he allowed Mr. Cherry's scheme was about the only way out
for their esteemed fellow-citizen, Mr. Hart, and it ought to go
through. But as it was a matter that seriously affected the comfort
and convenience of everybody in Palomitas, he said, it was only square
to take a vote on it--and so he'd ask all in favor of Mr. Cherry's
motion to say "Ay." And everybody in the room--except the few that was
asleep, or too drunk to say anything--said "Ay" as loud as they knowed
how.
"Mr. Cherry's motion is carried, gentlemen," Santa Fé said; "and I
will now appoint a committee to draught a notice to be posted at the
deepo, and to call around at the other banks and saloons in the town
and notify verbally our fellow-citizens of the action we have
taken--and I will ask the Hen here kindly to inform the other ladies
of Palomitas of our intentions, and to request their assistance in
realizing them. She had better tell them, I reckon, that the way they
can come to the front most effectively in this crisis is by keeping
entirely out of sight in the rear."
The Sage-Brush Hen, along with some of the other girls, had come in
from the back room--where the dancing was--to find out what the circus
was about; and when they caught on to what Palomitas was going to be
like when Hart's aunt struck it they all just yelled.
[Illustration: "WROTE OUT A NOTICE THAT WAS TACKED UP ON THE DEEPO DOOR"]
"You've come out well once as the Baptist minister, Charley," the Hen
said, shaking all over; "and I reckon you can do it again--only it
won't be so easy showing off the new church and the parsonage by
daylight as it was in the dark. About us girls laying low, maybe
you're right and maybe you're not right. Anyway, don't you worry about
us. All I'll say is, it won't be the ladies in this combine that'll
give anything away!" And she and the other girls got so to laughing
over it they all of 'em had to set down.
Cherry was more pleased than a little the way things had gone--and he
said so to the boys, and set up drinks all round again. Then he and
Abe Simons--they was the committee to do it--wrote out a notice that
was tacked up on the deepo door and read this way:
TO THE CITIZENS OF PALOMITAS
Mr. William Hart's aunt is coming to pay him a visit, and will
strike this town either by the Denver train to-morrow morning or
the Santa Fé coach to-morrow afternoon.
She is a perfect lady, and it is ordered that during her stay in
Palomitas this town has got to behave itself so her feelings won't
be hurt. She is to be took care of and given a pleasant
impression. All fights and drunks must be put off till she's
gone. Persons neglecting to do so will be taken out into the
sage-brush by members of the committee, and are likely to get
hurt.
Mr. Hart regrets this occurrence as much as anybody, and agrees
his aunt's visit sha'n't last beyond a day and a half if she comes
down from Denver, and only one day if she comes in from Santa Fé.
(_Signed_) THE COMMITTEE.
When Cherry got a-hold of Hart and told him what the town had agreed
to do for him he was that grateful--being all worked up, anyway--he
pretty near cried.
As it turned out, Hart's aunt come in on Hill's coach from Santa
Fé--her friends having gone down that way by the Atchison--and as Hill
had been at the meeting at the Forest Queen he was able to give things
a good start. Hill always was a friendly sort of a fellow, and--except
he used terrible bad language, which he said come of his having to
drive mules--he was a real first-class ladies' man.
Hill said he spotted Hart's aunt the minute he set his eyes on her
waiting for the coach at the Fonda, there not being likely to be
more'n one in the Territory of that kind. She was a trig little old
lady, dressed up in black clothes as neat as wax, he said, with a
little black bonnet setting close to her head; and she wore gold specs
and had a longish nose. But she'd a real friendly look about her,
he said; and while she spoke a little precise and particular she
wasn't a bit stuck-up, and seemed to be taking things about as they
happened to come along. When he asked her if she wouldn't set up on
the box with him, so she could see the country, she said that was
just what would suit her; and up she come, he said, as spry as a queer
little bird. Then he whipped up his mules--being careful not to use
any language--and got the coach started, and begun right off to be
agreeable by telling her he guessed he had the pleasure of knowing
her nephew, and asking her if she wasn't the aunt of Mr. William
Hart.
Well, of course that set things to going pleasant between 'em; and
when she'd allowed she was Hart's aunt, and said she was glad to meet
a friend of his, she started in asking all the questions about Bill
and about Palomitas she knowed how to ask.
Hill said he guessed that day they had to lay off the regular
recording angel and put a hired first-class stenographer on his
job--seeing how no plain angel, not writing shorthand, could a-kept up
with all the lies he felt it his duty to tell if he was going to bring
Bill through in good shape and keep up the reputation of the town. It
wasn't square to charge them lies up to him, anyway, Hill said, seeing
he only was playing Cherry's hand for him; and he said he hoped they
was put in Cherry's bill. By the time he'd got through with his fairy
tales, he said, he'd give Hart such a character he didn't know him
himself; and he'd touched up Palomitas till he'd got it so it might
a-been a town just outside Boston--only he allowed they was sometimes
troubled with hard cases passing through; and he told her of course
she'd find things kind of half-baked and noisy out there on the
frontier. And she must remember, he told her, that all the folks in
the town was young--young men who'd brought their young wives with
'em, come to hustle in a new country--and she mustn't mind if things
went livelier'n the way she was used to back East.
Hill said she said she wasn't expecting to find things like they was
at home, and she guessed she'd manage all right--seeing she always got
on well with young people, and wasn't a bit set in her own ways. And
she said she was as pleased as she was surprised to find out the kind
of a town Palomitas was--because her nephew William's letters had led
her to think it had a good many bad characters in it; and he'd not
mentioned any church but the Catholic one where the natives went; and
as to the Bible Class and the Friendly Aid Society, he'd never said a
word about 'em at all. She went on talking so cheerful and pleasant,
Hill said, it give him creeps in his back; and he got so rattled the
last half of the run--coming on from Pojuaque, where they'd had dinner
at old man Bouquet's--he hardly knowed what he'd told and what he
hadn't, and whether he was standing on his head or his heels.
Being that way, he made the only break that gave trouble afterwards.
She asked him if there was a school in Palomitas, and he told her
there wasn't, because all the folks in town was so young--except the
natives, who hadn't no use for schools--they hadn't any children big
enough to go to one. And then she said sudden, and as it seemed to him
changing the subject: "Isn't there a kindergarten?" Hill said he'd
never heard tell of such a concern; but he sized it up to be some sort
of a fancy German garden--like the one Becker'd fixed up for himself
over to Santa Cruz--and he said he allowed, from the way she asked
about it, it was what Palomitas ought to have. So he told her there
was, and it was the best one in the Territory--and let it go at that.
He said she said she was glad to hear it, as she took a special
interest in kindergartens, and she'd go and see it the first thing.
Hill said he knowed he'd put his foot in it somehow; but as he didn't
know how he'd put his foot in it, he just switched her off by telling
her about the Dorcas Society. He had the cards for that, he said,
because his mother'd helped run a Dorcas Society back East and he
knowed what he was talking about. The Palomitas one met Thursdays, he
told her, at the Forest Queen. That was the principal hotel, he told
her, and was kept by Mrs. Major Rogers, who was an officer's widow and
had started the society to make clothes for some of the Mexican poor
folks--and he said it was a first-rate charity and worked well. It
tickled him so, he said, thinking of any such doings at the Forest
Queen--with old Tenderfoot Sal, of all people, bossing the job!--he
had to work off the laugh he had inside of him by taking to licking
his mules.
But it went all right with the little old lady; and she was that
interested he had to strain himself, he said, making up more stories
about it--till by good luck she took to telling him about the Dorcas
Society she belonged to herself, back home in Vermont; and was so full
of it she kept things going easy for him till they'd crossed the
bridge over the Rio Grande and was coming up the slope into the town
at a walk.
Up at the top of the slope Santa Fé Charley stood a-waiting for
'em--looking, of course, in them black clothes and a white tie on,
like he was a sure-enough preacher--and as the coach come along he
sung out, pleasant and friendly: "Good-afternoon, Brother Hill. I
missed you at the Bible Class last evening. No doubt you were detained
unavoidably, and it's all right. But be sure to come next Friday. We
don't get along well without you, Brother Hill." And Santa Fé took his
hat off stylish and made the old lady the best sort of a bow.
Hill caught on quick and played right up to Santa Fé's lead. "That's
our minister, Mr. Charles, ma'am. The one I've been telling you
about," he said. "He's just friendly and sociable like that all the
time. He looks after the folks in this town closer'n any preacher
I ever knowed." A part of that, Hill said, was dead certain
truth--seeing as Santa Fé had his eyes out straight along for
everybody about the place who'd a dollar in his pocket, and wasn't
satisfied till he'd scooped in that dollar over his table at the
Forest Queen.
"There's the new church we're building," Hill went on, as they got to
the top of the slope and headed for the deepo. "It ain't much to look
at yet, the spire not being put on; and it won't show up well, even
when it gets its spire on it, with churches East. But we're going to
be satisfied with it, seeing it's the best we can do. You'll be
interested to know, ma'am, your nephew give the land."
"William hasn't let on anything about it," Hart's aunt said, looking
pleased all over. "But what in the world is a church doing with a
railroad track running into it, Mr. Hill?"
Hill said he'd forgot about the track when he settled to use the new
freight-house for church purposes; but he said he pulled himself
together quick and told her the track was temp'ry--put in so building
material could unload right on the ground. And then he took to talking
about how obliging the railroad folks had been helping 'em--and kept
a-talking that way till he got the coach to the deepo, and didn't need
to hustle making things up any more. He said he never was so thankful
in his life as he was when his stunt was done. He was just tired out,
he said, lying straight ahead all day over thirty miles of bad road
and not being able once to speak natural to his mules.
* * * * *
Hart was waiting at the deepo, on the chance his aunt would come in on
the coach; and when she saw him she give a little squeal, she was so
pleased, and hopped down in no time off the box--she was as brisk as a
bee in her doings--and took to hugging him and half crying over him
just like he was a little boy.
"Oh, William," she said, "I am _so_ happy getting to you! And I'm
happier'n I expected to be, finding out how quiet and respectable
Palomitas is--not a bit what your letters made me think it was--and
such real good people living in it, and everything but the queer
country and the queer mud houses just like it is at home. Mr. Hill
has been telling me all about it, coming over, and about this new
church you're building that you gave the lot for. To think you've
never told me! Oh, William, I am so glad and so thankful that out here
in this wild region you've kept serious-minded and are turning out
such a good man!"
Hart looked so mixed up over the way his aunt was talking, and so sort
of hopeless, that Hill cut in quick and give him a lift. "He's not
much at blowing about himself, your nephew ain't, ma'am," Hill said.
"Why, he not only give the land for the church over there"--and Hill
pointed at the freight-house, so Hart could ketch on--"but it was him
got the Company to lay them temp'ry tracks, so the building stuff
could be took right in. He's going to give a melodeon, too."
"Dear William!" Hart's aunt said. "It rejoices my heart you're doing
all these good deeds--and all the others Mr. Hill's been telling me
about. I must kiss you again."
"Oh, what I've done ain't nothing," Hart said, pulling himself
together while she was kissing him. "Land's cheap, cheap as it can be,
out here; and I give the Company such a lot of freight they're more'n
willing to oblige me; and as to the melodeon--"
Hart sort of gagged when he got to the melodeon, and Santa Fé
Charley--who'd come up while they all was talking away together--reached
across the table and played his hand. "As to the melodeon, Mr.
Hart," Santa Fé put in, "you said that being in business you could get
it at a discount off. But that does not appreciably lessen your
generosity, Mr. Hart; and your aunt"--Santa Fé took off his hat and
bowed handsome--"is justified in taking pride in your good deeds. I am
glad to tell her that in her nephew our struggling church has its
stanchest pillar and its strongest stay."
"Yes, that's the way it is about the melodeon, Aunt Maria," Hart said,
kind of weak and mournful. "Being in business, I get melodeons at such
a discount off that giving 'em away ain't nothing to me at all. And
now I guess we'd better be getting along home. It's a mighty mean home
to take you to, Aunt Maria; but there's one comfort--as you'll find
out when I get the chance to talk to you--you won't have to stay in it
long."