y night--and rounded on the padre by
getting back his rent-money over the table every Sunday afternoon.
He'd a-got it back Sunday mornings if the padre hadn't been tied up
mornings to his work. (He was a native, that padre was--and went on so
extra outrageous his own folks couldn't stand him and Bishop Lamy
bounced him from his job.) Pretty much all the time there was
rumpusses; and the way they was managed made the Mexicans--being used,
same as I've said, to knives mostly--open their eyes wide. It seemed
really to jolt 'em when they begun to find out what a live man with
his back up could do with a gun! Occurrences was so frequent--before
construction started up again, and for a while after--the new cemetery
out in the sage-brush on the mesa come close to having as big a
population as the town.

What happened--shootings, and doings of all sorts--mostly centred
on the Forest Queen. That was the only place that called itself a
hotel in Palomitas--folks being able to get some sort of victuals
there, and it having bunks in a room off the bar-room where
passers-through was give a chance to think (by morning they was
apt to think different) they was going to have a night's sleep.
Kicking against what you got--and against the throwed-in extras you'd
a-been better without--didn't do no good. Old Tenderfoot Sal, who kept
the place, only stuck her fat elbows out and told the kickers she
done the best she knowed how to, and she reckoned it was as good as
you could expect in them parts, and most was suited. If they didn't
like the Forest Queen Hotel, she said, they was free to get out of it
and go to one that suited 'em better--and as there wasn't none to go
to, Sal held the cards.

She was a corker, Sal was! By her own account of herself, she'd
learned hotel-keeping through being a sutler's wife in the war. What
sutling had had to do with it was left to guess at, and there was
opinions as to how much her training in hoteling had done for her; but
it was allowed she'd learned a heap of other things--of one sort and
another--and her name of Tenderfoot was give her because them fat feet
of hers, in the course of her travels, had got that hard I reckon she
wouldn't a-noticed it walking on red-hot point-upwards ten-penny
nails!

In the Forest Queen bar-room was the biggest bank there was in town.
Blister Mike--he was Irish, Blister was, and Sal's bar-keep--had some
sort of a share in it; but it was run by a feller who'd got the na