he'd
run 'em in you so slick and quiet--keeping as demure as a cat after
birds while she was doing it--you'd never suspicion anything was
happening till you found the whole town laughing its head off at you
for being so many kinds of a fool!

Things wasn't any time what you might call too extra quiet in
Palomitas; but when them two--the Hen and Santa Fe--started in
together to run any racket you may bet your life there was a
first-class circus from the word go! Grass didn't grow much under
their feet, either. The very minute the Hen struck the town--coming on
after Santa Fe, same as I've said, and him waiting for her when she
got there--they went at their monkey-shining, finishing two-handed
what the Hen had started as a lone-hand game. Right along from then on
they kept things moving spirited, one way and another, without much
of a let-up. And they ended off--the day the two of 'em, owing to
circumstances, lit out together--by setting up on all of us what I
reckon was the best rig ever set up on anybody anywheres since rigs
was begun!

Palomitas was a purer town, Cherry said--it was him led off in the
purifying--after we was shut of 'em, and of some others that was fired
for company; and I won't say he wasn't right in making out it was a
better town, maybe, when we'd got it so blame pure. But they had their
good points, the Hen and Santa Fe had--and after they was purified out
of it some of us didn't never quite feel as if the place was just the
same.

II

THE SAGE-BRUSH HEN

The Hen blew in one day on Hill's coach, coming from Santa Fe, setting
up on the box with him--Hill run his coach all the time the track was
stuck at Palomitas, it being quicker for Santa Fe folks going up that
way to Pueblo and Denver and Leadville than taking the Atchison out to
El Moro and changing to the Narrow Gauge--and she was so all over dust
that Wood sung out to him: "Where'd you get your Sage-Brush Hen from?"
And the name stuck.

More folks in Palomitas had names that had tumbled to 'em like that
than the kind that had come regular. And even when they sounded
regular they likely wasn't. Regular names pretty often got lost
coming across the Plains in them days--more'n a few finding it better,
about as they got to the Missouri, to leave behind what they'd been
called by back East and draw something new from the pack. Making some
sort of a change was apt to be wholesomer and often saved talk.

Hill said the Hen was more