fun coming across from Santa Fe than
anything he'd ever got up against; and she was all the funnier, he
said, because when he picked her up at the Fonda she looked like as
if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and started in with her
monkey-shines so sort of quiet and demure. Along with her, waiting
at the Fonda, was an old gent with spectacles who turned out to be
a mine sharp--one of them fellows the Government sends out to the
Territory to write up serious in books all the fool stories
prospectors and such unload on 'em: the kind that needs to be led,
and 'll eat out of your hand. The Hen and the old gent and Hill had
the box-seat, the Hen in between; and she was that particular about
her skirts climbing up, and about making room after she got
there, that Hill said he sized her up himself for an officer's wife
going East.

Except to say thank you, and talk polite that way, she didn't open her
head till they'd got clear of the town and begun to go slow in that
first bit of bad road among the sandhills; and it was the old gent
speaking to her--telling her it was a fine day, and he hoped she liked
it--that set her stamps to working a little then. She allowed the
weather was about what it ought to be, and said she was much obliged
and it suited her; and then she got her tongue in behind her teeth
again as if she meant to keep it there--till the old gent took a fresh
start by asking her if she'd been in the Territory long. She said
polite she hadn't, and was quiet for a minute. Then she got out her
pocket-handkerchief and put it up to her eyes and said she'd been in
it longer'n she wanted, and was glad she was going away. Hill said her
talking that way made him feel kind of curious himself; but he didn't
have no need to ask questions--the old gent saving him that trouble
by going for her sort of fatherly and pumping away at her till he got
the whole thing.

It come out scrappy, like as might be expected, Hill said; and so
natural-sounding he thought he must be asleep and dreaming--he knowing
pretty well what was going on in the Territory, and she telling about
doings that was news to him and the kind he'd a-been sure to hear a
lot of if they'd ever really come off. Hill said he wished he could
tell it all as she did--speaking low, and ketching her breath in the
worst parts, and mopping at her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief--but
he couldn't; and all he could say about it was it was better'n any
theatre show he'd ever