I've said, when a
tenderfoot took him for a fire-escape; and when it happened that way
he give it back to 'em in right-enough parson talk. So he says to the
little man, speaking benevolent: "In our poor way, sir, we can satisfy
your requirements. At the Forest Queen Hotel, over there, you can
procure the liquid refreshment that you name; and also food as good as
our little community affords. As for your bath, we can provide it on a
scale of truly American magnificence. We can offer you a tub, sir,
very nearly two thousand miles long!"

"A tub two thousand miles long?" says the little man. "Oh, come now,
you're chaffing me. There can't be a tub like that, you know. There
really can't!"

"I refer, sir," says Santa Fe, "to the Rio Grande."

The little man took his time getting there, but when he did ketch up
he laughed hearty. "How American that is!" says he. And then he says
over again: "How American that is!"--and he laughed some more. Then he
said he'd start 'em to getting his grub ready while he was bathing in
that two-thousand-mile bath-tub, and he'd have his brandy-and-soda
right away; and he asked Charley--speaking doubtful, and looking at
his white necktie--if he'd have one too?

Charley said he just would; and it was seeing how sort of surprised
the little man looked, he told the boys afterwards, set him to
thinking he might as well kill time that hot day trying how much
stuffing that sort of a tenderfoot would hold. He said at first he
only meant to play a short lone hand for the fun of the thing; and it
was the way the little man swallowed whatever was give him, he said,
that made the game keep on a-growing--till it ended up by roping in
the whole town. So off he went, explaining fatherly how it come that
preachers and brandys-and-sodas in Palomitas got along together first
class.

"In this wildly lawless and sinful community, sir," says he, "I find
that my humble efforts at moral improvement are best advanced by
identifying my life as closely as may be with the lives of those whom
I would lead to higher planes. At first, in my ignorance, I held aloof
from participating in the customs--many of them, seemingly,
objectionable--of my parishioners. Naturally, in turn, they held aloof
from me. I made no impression upon them. The good seed that I
scattered freely fell upon barren ground. Now, as the result of
experience, and of much soulful thought, I am wiser. Over a friendly
glass at the bar of the Forest Qu