, and brings along in good shape their
father--who'd just about be in the thick of his kicking on that
telegraph-pole, by this time, if she hadn't romped in the way she did
on the closest kind of a close call!

"And now let's turn to and get poor old Bill planted. We've kind of
lost sight of Bill in the excitement--and we owe him a good deal. If
Santa Fe hadn't started the reform movement by shooting him, we'd
still be going on in the same old way. You may say it's all Bill's
doings that Palomitas has been give the clean-up it wanted, and wanted
bad!"

* * * * *

When Hill drove into town next afternoon--coming to the deepo, where
most of the boys was setting around waiting for the train to pull
out--he was laughing so he was most tumbling off the box.

"I've got the damnedest biggest joke on this town," Hill said--Hill
had the habit of talking that off-hand way--"that ever was got on a
town since towns begun!"

Hill was so full of it he couldn't hold in to make a story. He just
went right on blurting it out: "Do you boys know who that wife of
Charley's was that blew in yesterday from Denver? I guess you don't!
Well, I do--she was the Sage-Brush Hen! Yes sirree," Hill said, so
full of laugh he couldn't hardly talk plain; "that's just who she was!
All along from the first there was something about her shape I felt I
ought to know, and I was dead right. It come out while we was stopping
at Bouquet's place at Pojuaque for dinner--they both knowing I'd see
it was such a joke I wouldn't spoil it by giving it away too soon. She
went in the back room at Bouquet's to have a wash and a brush up--and
when she come along to table she'd got over being Charley's wife and
was the Hen as good as you please! She hadn't a gray hair or a wrinkle
left nowhere, and was like she always was except for her black
clothes. When she saw my looks at seeing her, she got to laughing fit
to kill herself--just the same gay old Hen as ever; and she always
was, you know, the most comical-acting sort of a woman, when she
wanted to be, anybody ever seen.

"When she quieted down her laughing a little she told me the whole
story. She and Charley'd fixed it up between 'em, she said; and she'd
whipped up to Denver on one train and down again on the next--buying
quick her gray hair and her black outfit, and getting somebody she
knowed at the Denver theatre to fix her face for her so she'd look all
broke up and