ckest man, Hart's nephew was, you ever seen! But I
guess it learned him quite a little about how when he talked to ladies
he'd better be polite.

Fun wasn't no name that night for that Hen! She kept on wearing her
Mexican clothes, and she did look real down cute in 'em; and she'd got
a God-forsaken old rusty pepper-box six-shooter from somewheres, and
went flourishing it about saying it was what she'd held up the coach
with; and in between times, when she wasn't deviling Hart's nephew,
she'd go round the room drawing beads on the boys with her pepper-box,
and making out she was dangerous by putting her big black beard on,
and standing up in attitudes so the boys might see, she said, how
road-agenty she looked and bad and bold! Why, the Hen did act so
comical that night all hands pretty near died with their laugh!

IV

SANTA FE CHARLEY'S KINDERGARTEN

When Bill Hart, who was a good fellow and kept the principal store in
Palomitas, got word his aunt in Vermont was coming out to pay him a
visit--it being too late to stop her, and he knowing he'd have to
worry the thing through somehow till he could start her back East
again--he was the worst broke-up man you ever seen.

"Great Scott! Joe," Hart said, when he was telling Cherry about
it, "Palomitas ain't no sort of a town to bring aunts to--and it's
about the last town I know of where Aunt Maria'll fit in! She's
the old-fashioned kind, right up to the limit, Aunt Maria is.
Sewing-societies and Sunday-schools is the hands she holds
flushes in; and she has the preacher once a week to supper; and
when it comes to kindergartens--Hart was so worked up he talked
careless--she's simply hell! What's a woman like that going to
do, I want to know, in a place like this--that's mainly made up
of saloons and dance-halls and faro-banks, and everybody mostly
drunk, and shooting-scrapes going on all the time? It just makes
me sick to think about it." And Hart groaned.

Cherry swore for a while, sort of friendly and sociable--he was a
sympathetic man, Cherry was, and always did what he could to help--and
as Hart was too far gone to swear for himself, in a way that amounted
to anything, hearing what Cherry had to say seemed to do him good.

"I'd stop her, if there was any stop to her," he went on, in a minute
or two, speaking hopeless and miserable; "but there ain't. She says
she's starting the day after she writes--having a chance to come
sudden with friends--and that means