she's most here now. And there's
no heading her off--because she says the friends she's hooked fast to
may be coming to Pueblo and may be coming to Santa Fe. But it don't
make any difference, she says, as she's told she can get down easy by
the railroad from Pueblo, or she can slide across to Palomitas by 'a
short and pleasant coach-ride'--that's what she calls it--from Santa
Fe.

"That's all she tells about her coming. The rest of what's in her
letter is about how glad she'll be to see me, and about how glad she
knows I'll be to see her--being lonely so far from my folks, and
likely needing my clothes mended, and pleased to be eating some of her
home-made pies. It's just like Aunt Maria to put in things like that.
You see, she brought me up--and she's never got out of her head I'm
more'n about nine years old. What I feel like doing is going out in
the sage-brush and blowing the top of my fool head off, and letting
the coyotes eat what's left of me and get me out of the way!"

Hart really did look as if he meant it, Cherry said afterwards. He was
the miserablest-looking man, he said, he'd ever seen alive.

Cherry said he begun to have a notion, though, while Hart was
talking, how the thing might be worked so there wouldn't be no real
trouble if it could be fixed so Hart's aunt wouldn't stay in
Palomitas more'n about a day; and he come right on down to the
Forest Queen to see if he could get the boys to help him put it
through. He left Hart clearing out the room he kept flour and meal
in--being the cleanest--trying to rig up for his aunt some sort of
a bunking-place. He was going to give her his own cot and mattress,
he said; and he could fit her out with a looking-glass and a basin
and pitcher all right because he kept them sort of things to sell;
and he said he'd make the place extra tidy by putting a new
horse-blanket on the floor. Seeing his way to getting a grip on that
much of the contract, Cherry said, seemed to make him feel a little
less bad.

Cherry waited till the deal was over, when he got to the Forest Queen;
and then he asked Santa Fe Charley if he'd let him speak to the boys
for a minute before the game went on. He was always polite and
obliging, Santa Fe was, and he said of course he might; and he rapped
on the table with his derringer for order, and said Mr. Cherry had the
floor. Charley was old-fashioned in his ways of fighting. He always
had a six-shooter in his belt, same as other folks; but he