job--seeing how no plain angel, not writing shorthand, could a-kept up
with all the lies he felt it his duty to tell if he was going to bring
Bill through in good shape and keep up the reputation of the town. It
wasn't square to charge them lies up to him, anyway, Hill said, seeing
he only was playing Cherry's hand for him; and he said he hoped they
was put in Cherry's bill. By the time he'd got through with his fairy
tales, he said, he'd give Hart such a character he didn't know him
himself; and he'd touched up Palomitas till he'd got it so it might
a-been a town just outside Boston--only he allowed they was sometimes
troubled with hard cases passing through; and he told her of course
she'd find things kind of half-baked and noisy out there on the
frontier. And she must remember, he told her, that all the folks in
the town was young--young men who'd brought their young wives with
'em, come to hustle in a new country--and she mustn't mind if things
went livelier'n the way she was used to back East.

Hill said she said she wasn't expecting to find things like they was
at home, and she guessed she'd manage all right--seeing she always got
on well with young people, and wasn't a bit set in her own ways. And
she said she was as pleased as she was surprised to find out the kind
of a town Palomitas was--because her nephew William's letters had led
her to think it had a good many bad characters in it; and he'd not
mentioned any church but the Catholic one where the natives went; and
as to the Bible Class and the Friendly Aid Society, he'd never said a
word about 'em at all. She went on talking so cheerful and pleasant,
Hill said, it give him creeps in his back; and he got so rattled the
last half of the run--coming on from Pojuaque, where they'd had dinner
at old man Bouquet's--he hardly knowed what he'd told and what he
hadn't, and whether he was standing on his head or his heels.

Being that way, he made the only break that gave trouble afterwards.
She asked him if there was a school in Palomitas, and he told her
there wasn't, because all the folks in town was so young--except the
natives, who hadn't no use for schools--they hadn't any children big
enough to go to one. And then she said sudden, and as it seemed to him
changing the subject: "Isn't there a kindergarten?" Hill said he'd
never heard tell of such a concern; but he sized it up to be some sort
of a fancy German garden--like the one Becker'd fixed up for himself
o