"Because you didn't give me time. You would have hung him first and then listened to what I had to say afterwards."
"Hum!" ejaculated Blake, "I guess you're about right there."
"Boys," continued Dick, turning to the others, "I'm mighty sorry to have spoiled your fun, but I'll see that you don't regret your visit to Santa Fé. Come into the house and I'll tell how it happened. The cigars and the drinks are on me!"
"Well, as I said before, Dick," exclaimed Blake, "you're the cussedest, most contrariest feller I ever seen. You got the best of us this time, but I guess we'll about get even with you on the drinks before we're through—won't we, boys?" and amid a chorus of laughter and good-humored exclamations, the men, followed by Dick and Blake, crowded into the house.
"What a country!" gasped Mrs. Forest after the last of them had disappeared. "Have people here nothing to do but murder one another?" she asked in a despairing voice, sniffing vigorously at the bottle of salts her maid handed her.
"Ze Saints be praised, zey do not!" cried the Señora who by this time had regained her composure. "Such a zing 'as happened nevair before."
"They are a little more free-handed out here than we are," remarked the Captain. "Where we come from, people allow a man to go free after exhausting all the resources of the law, while here, they quietly hang a scoundrel when they catch him without making any fuss about it. It's much simpler, you know."
"Beautiful!" echoed the Colonel.
VIII
After much persuasion and further caustic remarks on the country and a people whose chief occupation seemed to be that of shooting and hanging one another, Mrs. Forest was finally induced to enter the house, leaving Blanch and Bessie seated on the bench beneath the cottonwood tree where they had collapsed, the result of the shock their nerves had sustained.