That ended things. Before the old gent knowed what had got him, Santa Fé and the Hen had boosted him up the steps onto the platform of the Pullman––where the Pullman conductor got a grip on him just in time to save him from spilling––and then the train pulled out: with the Pullman conductor keeping him steady, and he throwing back good-bye kisses to the Hen with both hands.
Hill said the Hen and Santa Fé kept quiet till the hind-lights showed beyond the end of the deepo platform: and then the Hen grabbed Santa Fé round the neck and just hung onto him––so full of laugh she was limp––while they both roared. And Hill said he roared too. It was the most comical bit of business, he said, he’d tumbled to in all his born days!
It wasn’t till the train got clean round the curve above the station, Hill said, that Charley and the Hen could pull ’emselves together so they could talk. Then the Hen let a-go of Santa Fé’s neck and said comical––speaking kind of precise and toney, like as if she was an officer’s wife sure enough: “You had better return to your study, dear Uncle Charley, and finish writing that sermon you said we’d interrupted you in that was about caring for the sheep as well as the lambs!”
And then they went off together yelling, Hill said, over to the Forest Queen.
III
HART’S NEPHEW’S HOLD-UP
Hill always said he counted on coming into Palomitas some day on one of his mules bareback––leaving the other five dead or stampeded, and the coach stalled somewhere––and bringing his hair only because road-agents hadn’t no use for hair and his wasn’t easy to get anyhow, he being so bald on top there wasn’t nothing to ketch a-hold of if anybody wanted to lift what little there was along the sides. Of course that was just Hill’s comical way of putting it; but back of his fool talk there was hard sense––as there was apt to be back of Hill’s talk every time. He knew blame well what he was up against, Hill did; and if he hadn’t been more’n extra sandy he never could a-held down his job.