IV
SANTA FÉ 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 78 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 she’s most here now. And there’s no heading her off––because 79 she says the friends she’s hooked fast to may be coming to Pueblo and may be coming to Santa Fé. 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 Fé.
“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 80 man, he said, he’d ever seen alive.