“That wife of yours thinks so sensible she just beats all!”
Santa Fé give Hart a look as much as to say he’d got to get his aunt away somehow––seeing she was liable to break out a’most anywheres, and he’d stood about all he could stand. Hart allowed what Charley wanted was reasonable, and he just grabbed her by the arm and begun to lug her to the door. But she managed to give Santa Fé one more jolt, and a bad one, before she was gone.
“I haven’t seen what this is,” she said; and she broke off from Hart and went to where the wheel was standing covered up in the corner. “I s’pose I may look at it, Mr. Charles?” she said––and before either of ’em could get a-hold of her to stop her she had off the cloth. “For the land’s sake!” she said. “Whatever part of a kindergarten have you got here?”
Hart said afterwards his heart went down into his boots, being sure they’d got to a give-away of the worst sort. Santa Fé said he felt that way for a minute himself; then he said he ciphered on it that Hart’s aunt likely 120 wouldn’t know what she’d struck––and he braced up and went ahead on that chance.
“Ah,” he said––speaking just as cool as if he was calling the deal right among friends at his own table––“that is one of the new German kindergarten appliances that even you, madam, may not have seen. We received it as a present from a rich German merchant in Pueblo, who was grieved by our pitiable plight and wanted to do what he could to help us after the fire.”
“But what in the name of common-sense,” said Hart’s aunt, “do you do with it––with all those numbers around in circles, and that little ball?”
“‘ONE OF THE NEW GERMAN KINDERGARTEN APPLIANCES’”