“Speaking for my dear little girls, I thank you from my heart, gentlemen,” Santa Fé said. “This is a royal gift, and it comes at a mighty good time. Some part of it must be used to pay our way East––back to the dear old home, where those little angels are waiting for us sitting cuddled up on their grandmother’s knees. What remains, I promise you gentlemen, shall be a sacred deposit––to be used in buying little dresses, and hats, and things, for my sweet babes. I hate to use a single cent of it for anything else, but the fact is just now I’m right down to the hardpan.” And everybody––remembering Santa Fé’d took advantage of being on his drunk to get cleaned out at Denver Jones’s place the night before the shooting––knowed this was true.
“Well, Charley, we must be andying along,” 231 Hill said. “Waiting here to see you hung has put me more’n an hour behind on my schedule. I’ll have to hustle them mules like hell”––that was the careless way Hill talked always––“if we’re going to ketch that 6.30 train.”
Everybody shook hands for good-bye with Santa Fé and his wife, and Santa Fé had his pockets stuffed full of seegars, and more bottles was put in the coach than was needed––and then we give ’em three cheers again, and away they went down the slope to the bridge over the Rio Grande, with Hill whipping away for all he was worth and cussing terrible at his mules. Whipping done some good, Hill used to say; but cuss-words was the only sure things to make mules go.
“Well, boys,” said Cherry, when the yelling let up a little. “I guess getting shut of Santa Fé that way is better’n hanging him; and I guess––with him and the Hen and the rest of ’em fired out of it––we’ve got Palomitas purified about down to the ground. And what’s to all our credits, we’ve ended off by doing a first-class good deed! Them 232 little girls’ll be pleased and happy when their mother gets back to ’em with our money in her pocket, and brings along in good shape their father––who’d just about be in the thick of his kicking on that telegraph-pole, by this time, if she hadn’t romped in the way she did on the closest kind of a close call!
“And now let’s turn to and get poor old Bill planted. We’ve kind of lost sight of Bill in the excitement––and we owe him a good deal. If Santa Fé hadn’t started the reform movement by shooting him, we’d still be going on in the same old way. You may say it’s all Bill’s doings that Palomitas has been give the clean-up it wanted, and wanted bad!”
When Hill drove into town next afternoon––coming to the deepo, where most of the boys was setting around waiting for the train to pull out––he was laughing so he was most tumbling off the box.
“I’ve got the damnedest biggest joke on this town,” Hill said––Hill had the habit of 233 talking that off-hand way––“that ever was got on a town since towns begun!”
Hill was so full of it he couldn’t hold in to make a story. He just went right on blurting it out: “Do you boys know who that wife of Charley’s was that blew in yesterday from Denver? I guess you don’t! Well, I do––she was the Sage-Brush Hen! Yes sirree,” Hill said, so full of laugh he couldn’t hardly talk plain; “that’s just who she was! All along from the first there was something about her shape I felt I ought to know, and I was dead right. It come out while we was stopping at Bouquet’s place at Pojuaque for dinner––they both knowing I’d see it was such a joke I wouldn’t spoil it by giving it away too soon. She went in the back room at Bouquet’s to have a wash and a brush up––and when she come along to table she’d got over being Charley’s wife and was the Hen as good as you please! She hadn’t a gray hair or a wrinkle left nowhere, and was like she always was except for her black clothes. When she saw my looks at seeing her, she got to laughing fit to kill herself––just 234 the same gay old Hen as ever; and she always was, you know, the most comical-acting sort of a woman, when she wanted to be, anybody ever seen.
“When she quieted down her laughing a little she told me the whole story. She and Charley’d fixed it up between ’em, she said; and she’d whipped up to Denver on one train and down again on the next––buying quick her gray hair and her black outfit, and getting somebody she knowed at the Denver theatre to fix her face for her so she’d look all broke up and old. She nearly gave the whole thing away, she said, when Charley asked her about the little girls. He just throwed that in, without her expecting it––and it set her to laughing and shaking so, back of her veil, that we’d a-ketched up with her sure, she said, if Charley hadn’t whispered quick to pretend to cry and carry off her laughing that way. She had another close call, she said, when Charley was talking about the old farm in Ohio––she all the time knowing for a fact he was born in East St. Louis, and hadn’t any better acquaintance with Ohio than three 235 months in the Cincinnati jail. Charley ought to go on the stage, she says––where she’s been herself. She says he’d lay Forrest and Booth and all them fellows out cold!