More folks in Palomitas had names that had tumbled to ’em like that than the kind that had come regular. And even when they sounded regular they likely wasn’t. Regular 16 names pretty often got lost coming across the Plains in them days––more’n a few finding it better, about as they got to the Missouri, to leave behind what they’d been called by back East and draw something new from the pack. Making some sort of a change was apt to be wholesomer and often saved talk.
Hill said the Hen was more fun coming across from Santa Fé than anything he’d ever got up against; and she was all the funnier, he said, because when he picked her up at the Fonda she looked like as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and started in with her monkey-shines so sort of quiet and demure. Along with her, waiting at the Fonda, was an old gent with spectacles who turned out to be a mine sharp––one of them fellows the Government sends out to the Territory to write up serious in books all the fool stories prospectors and such unload on ’em: the kind that needs to be led, and ’ll eat out of your hand. The Hen and the old gent and Hill had the box-seat, the Hen in between; and she was that particular about her skirts climbing up, and about making 17 room after she got there, that Hill said he sized her up himself for an officer’s wife going East.
Except to say thank you, and talk polite that way, she didn’t open her head till they’d got clear of the town and begun to go slow in that first bit of bad road among the sandhills; and it was the old gent speaking to her––telling her it was a fine day, and he hoped she liked it––that set her stamps to working a little then. She allowed the weather was about what it ought to be, and said she was much obliged and it suited her; and then she got her tongue in behind her teeth again as if she meant to keep it there––till the old gent took a fresh start by asking her if she’d been in the Territory long. She said polite she hadn’t, and was quiet for a minute. Then she got out her pocket-handkerchief and put it up to her eyes and said she’d been in it longer’n she wanted, and was glad she was going away. Hill said her talking that way made him feel kind of curious himself; but he didn’t have no need to ask questions––the old gent saving him 18 that trouble by going for her sort of fatherly and pumping away at her till he got the whole thing.
It come out scrappy, like as might be expected, Hill said; and so natural-sounding he thought he must be asleep and dreaming––he knowing pretty well what was going on in the Territory, and she telling about doings that was news to him and the kind he’d a-been sure to hear a lot of if they’d ever really come off. Hill said he wished he could tell it all as she did––speaking low, and ketching her breath in the worst parts, and mopping at her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief––but he couldn’t; and all he could say about it was it was better’n any theatre show he’d ever seen. The nubs of it was, he said, that she said her husband had taken out a troop from Fort Wingate against the Apaches (Hill knew blame well up there in the Navajo country was no place to look for Apaches) and the troop had been ambushed in a cañon in the Zuñi Mountains (which made the story still tougher) and every man of ’em, along with her “dear Captain” as she 19 called him, had lost his hair. “His loved remains are where those fierce creatures left them,” she said. “I have not even the sad solace of properly burying his precious bones!” And she cried.
The old gent was quite broke up, Hill said, and took a-hold of her hand fatherly––she was a powerful fine-looking woman––and said she had his sympathy; and when she eased up on her crying so she could talk she said she was much obliged––and felt it all the more, she said, because he looked like a young uncle of hers who’d brought her up, her father being dead, till she was married East to her dear Captain and had come out to the Territory with him to his dreadful doom.
Hill said it all went so smooth he took it down himself at first––but he got his wind while she was crying, and he asked her what her Captain’s name was, and what was his regiment; telling her he hadn’t heard of any trouble up around Wingate, and it was news to him Apaches was in them parts. She give him a dig in the ribs with her elbow––as much as to tell him he wasn’t to ask no 20 such questions––and said back to him her dear husband was Captain Chiswick of the Twelfth Cavalry; and it had been a big come down for him, she said, when he got his commission in the Regulars, after he’d been a Volunteer brigadier-general in the war.
Hill knowed right enough there wasn’t no Twelfth Cavalry nowhere, and that the boys at Wingate was A and F troops of the Fourth; but he ketched on to the way she was giving it to the old gent––and so he give her a dig in the ribs, and said he’d knowed Captain Chiswick intimate, and he was as good a fellow as ever was, and it was a blame pity he was killed. She give him a dig back again, at that––and was less particular about making room on his side.
The old gent took it all in, just as it come along; and after she’d finished up about the Apaches killing her dear Captain he wanted to know where she was heading for––because if she was going home East, he said, he was going East himself and could give her a father’s care.
She said back to him, pleasant like, that a young man like him couldn’t well be fathering an old lady like her, though it was obliging of him to offer; but, anyway, she wasn’t going straight back East, because she had to wait awhile at Palomitas for a remittance she was expecting to pay her way through––and she wasn’t any too sure about it, she said, whether she’d get her remittance; or, if she did get it, when it would come. Everything bad always got down on you at once, she said; and just as the cruel savages had slain her dear Captain along come the news the bank East he’d put his money in had broke the worst kind. Her financial difficulties wasn’t a patch on the trouble her sorrowing heart was giving her, she said; but she allowed they added what she called pangs of bitterness to her deeper pain.