Till Hill started his coach up, the only way to get across to Santa Fé from Palomitas was to go a-horseback or walk. Both ways was unhealthy; and the coach, being pretty near as liable to hold-ups, wasn't much healthier. It had to go slow, the coach had--that was a powerful mean road after you left Pojuaque and got in among the sandhills--and you never was sure when some of them bunches of scrub-cedar wasn't going to wake up and take to pumping lead into you. Only a nervy man, like Hill was, ever could have took the contract; and Hill said he got so rattled sometimes--when it happened he hadn't no passengers and was going it alone in among them sandhills--he guessed it was only because he had so little hair to turn anything it didn't turn gray. Hill slept at the Forest Queen, the nights he was in Palomitas--he drove one way one day and the other way the next--and the boys made things cheerfuller for him by all the time rigging him about the poor show he had for sticking long at his job. He'd look well, they said, a-laying out there in the sage-brush plugged full of lead waiting for his friends to call for him; and they asked him how he thought he'd enjoy being a free-lunch counter for coyotes; and they told him he'd better write down on a piece of paper anything he'd like particular to have painted on the board--and they just generally devilled him all round. Hill didn't mind the fool talk they give him--he always was a good-natured fellow, Hill was--and he mostly managed to hit back at 'em, one way or another, so they'd come out about even and end up with drinks for all hands. The only one who really didn't like that sort of talk, and always kicked when the boys started in on it, was the Sage-Brush Hen. She said it was a mean shame to make a joke about a thing like that, seeing there wasn't a day when it mightn't happen; and it wasn't like an ordinary shooting-match, she said, that come along in the regular way and both of you took your chances; and sometimes she'd get that mad and worried she'd go right smack out of the room. You see, the Hen always thought a heap of Hill--they having got to be such friends together that first day when he brought her over to Palomitas on the coach and helped her put up her rig on the old gent from Washington; and, back of her liking Hill specially, she really was about as good-natured a woman as ever lived. Except Hart's nephew--she did just hate Hart's nephew, who was a chump if ever there was one--she always was as pleasant as pie with everybody; and if any of the boys was hurt--like when Denver Jones got that jag in his shoulder rumpussing with Santa Fé Charley; and she more friends with Charley, of course, than with anybody else--she'd turn right in and help all she knowed how.