When things was settled, all quick that way, Hart's nephew took to squirming--he seeing, drunk as he was, he'd bit off a blame sight more'n he cared to chew. But with the Hen right after him--and Hill and all the rest of the boys backing her, they being sure she'd dandy cards up her sleeve for the queer game she was playing--he couldn't make nothing by all his squirms. The boys got at him and told him anybody could see he was afraid; and the Hen got at him and told him anybody could see he wasn't, and she said she knew he was about the bravest man alive; and Hill got at him and told him the road had improved so, lately, the nearest to road-agents you ever seen on it was burros and cotton-tail rabbits; and all of 'em together kept getting more drinks in him right along. So the upshot of it was: first Hart's nephew stopped his squirming; and then he took to telling what a holy wonder he was at mule-driving; and then he went to blowing the biggest kind--till he got so he couldn't talk no longer--about what he'd do in the shooting line if any road-agents come around trying their monkey-shine hold-ups on _him_! So it ended, good enough, by their getting him fixed tight in his hole. The boys kept things going with him pretty late that night, and when he showed up in the morning at the deepo--a delegation seeing to it he got there, and Hill having the coach all ready for him--he still had on him a fairly sizable jag. But he'd sobered up enough--having slept quite a little, and soaked his head at the railroad tank--to want to try all he knew how to spill himself out of his job. It took all the Hen could do--the Hen had got up early and come down to the deepo a-purpose to attend to him--and all the boys could do helping her, to get him up on that coach-box and boosted off out of town. He was that nervous he was shaking all over; and what made him nervouser was having no passengers--nobody for Santa Fé having come in on the Denver train. It was just a caution to see his shooting outfit! The box of the coach looked like it was a gun-shop--being piled up with two Winchesters and a double-barrelled shot-gun (the shot-gun, he said, was to cripple anybody he didn't think it was needful to kill); and beside that he had a machete some Mexican lent him hooked on to his belt, and along with it a brace of derringers and two forty-fives. Hill was the only one who didn't laugh fit to kill himself over that layout. Hill said Hart's nephew done just right to take along all the guns he could get a-hold of; and Hill said he'd attended to the proper loading of every one of them weepons himself.