Cherry swore for a while, sort of friendly and sociable--he was a sympathetic man, Cherry was, and always did what he could to help--and as Hart was too far gone to swear for himself, in a way that amounted to anything, hearing what Cherry had to say seemed to do him good. "I'd stop her, if there was any stop to her," he went on, in a minute or two, speaking hopeless and miserable; "but there ain't. She says she's starting the day after she writes--having a chance to come sudden with friends--and that means she's most here now. And there's no heading her off--because she says the friends she's hooked fast to may be coming to Pueblo and may be coming to Santa Fé. But it don't make any difference, she says, as she's told she can get down easy by the railroad from Pueblo, or she can slide across to Palomitas by 'a short and pleasant coach-ride'--that's what she calls it--from Santa Fé. "That's all she tells about her coming. The rest of what's in her letter is about how glad she'll be to see me, and about how glad she knows I'll be to see her--being lonely so far from my folks, and likely needing my clothes mended, and pleased to be eating some of her home-made pies. It's just like Aunt Maria to put in things like that. You see, she brought me up--and she's never got out of her head I'm more'n about nine years old. What I feel like doing is going out in the sage-brush and blowing the top of my fool head off, and letting the coyotes eat what's left of me and get me out of the way!" Hart really did look as if he meant it, Cherry said afterwards. He was the miserablest-looking man, he said, he'd ever seen alive. Cherry said he begun to have a notion, though, while Hart was talking, how the thing might be worked so there wouldn't be no real trouble if it could be fixed so Hart's aunt wouldn't stay in Palomitas more'n about a day; and he come right on down to the Forest Queen to see if he could get the boys to help him put it through. He left Hart clearing out the room he kept flour and meal in--being the cleanest--trying to rig up for his aunt some sort of a bunking-place. He was going to give her his own cot and mattress, he said; and he could fit her out with a looking-glass and a basin and pitcher all right because he kept them sort of things to sell; and he said he'd make the place extra tidy by putting a new horse-blanket on the floor. Seeing his way to getting a grip on that much of the contract, Cherry said, seemed to make him feel a little less bad.