Palomitas means "little doves"--but I reckon the number of them birds about the place was few. For about a thousand years, more or less, it had been run on a basis of two or three hundred Mexicans and a sprinkling of pigs and Pueblo Indians--the pigs was the most respectable--and it was allowed to be, after the track got there, the toughest town the Territory had to show. Santa Cruz de la Cañada, which was close to it, was said to have took the cake for toughness before railroad times. It was a holy terror, Santa Cruz was! The only decent folks in it was the French padre--who outclassed most saints, and hadn't a fly on him--and a German named Becker. He had the Government forage-station, Becker had; and he used to say he'd had a fresh surprise every one of the mornings of the five years he'd been forage-agent--when he woke up and found nobody'd knifed him in the night and he was keeping on being alive! But when the track come in, and the higher civilization come in a-yelling with it and spread itself, Palomitas could give points to the Cañada in cussedness all down the line. Most of it right away was saloons and dance-halls; and the pressure for faro accommodation was such the padre thought he could make money by closing down his own monte-bank and renting. Denver Jones took his place at fifty dollars a week, payable every Saturday night--and rounded on the padre by getting back his rent-money over the table every Sunday afternoon. He'd a-got it back Sunday mornings if the padre hadn't been tied up mornings to his work. (He was a native, that padre was--and went on so extra outrageous his own folks couldn't stand him and Bishop Lamy bounced him from his job.) Pretty much all the time there was rumpusses; and the way they was managed made the Mexicans--being used, same as I've said, to knives mostly--open their eyes wide. It seemed really to jolt 'em when they begun to find out what a live man with his back up could do with a gun! Occurrences was so frequent--before construction started up again, and for a while after--the new cemetery out in the sage-brush on the mesa come close to having as big a population as the town.