Down he come along the platform--he was a-looking at his _Tribune_, and not paying no attention--and just as he got alongside the Pullman a man stepped off it and most plumped into him; and would a-plumped if he hadn't been so beat out by the hot weather he was going slow. He was a little round friendly looking feller, with a red face and little gray side-whiskers; and he was dressed up in black same as Charley was--only he'd a shorter-tailed coat, and hadn't a white tie on, and was wearing a shiny plug hat that looked most extra unsuitable in them parts on that sort of a day. "I beg your pardon, sir!" says the little man, as he pulled himself up just in time to keep from bumping. Charley bowed handsome--there was no ketching off Santa Fé when it come to slinging good manners, his being that gentlemanly he could a-give points to a New York bar-keep--and says back: "Sir, I beg yours! Heedlessness is my besetting sin. The fault is mine!" And then he said, keeping on talking the toney way he knowed how to: "I trust, sir, that you are not incommoded by the heat. Even for New Mexico in August, this is a phenomenally hot day." [Illustration: "'IT'S HOTTER THAN SAHARA!' SAID THE ENGLISHMAN"] "Incommoded is no name for it!" says the little man, taking off his shiny hat and mopping away at himself with his pocket-handkerchief. "I've never encountered such heat anywhere. It's hotter than Sahara! In England we have nothing like it at all." Then he mopped himself some more, and went ahead again--seeming glad to have somebody to let out to: "My whole life long I've been finding fault with our August weather in London. I'll never find fault with it again. I'd give fifty pounds to be back there now, even in my office in the City--and I'd give a hundred willingly if I could walk out of this frying-pan into my own home in the Avenue Road! If you know London, sir, you know that St. John's Wood is the coolest part of it, and that the coolest part of St. John's Wood--up by the side of Primrose Hill--is the Avenue Road; and so you can understand why thinking about coming out from the Underground and walking homeward in the cool of the evening almost gives me a pain!" Santa Fé allowed he wasn't acquainted with that locality; but he said he hadn't no doubt--since you couldn't get a worse one--it was a better place in summer than Palomitas. And then he kind of chucked it in casual that as the little man didn't seem to take much stock in Palomitas maybe he'd a-done as well if he'd stuck at home.