Things really did look serious; and Wood said--for all he'd been told what was coming--he more'n half thought the boys had got to rumpussing in dead earnest. Three or four was setting on the ground with their sleeves and pants rolled up tying up their arms and legs with their pocket-handkerchiefs; there was a feller--Nosey Green, it turned out to be--laying on one side in a sort of mixed-up heap like as if he'd dropped sudden; right in the middle of the road Blister Mike was sprawled out, with Santa Fé--his black clothes all over dust and his hat off--holding his head with one hand and feeling at his heart with the other; and just as the buck-board stopped, right in the thick of it, Kerosene Kate come a-tearing along, with the Sage-Brush Hen close after her, and plumped down on Mike and yelled out: "Oh, my husband! My poor husband! He is foully slain!" It was all so natural, Wood said, that seeing it sudden that way give him a first-class jolt. For a minute, he said, he couldn't help thinking it was the real thing. As for the little man--and he likely would have took matters just the same, and no blame to him, if his feet had been as hard as anybody's--he swallowed the show whole. "Good Heavens!" says he, getting real palish. "What a dreadful thing this is!" Santa let go of Mike's head and got up, brushing his pants off, and says solemn: "Our poor brother has passed from us. Palomitas has lost one of its most useful citizens--there was nobody who could mix drinks as he could--and the world has lost a noble man! Take away his stricken wife, my dear," he says, speaking to the Sage-Brush Hen. "Take poor Sister Rebecca home with you to the parsonage--my duties lie elsewhere at present--and pour out to her from your tender heart the balm of comfort that you so well know how to give." Then he come along to the buck-board, and says to the little man: "I greatly regret that this unfortunate incident should have occurred while you are with us. From every point of view the event is lamentable. Brother Green, known familiarly among us because of his facial peculiarity as Nosey Green--the gentleman piled up over there on the other side of the road--was as noble-hearted a man as ever lived; so was Brother Michael, whom you met in all the pride of his manly strength only this morning at the Forest Queen bar. Both were corner-stones of our Sunshine Club, and among the most faithful of my parishioners. In deep despondency we mourn their loss!" "It is dreadful--dreadful!" says the little man. And then he wanted to know how the shooting begun.