"Well, boys," said Cherry, when the yelling let up a little. "I guess getting shut of Santa Fé that way is better'n hanging him; and I guess--with him and the Hen and the rest of 'em fired out of it--we've got Palomitas purified about down to the ground. And what's to all our credits, we've ended off by doing a first-class good deed! Them little girls'll be pleased and happy when their mother gets back to 'em with our money in her pocket, and brings along in good shape their father--who'd just about be in the thick of his kicking on that telegraph-pole, by this time, if she hadn't romped in the way she did on the closest kind of a close call! "And now let's turn to and get poor old Bill planted. We've kind of lost sight of Bill in the excitement--and we owe him a good deal. If Santa Fé hadn't started the reform movement by shooting him, we'd still be going on in the same old way. You may say it's all Bill's doings that Palomitas has been give the clean-up it wanted, and wanted bad!" * * * * * When Hill drove into town next afternoon--coming to the deepo, where most of the boys was setting around waiting for the train to pull out--he was laughing so he was most tumbling off the box. "I've got the damnedest biggest joke on this town," Hill said--Hill had the habit of talking that off-hand way--"that ever was got on a town since towns begun!" Hill was so full of it he couldn't hold in to make a story. He just went right on blurting it out: "Do you boys know who that wife of Charley's was that blew in yesterday from Denver? I guess you don't! Well, I do--she was the Sage-Brush Hen! Yes sirree," Hill said, so full of laugh he couldn't hardly talk plain; "that's just who she was! All along from the first there was something about her shape I felt I ought to know, and I was dead right. It come out while we was stopping at Bouquet's place at Pojuaque for dinner--they both knowing I'd see it was such a joke I wouldn't spoil it by giving it away too soon. She went in the back room at Bouquet's to have a wash and a brush up--and when she come along to table she'd got over being Charley's wife and was the Hen as good as you please! She hadn't a gray hair or a wrinkle left nowhere, and was like she always was except for her black clothes. When she saw my looks at seeing her, she got to laughing fit to kill herself--just the same gay old Hen as ever; and she always was, you know, the most comical-acting sort of a woman, when she wanted to be, anybody ever seen.