For Bill was Santa Fé’s most remarkable institution. He was surgeon general to all maimed cars in a radius of twenty miles. We had encountered mechanics competent but dishonest, and mechanics honest but incompetent, and were to meet every other variety,--careless, sloppy, slow, stupid, and criminally negligent, but to Bill belongs the distinction of being the most honest, competent and intelligent mechanic we met in eleven thousand miles of garage-men. Hence he shall have a chapter to himself. When we discovered Bill, we permitted ourselves the luxury of a complete overhauling, and he, after one keen non-committal glance at our mud-caked veteran, silently shifted his gum, wheeled the car on to the turntable, got under it and stayed there two weeks. Three months of mud, sand, and water had not crippled the valiant “old lady,” but had dented her figure, and left her with a hacking cough. Her dustpan had been discarded, shred by shred, three spring leaves had snapped, the gear chain, of whose existence I learned for the first time, rattled; the baking sun had shrunk the rear wheels so that they oozed oil, the batteries needed recharging, the ignition had not been the same since the adventure of the mud-hole, and there were other suspected complications. Besides which, all the tires flapped in the breeze, cut to shreds by frozen adobe ruts, and a few tire rims had become bent out of shape. A thrifty garage-man could have made the job last a year. Now Bill had two signs which every good mechanic I ever knew bears,--a calm manner, and prominent jaw-bones. Whenever, during our hobo-ing we drove into a garage and were greeted by a man with a grease smudge over his right eye, and a lower jaw which suggested an indignant wisdom tooth, we learned to say confidently and without further parley, “Look the car over, and do anything you think best.” It was infallible. Nor was our confidence in Bill’s jaw-bone misplaced, for at the fortnight’s end, Bill rolled her out of the garage, shining, sleek and groomed, purring like a tiger cat, quiet, rhythmic and bursting with unused power. He had taken off the wheels, removed the cylinder heads, repaired the ignition, put in new gear chains and spark plugs, adjusted the carburetor to the last fraction, loosened the steering wheel, removed the old lady’s wheeze entirely, and done the thousand and one things we had repeatedly paid other garagemen to do and they had left undone. He had finished in record time, and my eye, long practised in the agony of computing the waste motions of mechanics, had noted Bill’s sure accuracy and unhurried speed. Not content with this much, he sent in a reasonable bill, in which he failed to add in the date or charge us for time of his which other people had wasted. In fact, nobody dared waste Bill’s time. Over his workbench hung a sign, “Keep out. Regardless of your personality, this means YOU!” We took a trial spin,