Santa Fé's Partner

was more fun coming across from Santa Fé than anything he'd ever got up against; and she was all the funnier, he said, because when he picked her up at the Fonda she looked like as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth and started in with her monkey-shines so sort of quiet and demure. Along with her, waiting at the Fonda, was an old gent with spectacles who turned out to be a mine sharp--one of them fellows the Government sends out to the Territory to write up serious in books all the fool stories prospectors and such unload on 'em: the kind that needs to be led, and 'll eat out of your hand. The Hen and the old gent and Hill had the box-seat, the Hen in between; and she was that particular about her skirts climbing up, and about making room after she got there, that Hill said he sized her up himself for an officer's wife going East.

Except to say thank you, and talk polite that way, she didn't open her head till they'd got clear of the town and begun to go slow in that first bit of bad road amon