ad-agents you ever seen on it
was burros and cotton-tail rabbits; and all of 'em together kept
getting more drinks in him right along. So the upshot of it was: first
Hart's nephew stopped his squirming; and then he took to telling what
a holy wonder he was at mule-driving; and then he went to blowing the
biggest kind--till he got so he couldn't talk no longer--about what
he'd do in the shooting line if any road-agents come around trying
their monkey-shine hold-ups on _him_! So it ended, good enough, by
their getting him fixed tight in his hole.

The boys kept things going with him pretty late that night, and when
he showed up in the morning at the deepo--a delegation seeing to it he
got there, and Hill having the coach all ready for him--he still had
on him a fairly sizable jag. But he'd sobered up enough--having slept
quite a little, and soaked his head at the railroad tank--to want to
try all he knew how to spill himself out of his job. It took all the
Hen could do--the Hen had got up early and come down to the deepo
a-purpose to attend to him--and all the boys could do helping her, to
get him up on that coach-box and boosted off out of town.

He was that nervous he was shaking all over; and what made him
nervouser was having no passengers--nobody for Santa Fe having come in
on the Denver train. It was just a caution to see his shooting outfit!
The box of the coach looked like it was a gun-shop--being piled up
with two Winchesters and a double-barrelled shot-gun (the shot-gun, he
said, was to cripple anybody he didn't think it was needful to kill);
and beside that he had a machete some Mexican lent him hooked on to
his belt, and along with it a brace of derringers and two forty-fives.
Hill was the only one who didn't laugh fit to kill himself over that
layout. Hill said Hart's nephew done just right to take along all the
guns he could get a-hold of; and Hill said he'd attended to the proper
loading of every one of them weepons himself.

At last--with all the boys laughing away and firing fool talk at him,
and the Hen keeping him up to the collar by going on about how brave
he was--he did manage to whip up his mules and start off. Sick was no
name for him--and he was so scared stiff he looked like he was about
ready to cry. After he'd got down the slope, and across the bridge
over the Rio Grande, and was walking his mules on that first little
stretch of sandy road on the way to La Canada, we could see him
reaching d