e no sort of an American town nohow,
Palomitas wasn't--being made to start with of 'dobes (which is
Mexican for houses built of mud, and mud they was in the rainy season)
spilled around on the bluff anywheres; and when the track come along
through the middle of it the chinks was filled in with tents and
shingle-shacks and dugouts--all being so mixed up and scattery you'd
a-thought somebody'd been packing a town through them parts in a wagon
and the load had jolted out, sort of casual over the tail-board, and
stuck where it happened to come down. The only things you could
call houses was the deepo, and the Forest Queen Hotel right across
the track from it, and Bill Hart's store. Them three buildings was
framed up respectable; with real windows that opened, and doors such
as you could move without kicking at 'em till you was tired. The
deepo was right down stylish--having a brick chimney and being
painted brown. Aside the deepo was the tank and the windmill that
pumped into it. Seems to me at nights, sometimes, I can hear that
old windmill going around creaking and clumpetty-clumpetting now!

Palomitas means "little doves"--but I reckon the number of them birds
about the place was few. For about a thousand years, more or less, it
had been run on a basis of two or three hundred Mexicans and a
sprinkling of pigs and Pueblo Indians--the pigs was the most
respectable--and it was allowed to be, after the track got there, the
toughest town the Territory had to show. Santa Cruz de la Canada,
which was close to it, was said to have took the cake for toughness
before railroad times. It was a holy terror, Santa Cruz was! The only
decent folks in it was the French padre--who outclassed most saints,
and hadn't a fly on him--and a German named Becker. He had the
Government forage-station, Becker had; and he used to say he'd had a
fresh surprise every one of the mornings of the five years he'd been
forage-agent--when he woke up and found nobody'd knifed him in the
night and he was keeping on being alive!

But when the track come in, and the higher civilization come in
a-yelling with it and spread itself, Palomitas could give points to
the Canada in cussedness all down the line. Most of it right away was
saloons and dance-halls; and the pressure for faro accommodation was
such the padre thought he could make money by closing down his own
monte-bank and renting. Denver Jones took his place at fifty dollars a
week, payable every Saturda