assistant for the first time—­a tallish, good-looking young man, but with a weak mouth.  “This is Mr. Lusk,” said the rain-maker; and we shook hands, Ogden and I exchanging a glance.  Ourselves and the cart marched up Hill Street—­or Capitol Avenue, as it has become named since Cheyenne has grown fuller of pomp and emptier of prosperity—­and I thought we made an unusual procession:  the Governor’s secretary, unofficially leading the way to the barn; the cart, and the rain-maker beside it, guarding his packed-up mysteries; McLean and Lusk, walking together in unconscious bigamy; and in the rear, Odgen nudging me in the ribs.  That it was the correct Lusk we had with us I felt sure from his incompetent, healthy, vacant appearance, strong-bodied and shiftless—­the sort of man to weary of one trade and another, and make a failure of wife beating between whiles.  In Twenty-fourth Street—­ the town’s uttermost rim—­the Governor met us, and stared at Lusk.  “Christopher!” was his single observation; but he never forgets a face—­ cannot afford to, now that he is in politics; and, besides, Lusk remembered him.  You seldom really forget a man to whom you owe ten dollars.

“So you’ve quit hauling poles?” said the Governor.

“Nothing in it, sir,” said Lusk.

“Is there any objection to my having a hole in the roof?” asked the rain-maker; for this the secretary had been unable to tell him.

“What! going to throw your bombs through it?” said the Governor, smiling heartily.

But the rain-maker explained at once that his was not the bomb system, but a method attended by more rain and less disturbance.  “Not that the bomb don’t produce first-class results at times and under circumstances,” he said, “but it’s uncertain and costly.”

The Governor hesitated about the hole in the roof, which Hilbrun told us was for a metal pipe to conduct his generated gases into the air.  The owner of the barn had gone to Laramie.  However, we found a stove-pipe hole, which saved delay.  “And what day would you prefer the shower?” said Hilbrun, after we had gone over our contract with him.

“Any day would do,” the Governor said.

This was Thursday; and Sunday was chosen, as a day when no one had business to detain him from witnessing the shower—­though it seemed to me that on week-days, too, business in Cheyenne was not so inexorable as this.  We gave the strangers some information about the town, and left them.  The sun went away in a cloudless sky, and came so again when the stars had finished their untarnished shining.  Friday was clear and dry and hot, like the dynasty of blazing days that had gone before.