“My jaw dropped and I shut the door mighty quick, when I saw that,” he told me, with a reminiscent, amused chuckle at himself.  “I knew in a second that the Governor was onto us, that he must have seen us in front of his window, and that it was up to me to do some lively pullin’ of freight.  As a matter of fact, I had n’t had anything to do with the lynching.  That had been done by some cowboys who were in town the day before, and the fellow they ’d done for was an ornery cuss of a half-breed Mexican, who was a whole lot better off dead than alive, anyway.  He tried to play some low-down game on ’em at poker, and they just strung him up and rode off.  Some of our fellows heard about it, and three or four of us decided it would be a good thing to let Coolidge know what our sentiments were.

“We were in dead earnest, and we meant to get his political scalp and drive him out of the Territory with his tail between his hind legs, before he knew what had happened to him.  I won’t say,” and the man grinned and his eyes twinkled, “I was n’t expecting to be appointed Governor myself afterwards.  Anyway, I did n’t care to be roped into a trial for murder just then.  It would have interfered with my plans.  And if the Governor had seen us apparently lynching a man right under his eyes, he could cinch us if he wanted to.

“I called the Mexicans up to the door, told them I didn’t know how the body got there (I didn’t, either), but it must have been put there by some of my enemies.  Then I gave them money to take charge of it, say the dead man was a friend of theirs, and do the proper thing.  So the poor cuss was in luck by the affair after all, for he got a mass said over him.  Then I sent word to my friends who ’d been with me, and we all just quietly skipped, on the minute.  At sun-up that morning there was n’t one of us in town.  I had urgent business in Texas for the next week.

“You see, we ’d all of us thought our new Governor was just a highfalutin’ tenderfoot, and it would n’t be any job at all to buffalo him.  But this move of his gave us a suspicion that maybe we ’d sized him up wrong.  It was just the kind of quiet warning that we ’d be likely to give if we had cards up our sleeve that the other fellow did n’t know about.  It looked as if he really could and would strike back good and plenty if we pushed him too hard.  So we sent word to our crowd all over the Territory to keep quiet a while.  And let me tell you, life in New Mexico was not nearly so exciting for the next few weeks as some of us had planned it should be.

“Still, I was n’t quite satisfied about it.  Somehow, the Governor did n’t seem to pan out to be just the kind of man who would give that kind of a jolt to his enemies.  He was too Eastern.  I was still chawin’ it over in my mind, when one day I met Mrs. Coolidge, two or three weeks after it happened and the first time I ’d seen her since.  She was lively and cordial,