as she always was, and is; but as I shook hands with her and looked her in the eyes she suddenly dropped her eyelids, and a queer expression crossed her face.  She had hold of herself again in a second and was looking at me and smiling and talking.  But that second was enough.  It flashed into my mind that she was the one who ’d done it.  I reckon I would n’t have dared to bone her about it if I ’d waited two minutes.  But the impulse took me, and I just asked her bluntly right then and there if it was she who had transferred that Greaser from her husband’s window to my door.

“She threw up her head and looked me square in the eyes—­you know that straight, frank gaze she has—­frowned a little and said, ’Yes, I did it.  I thought your doorway was the rightful place for that corpse to be found in.’

“Well, the joke of it and the pluck of her just struck me right where I lived, and I fairly roared.  ‘Put it there, Mrs. Coolidge,’ I said, and stuck out my hand, as soon as I could speak.  ’You ’re a regular captain!  No, you ’re bigger than that—­you ’re a colonel!  Shake, and let’s be friends!’

“Well, I just thought it would be a shame to drive a woman with as much pluck and sabe as that back East to live.  So I passed the word down the line in our party that we ’d give the Governor a show—­let him have fair play anyhow, and, if he could make good, all right, the pot should be his.  I was so tickled by Mrs. Coolidge’s trick and the way she won out on it that I never called her anything but ‘Colonel’ after that, and, somehow, the title stuck.  Anyway, she deserves it.”

For a long time after this affair, so I learned from Mrs. Coolidge when I asked her about the story her friend had told me, the Governor thought it was that interview and the stern spirit he displayed in it that had made the change in the opposition’s attitude toward him and had seemed to affect the feeling of the whole Territory.  For his official path became unexpectedly easy.  There were few attempts to balk him in his administration of affairs and there was a general manifestation of tolerance, and even of willingness to see how his ideas would work out.

But the time came when, understanding better the people with whom he had to deal, he knew that that interview ought to have had just the opposite result.  One day he said to his wife how surprising it was that it had not landed him in the hottest of hot water, and how puzzled he was to account for what seemed to have been its effect.  Then she confessed to him what had happened on that crucial night, how she had taken the body away and hung it in front of the other house, and what she partly knew and partly guessed about the results of the affair.  At once he realized that her instant and audacious retaliation was what had made possible his success and his growing popularity.  Nevertheless, he was shocked at first, for New England was still but a little way behind him.  But amusement soon overcame every other feeling, and he laughed heartily in admiration of her daring, just as his opponent had done.  After that, he seemed to take particular pride in her sobriquet, and himself often called her “Colonel Kate.”