Santa Fe's Partner by Thomas A. Janvier — Read

Some of them summer days in Palomitas was that hot they'd melt the stuffing out of a lightning-rod, and you could cook eggs in the pockets of your pants. When things was that way the town was apt to get quieted down -- most being satisfied to take enough drinks early to make it pleasant spending the rest of the day sleeping 'em off somewheres in the shade. Along late in the afternoon, though, the wind always breezed down real cool and pleasant from the mountains -- and then the boys would wake up and get a brace on, and whatever was going to happen would begin.

Being that sort of weather, nobody was paying no attention worth speaking of to nothing: and when the Denver train come in -- being about three hours late, like it had a way of being, after a wash-out -- the place was in such a blister that pretty much all you could hear to show anybody was alive in Palomitas was snores. Besides Wood -- who had to be awake to do his work when the train got there -- and the clump of Mexicans that always hung around the deepo at train-time, there wasn't half a dozen folks with their eyes open in the whole town.