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