Free The Gentleman Outlaw and Me-Eli by Mary Downing Hahn

them. Suddenly he seemed downright pathetic, all dirty and rumpled and still acting like a fine gentleman, using big words when little ones would have done just as well if not better. Though I struggled against it, I felt my heart go as soft as a rotten apple.
    "How far will twenty dollars get us?" I asked, keeping my voice as tough and hard as Little Homer's. Calvin knew I had those two gold pieces, so it made no sense to hold them back. But the other twenty dollars were my secret. Calvin had no way of knowing the mysterious gentleman had taken pity on me twice. And he wasn't going to find out.
    Calvin walked over to the ticket window and squinted at the fare table. "It appears we have enough to get to Alamosa," he said. "We'll earn some money there and then go on."
    By the time the ticket agent showed up, Calvin had doused his head in a horse trough and sobered up a bit. I handed over two of my eagles, but I kept the other two in my left shoe where I hoped they'd be safe.
    ***
    We rode third class again, which meant seats about as comfortable as church pews, but since it was now 4 A.M. , the three of us fell sound asleep in no time.
    When I woke up, the sun was shining in my eyes. It was a little after six and we were pulling into Cuchara Junction. The mountains were much closer. Bigger too. After seeing the flat land of Kansas all my life, I noticed the sky seemed smaller here. You couldn't see forever the way you could back home.
    "Those are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains," said Calvin, sounding more like his regular old smarty-pants self. "It's Spanish for
Blood of Christ.
"
    The train jerked to a stop and the conductor yelled, "All out for breakfast. Train leaves in twenty minutes, so make it snappy, folks."
    I shoved Calvin. "If you want to eat, get moving."
    He gave me a bleary-eyed look and shook his head. "No thanks, Elijah. I can't stomach the food I'd be likely to get in that hellhole."
    "Well, mind Caesar then. I'm half starved."
    Somehow I managed to grab a table and get coffee and rolls from a waitress even sloppier than the one we'd met in Pueblo. I wolfed it down and ran back to the train without a minute to spare.
    After we left Cuchara, the train climbed higher and higher into the mountains.
Sangre de Cristo.
I rolled the words around in my mouth, savoring their foreign taste. It was a peculiar name, but maybe it meant those old Spanish explorers suffered a lot looking for the cities of gold they never found.
    We made a short stop in a little town called La Veta to unload freight and take on a few passengers. Then we went on up the mountain. On one side of the train was a rocky wall. On the other, the ground dropped way down so all you saw out the window were sky and more mountains in the distance. For once I didn't stick my head out to get a better view. Frankly, I didn't want to know how far up we were.
    Sometime after eleven, we arrived in Alamosa, another dusty town abustle with the usual mix of folks—railroad workers, miners, cowboys, gamblers, Spaniards, and Indians. Some were heading south to Espanola in the New Mexico Territory, and others
were heading west toward Durango and Silverton to try their luck at the silver camps.
    "So what do you intend to do now, Calvin?" I asked. "Thanks to you, we're dead broke." It was a mean thing to say, but I wanted to see him wince.
    Calvin was busy wiping his boot on the side of a horse trough. When he'd scraped it clean, he turned to me. "We're not quite broke, Eli."
    With a smile, he reached toward me and pretended to pull two gold eagles out of my ear. "My, my, where did these come from?"
    Too late, I grabbed at the coins. The rotten pick-pocketing son of a gun must have stolen them while I was dozing on the train.
    "Give them back, you thief!" I shouted. "They're mine!"
    'Yours?" Calvin eyed me. The coins jingled in his pocket. "And from whom did you steal them, Eli?"
    "The gentleman who outsmarted you at three-card monte gave them to me! Me—not