said, "him and me being such good friends; but he says it would only
worry him having me in the audience, and so I've promised him I'll
light out"--and she kept her word, and got away for Denver by that
night's train. Her going took a real load off the Committee's mind.

Some of the other fired ones went off on the same train. The rest took
Hill's coach across to Santa Fe--and made no trouble, Hill said,
except they held the coach for two hours at Pojuaque while all
hands got drunk at old man Bouquet's. Hill said all the rest of the
way they was yelling, and firing off their guns, and raising hell
generally--that was the way Hill put it--but they didn't do no real
harm.

It was Joe Cherry's notion that Santa Fe should be took along to
Hart's funeral, and not hung till everybody got back to town again.
Joe was a serious-minded man, and he said the moral effect of running
things that way would pan out a lot richer than if they just had a
plain hanging before the funeral got under way.

Santa Fe kicked at that, at first; and a good many of the boys
felt he had a right to. Santa Fe said it was all in the game to run
him up to the telegraph-pole in front of the deepo, the same as
other folks; but no committee had no right, he said, to make a
circus of him by packing him all round the place after poor old
Bill--who always had been plain in his tastes, and would have been
the last man in Palomitas to want that kind of a fuss made over
him--and he didn't mean to take a hand in no such fool carryings-on.
He didn't want anybody to think he was squirming, he said, for he
wasn't. Some men got up against telegraph-poles, and others got up
against guns or pneumonia or whatever happened to come along--and it
was all in the day's work. But when they did get up against
it--whatever it turned out to be--that was the one time in their
lives when it wasn't fair to worry 'em more'n was needed. Nobody
but chumps, he said, would want to hurt his feelings by making him
do trick-mule acts at poor old Bill's funeral--'specially as him and
Bill always had been friendly, and nobody was sorrier than he was
about the accident that had occurred.

Santa Fe was a first-rate talker, and everybody but Cherry allowed
what he was letting out had a good deal of sense in it. He ended up by
saying that if they did make any such fool show of him he'd like 'em
to put it through quick and get him back to the deepo and telegraph
him off to Kingdom Come in a