As was to be expected of 'em, all the boys--knowing Hart for a square-acting man, and liking him--tumbled right off to Cherry's plan. Santa Fé said--this was after they'd had their drinks--he s'posed he was chairman of the meeting, and he guessed he spoke the sense of the meeting when he allowed Mr. Cherry's scheme was about the only way out for their esteemed fellow-citizen, Mr. Hart, and it ought to go through. But as it was a matter that seriously affected the comfort and convenience of everybody in Palomitas, he said, it was only square to take a vote on it--and so he'd ask all in favor of Mr. Cherry's motion to say "Ay." And everybody in the room--except the few that was asleep, or too drunk to say anything--said "Ay" as loud as they knowed how. "Mr. Cherry's motion is carried, gentlemen," Santa Fé said; "and I will now appoint a committee to draught a notice to be posted at the deepo, and to call around at the other banks and saloons in the town and notify verbally our fellow-citizens of the action we have taken--and I will ask the Hen here kindly to inform the other ladies of Palomitas of our intentions, and to request their assistance in realizing them. She had better tell them, I reckon, that the way they can come to the front most effectively in this crisis is by keeping entirely out of sight in the rear." The Sage-Brush Hen, along with some of the other girls, had come in from the back room--where the dancing was--to find out what the circus was about; and when they caught on to what Palomitas was going to be like when Hart's aunt struck it they all just yelled. [Illustration: "WROTE OUT A NOTICE THAT WAS TACKED UP ON THE DEEPO DOOR"] "You've come out well once as the Baptist minister, Charley," the Hen said, shaking all over; "and I reckon you can do it again--only it won't be so easy showing off the new church and the parsonage by daylight as it was in the dark. About us girls laying low, maybe you're right and maybe you're not right. Anyway, don't you worry about us. All I'll say is, it won't be the ladies in this combine that'll give anything away!" And she and the other girls got so to laughing over it they all of 'em had to set down. Cherry was more pleased than a little the way things had gone--and he said so to the boys, and set up drinks all round again. Then he and Abe Simons--they was the committee to do it--wrote out a notice that was tacked up on the deepo door and read this way: TO THE CITIZENS OF PALOMITAS Mr. William Hart's aunt is coming to pay him a visit, and will strike this town either by the Denver train to-morrow morning or the Santa Fé coach to-morrow afternoon.