Santa Fé kicked at that, at first; and a good many of the boys felt he had a right to. Santa Fé 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 Fé 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 hurry--as he'd be glad at any price to be shut of a crowd that would play it on anybody that low down! Cherry stuck it out, though, to have things his way. Palomitas was going in for purification, Cherry said, and the moral effect of having Santa Fé along at Bill's funeral was part of the purifying. The very fact that Santa Fé was kicking so hard against it, he said, showed it was a good thing. There was sense in that, too; and so the upshot of it was the boys come round to Cherry's plan. The only serious thing against it was it meant waiting over another day, till the funeral outfit got down from Denver--all hands having chipped in to give Hart a good send-off, and telegraphed his size to a first-class Denver undertaker, with orders to do him up in style. Making him wait around so long, sort of idle, was what Santa Fé kicked hardest against at first. But after his talk with the Hen, as was remembered afterwards, he didn't do any more kicking; and some of the boys noticed he was a little nervous, and kept asking, off and on, if they still meant to run the show that way.