While some six of them, with Chalkeye, bore the light, half-rotted coffin into the room, many followed Toothpick Kid to the post-trader’s store.  Breaking in here, they found men sleeping on the counters.  These had been able to find no other beds in Drybone, and lay as they had stretched themselves on entering.  They sprawled in heavy slumber, some with not even their hats taken off and some with their boots against the rough hair of the next one.  They were quickly pushed together, few waking, and so there was space for spreading cloth and chintz.  Stuffs were unrolled and flung aside till many folds and colors draped the motionless sleepers, and at length a choice was made.  Unmeasured yards of this drab chintz were ripped off, money treble its worth was thumped upon the counter, and they returned, bearing it like a streamer to the coffin.  While the noise of their hammers filled the room, the hearse came tottering to the door, pulled and pushed by twenty men.  It was an ambulance left behind by the soldiers, and of the old-fashioned shape, concave in body, its top blown away in winds of long ago; and as they revolved, its wheels dished in and out like hoops about to fall.  While some made a harness from ropes, and throwing the saddles off two ponies backed them to the vehicle, the body was put in the coffin, now covered by the chintz.  But the laudanum upon the front of her dress revolted those who remembered their holidays with her, and turning the woman upon her face, they looked their last upon her flashing, colored ribbons, and nailed the lid down.  So they carried her out, but the concave body of the hearse was too short for the coffin; the end reached out, and it might have fallen.  But Limber Jim, taking the reins, sat upon the other end, waiting and smoking.  For all Drybone was making ready to follow in some way.  They had sought the husband, the chief mourner.  He, however, still lay in the grass of the quadrangle, and despising him as she had done, they left him to wake when he should choose.  Those men who could sit in their saddles rode escort, the old friends nearest, and four held the heads of the frightened cow-ponies who were to draw the hearse.  They had never known harness before, and they plunged with the men who held them.  Behind the hearse the women followed in a large ranch-wagon, this moment arrived in town.  Two mares drew this, and their foals gambolled around them.  The great flat-topped dray for hauling poles came last, with its four government mules.  The cow-boys had caught sight of it and captured it.  Rushing to the post-trader’s, they carried the sleeping men from the counter and laid them on the dray.  Then, searching Drybone outside and in for any more incapable of following, they brought them, and the dray was piled.

Limber Jim called for another drink and, with his cigar between his teeth, cracked his long bull-whacker whip.  The ponies, terrified, sprang away, scattering the men that held them, and the swaying hearse leaped past the husband, over the stones and the many playing-cards in the grass.  Masterfully steered, it came safe to an open level, while the throng cheered the unmoved driver on his coffin, his cigar between his teeth.