The cattlemen who had carried the warning across the river to Hughes were still sitting on their dripping horses when Dunham rode into the ford. Others had been waiting to hear how the Texans took the news, evidently, for there was a group of men, on foot and mounted, numbering about twenty, collected around Moore and the other delegates, one of whom Dunham recognized as Garland, the man who had hired him for Moore to discharge so contemptuously.
Moore was lolling slouchily with one thigh across his saddle, pretty well pleased with something, it seemed, for his loud laugh came clacking like the voice of a crow as Dunham struck the shallows of the ford and headed across. Somebody called attention to his approach. Moore threw a startled look around and slid into his saddle like a turtle going across a log, the ripple of Dunham's identity running through the crowd.
John Moore was neither a coward nor a gunman. He was a fellow who would bull up against any kind of bare-handed encounter with a roar, and claw, hammer and bite his way through. He had the fist-fighter's contempt for weapons, never carrying a gun except on extraordinary occasions such as this. From the way he turned white around the gills now it was plain he thought Dunham had come back for a settlement, and he knew he never could get his gun out in time to do him a bit of good. He let it hang where it was.
Dunham lifted his right hand to indicate his peaceful disposition, legs doubled against his horse's sides to keep the water from overflowing his boot-tops. The current ripped along there in a narrow channel with great rapidity and force, although the water was only a little more than belly-deep to a horse. As Bill cleared the ford and lowered his feet, Moore rode down a little way to meet him.
"Hello, Bill," Moore greeted, his voice hearty but his grin sort of weak and flickering, "where you been keepin' yourself all this time?"
Dunham returned the greeting without going into particulars of his last night's lodging-place; spoke to Garland cordially, and gave the others a blanket greeting in a "Good-morning, gentlemen," although he was certain he had stretched the noun until it cracked.
Taking them as they ran, they were about the toughest-looking collection he ever had faced. He wondered if Moore and Garland had sifted the range and picked the scoundrels, or if the crowd was a fair representation of the human stock that frequented the Kansas range.
Garland looked at him questioningly, as if to ask him if he had been associating with those outcasts from south of the fever line.
"Everything all right with you, Dunham?" he asked, more to fill an awkward chink in the openly embarrassing situation than to elicit information.
"Why," said Dunham, bending his head as if a hard question had been propounded and he must go into it carefully, "I can't exac'ly say anything's wrong."
"I'm damned sorry for the reception you got down here yesterday, Dunham," Garland said with frank sincerity.
"Oh, he knows how to take a joke," Moore said, with ingratiating assurance.
"I'm learnin' right along," Dunham agreed, looking at Moore so coldly the cowman's gizzard sagged, "but it's a hard matter for a green man like me to know where the joke stops and the insult begins."
"Them damn-fool boys ain't accountable, Bill," Moore said, apparently full of regret for the incident. "A man like you can afford to pass a little thing like that by."
"I don't hold the boys accountable, but I took you for a full-grown man," Bill told him, with more indifference than censure. "But that don't matter; I didn't come over here to take that up with you."
"You came over to ask me what in the hell I mean when I tell a man he's hired, I guess," Garland said. "I mean what I say, when I say it that way. If you want to go to work, you're still hired."
"No, I didn't exac'ly come to take that up with you, either, Mr. Garland. Mr. Moore shot off a lot of talk yesterday about the kind of men he needed down here to keep Texas cattle out of Kansas. I'm here to show him what kind of a man it takes to bring them in."
"What do you mean, Dunham?"
Garland was all on edge in a moment, and if the others could have raised their ears there would have been a general pointing in Bill Dunham's direction. Since these erectile muscles had fallen into disuse in Kansas at that time, although a breed of politicians developed later in that state that could waggle their ears like any ass, the movement among the cattlemen was that of feet. They swayed a little nearer, braced for what was coming next.
"I've got a herd of four thousand cattle over there that I'm goin' to take up to Pawnee Bend."
"Do you mean you own that herd? Do you mean to tell me you hired out to me for a quarantine guard and you owner of that herd all the time?"
Garland was so outraged by what he took to be Dunham's underhanded treason that he clapped his hand to his gun.
"No, I don't own a hair of 'em," Dunham replied calmly, unmoved by the demonstration, but watching for the next foolish move. "I've assumed responsibility for their delivery to the pens at Pawnee Bend. They stand under my orders; that's what I mean."
"If you've taken the contract to drive that herd to Pawnee Bend you'll need a whole lot of help, young feller," Moore said, assured again, and full of words, since Dunham had not come gunning for him.
But there were others in that camp who did not feel this pleasant freedom to draw a long breath and look away for a minute as the news of Bill Dunham's arrival ran like a wind through tall grass. It reached Shad Brassfield where he was hobbling his horses to turn them out for the day, giving him such a palsy he couldn't pull a knot. Two young cowpunchers lolling under the trees near their horses, swapping boastful yarns of their latest conquests among the dance-hall ladies of Pawnee Bend, stopped breathing a moment to look a startled question into each other's eyes. It took them only about three seconds to reach an undivided opinion that their urgent business was not on the shore of the Cimarron that day, but at some undetermined point toward the north.
"Hughes didn't tell us he'd turned things over to you," Garland said. "If this is a joke, kid, it looks to me like you're showin' kind of poor judgment in pickin' your day to put it over."
"I leave jokin' to you people; it's more in your line than mine. Hughes didn't say anything about me because I hadn't taken the job then."
"Do you expect us to stand here hands-down and let you pass?" an elderly, bearded, Scottish-looking man inquired, bending over his saddle-horn to glare at Dunham wrathfully.
"This is a public road," Dunham replied. "You gentlemen have taken one end of the law in your own hands; I'll take the other in mine. I'm as good a Jayhawker as any of you—better, I expect, for I was born in this state—and I know the laws of my state as well as any of you do. There's no law that gives you authority to close the public roads against the peaceable citizens of another state. What I'm here for is to tell you to either step out of the way when you see that herd comin', or be treated the same as any other band of outlaws if you try to stop us."
"Dunham, I thought you had more sense than that. Don't you know you can't run a bluff on this crowd of men that have got everything they own up on this throw?"
Garland spoke with patronizing friendliness, as if he had an honest interest in seeing Dunham spared the humiliation of attempting a thing so preposterously impossible. Others were not so friendly. There was derisive laughter, which rounded out in daring challenges, and damnation enough uttered to make Dunham limp under curses all the rest of his life if there had been half efficacy in the weakest of them.
"You don't stand to lose any more, individually, than Hughes," Dunham argued. "When a man loses all he's got he's cleaned, if it's much or little. Where's he to go with his cattle if he can't go on to Pawnee Bend and ship?"
"That's for him to settle," the Scotsman said.
"I'm here to make a fair proposal to you, gentlemen," Dunham continued. "We'll keep to the trail if you don't molest us, grazin' no further on each side than is reasonable and necessary. You can easily keep your cattle away from where we've passed. There are a lot of Texas cattle headed up the trail; you can't keep them all out without more fightin' than you've contracted for, not to mention damage suits that'll clean you out quicker than any fever, and keep you cleaned. You might as well step out of the way first as last."
"That herd can't come into this state—not along here, anyhow," Moore declared. "If you try to bring them rotten cattle in here, we'll be right here to stop you."
"We'll come," Dunham said, ominously calm, "and we'll give you the best thirty men with pump-guns can deliver. Unless you back up and stay backed, there's goin' to be more than one funeral tomorrow, gentlemen. We're comin' over here not only ready to fight, but all set to stampede that herd over this range if we can't get it in any other way."
"You'll find one man that won't back up," the hairy Scotsman said.
And that was a stern fact, others averred, in various tints of individual expression, none of them subdued. Only Garland seemed to be thinking about the serious complications which could very well develop out of a fight, even though the Texans were strongly outnumbered. They had not expected it to come to a fight, when all was said, their reliance being in numbers to make their prohibition good.
The threat of a stampede was another thing to fix the thought of reasonable men like Garland. Even Moore had jumped when Dunham spoke of it. Such a stampede could be started by a few men; the turmoil of a fight would accelerate it, and all the men gathered there would be no more than a handful of chaff in the faces of those four thousand animals once they were beyond human restraint. They would run until they fell of exhaustion, fifteen miles, twenty-five miles, sowing their dreaded, mysterious plague far and wide.
Another thing to be considered was that Texas rangemen were shooting men, while Kansas cattlemen, as a general rule, were not. Many of the Kansans had been farmers in the eastern states before taking up range life. Moore was a fair example of the class. There would be more than one funeral, for a fact, and it was no pleasant thought for any life-loving Kansas cowman that one of such funerals might be his. A man could much better stand the loss of half his cattle through Texas fever than the loss of his own life through conjunction with a Texas bullet.
Dunham could see that he had set the ferment of doubt and caution working; that the resolution of some of them, at least, was shaken. But Moore was still confident in the array of numbers to bluff Dunham and the Texans back.
"You'll hit the hottest water you ever put your foot in, Dunham, if you try to bring that herd across this river," Moore warned. "I don't care whose funeral comes off tomorrow; you can't bring them cattle into Kansas."
"You'd better call it off, Dunham, as far as you're concerned," Garland advised. "Whatever you're gettin' out of it won't be enough to make it worth while to have everybody in this country down on you. There's not a chance to break through, but if you lead them fellers on to try it you'll be in just as bad with us as if you'd made it. I know you're sore, I don't blame you for bein' sore, but you're a fool if you think you can square accounts this way."
"I don't hold any animosity against you, Mr. Garland," Dunham said with grave courtesy. "But there is a man here that I do hold animosity against for insults and injuries, and if that man stands in my way when I come over here with that herd, I'm goin' after him. If one shot's fired, I'll hold that man responsible for it with his life, and I'll get him if I have to chase him to his own doorstep!"
Dunham turned his horse and rode into the river, looking as straight and as steadily ahead as if he drew a furrow to a mark. He did not even lift his feet to bring his new boots above the water, riding through the little stream as though it were not there. He rode up the pebbly strand and into the dusty trail, worn deep into the sod by traffic that had begun to stream up it from the Texas ranges before he was born; and up the gentle slope to the hilltop, eyes as inflexibly ahead as the eyes of a statue.
If any man behind him drew a gun, Dunham did not know it; if there was a movement to ride after him in force and overwhelm him, it was checked by the council of Garland and the others who had sense enough to think, without a ripple of it ever reaching his ears.
On the Kansas shore they looked after Dunham as he disappeared over the little hill. They were nearer the water's edge than Dunham had left them, and Garland had his horse turned like a barrier across the road. He looked at Moore, accusingly, heaping the blame for the situation on his shoulders.
"There's such a thing as carryin' a joke too damn far, as I guess you're about due to learn," he said. "You sure did play hell when you rubbed that kid the wrong way!"