When that railroad was put through the job was done hastily, the builders being in a hurry to get in on the business of handling the vast droves of livestock which cattlemen herded up from Texas and the Cherokee Nation, where they leased grazing land from the Indians. It was the second line to stretch across Kansas from east to west and, being from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles south of the original road, it offered a big saving to stockmen in the matter of wear and tear and incidental expenses. It reached into the cattle country with the inexorable arm of competition, cutting off at one stroke its rival's business in that field.
But it was a mushy, squashy railroad after a rain, or when the spring thaws came, the ties being laid on the earth roadbed just as the graders' slushers had left it; tamped with earth, the centers filled with earth, which is poor material to hold track in line when the frost breaks and the rains come, as any section boss will testify.
Now, after some years of this mud-spattering, the tarriers were on the job, resurfacing the track with rock ballast, straightening a curve here, reducing a grade there, replacing the light, clattering, strap-jointed iron with heavy steel, making a real railroad of it, at once the pride of its builders and the state toward whose development it had contributed so much.
Texas cattle were still coming on the hoof in those days for Kansas railroads to carry the rest of the way to market, and there were Kansas cattle by hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands more in the Cherokee Nation, for which this road was the most convenient outlet.
For a long distance it ran parallel to the Cherokee Strip, as it was called, not a great way from it as distances were considered in those robust days of driven herds. Hundreds of men were employed along this railroad in big gangs; hundreds rode after cattle on the range. All these nomads—for they were transients, blowing like cottonwood seeds before the winds of chance—sought their highly seasoned diversions in the towns along the line.
Far-scattered towns these were, great stretches of bleak high prairie-lands lying between them. To these the rovers came, bringing their hard-come wages to blow in on one go-easy spree. There was plenty of business in these towns, set so far apart that competition was not felt in any cutting degree, and one of the liveliest, one of the most lurid, profane and altogether outside both statutory and moral law in its day, was Pawnee Bend, the place toward which we have been heading since the very first word.
Things had been put down hastily at Pawnee Bend, its merchants and others who profited on that unstable trade being in a manner camp-followers. They pushed along as the cattle frontier contracted into the diminishing west; as railroad activities centered here and there. The two sources of revenue combined by this natural process of retreat on one hand, development on the other, kept things in such towns as Pawnee Bend on the bound until the scene shifted and the rough customers took down their tents and traveled on.
While the day of this highly colored prosperity was brief, the marvel was that few towns vanished away and were forgotten. Agriculture, that foundation of all lasting prosperity, pushed close on the stride of railroad development, giving Pawnee Bend and similar places a solid reason for being. Some fell back into colorless wayside villages when the flare burned out; others rose to towns and cities of consequence. Perhaps Pawnee Bend was one of these. Who knows?
On that early June day, languid sunlight over the gray-green, melancholy hills, there was not much promise of future consequence in Pawnee Bend. It seemed thrown down there without a purpose in that huge rough plan of nature, as boxes which might have jolted out of a wagon, except for the geometrical exactness of the streets, such as there were houses enough along to trace. It had been done regularly, for townsite promoters always were first on the scene of these railroad towns of western Kansas. The town was bounded on the south by the railroad, unbounded on the north by prairie spaciousness that would have contained all the cities that ever came to be built in that marvelous great state. Between this limit on one side, this vastitude on the other, probably three hundred people were housed, attendants in one capacity or another upon the prosperity of the place.
Pawnee Bend was built to the pattern of all those prairie towns: of more board and batten than plaster and stone. On the face of it the builders expressed their caution. Nobody wanted to be caught with a house on his hands that could not be disjointed readily and loaded on a flatcar when the day for moving came.
Along the broad principal street the blunt-nosed business houses stood shoulder to shoulder, some large, many of them small, all of design so exactly alike that the little ones might have been the brood of the big ones, to grow up presently all of a size, like a flock of ducks. There was a diversity of business along there, not of any wide range to be sure, for these merchants and panderers and parasites were serving men whose primitive desires could be fully expressed in three words.
Beer kegs impeded the narrow board sidewalks of this main thoroughfare; blue smoke of continual frying came out of the many restaurants, generally more stylishly designated cafés. There was so much grease afloat that regular inhabitants had no need of oil for their hair.
There never was a young man who felt so much like an opened oyster as Bill Dunham when he saw the train that had carried him to Pawnee Bend diminishing to a rapidly contracting point in the direction of Colorado. Pawnee Bend was surrounded by more country than he ever had taken in at a single gulp; such naked, raw, unfenced and useless-looking country that the sight of it gave him a sinking feeling in that particular of his anatomy he always thought of as his craw.
He stood on the station platform, his matting suitcase with imitation leather corners between his feet, feeling as if the shell had been taken off and left him exposed, nothing to hide his greenness, his insufficiency, from the sneering scrutiny of that bold land. If there was a hand-hold for a man in that stripped-off, bald-headed country it would take shrewder eyes than his to find it, he was sadly and down-heartedly sure.
Bill had come out to that roof of his native state, the very apex of the earth, it seemed to him, following the beguiling lure of romance and the advice of Dutch Gus, who was not a Dutchman, but a Swede. While everybody knew that Dutch Gus was a Swede, nobody ever would take this country for a part of Kansas. It was a deceit that no amount of explanation could cover, it appeared to Bill. It certainly must have got on the map through misrepresentations.
Back in Johnson County, where Bill was born, it wasn't that kind of a country. A man could see a natural tree back there. Trees had been Bill's principal business in life for a good many years, accounting for his first thought in comparison of advantages between the place he had left and the land in which he had arrived.
For eight years Bill had been actively engaged with trees in Schoonover's nursery, enlarging his education, which could stand a good deal of it without trespassing on anybody, by putting in three months at a business college at Lawrence for three winters, coming home to spend Saturdays and Sundays grafting and budding little seedling trees in Schoonover's sand-floored dugouts.
Bill had grafted trees enough to qualify him for a Bachelor of Grafters' degree; he had pulled trees enough out of the long rows, following the curved plow that ran under them and cut the deep roots, to plant a border around the state of Kansas.
His big hands were ridged with callouses from this uplifting work; the muscles of his long back were as hard as dried beef. Yet Bill was a timid man. He had clung to this job in the nursery so long that people who had looked upon him confidently when he began to attend business college shook their heads doubtfully and said Bill Dunham was a long time starting out; that they didn't reckon he ever would start out, just stick to that job till he took root in a row and one of the hands pulled him up and shipped him off for a tree.
It was a sort of traditional requirement of a young man in that part of Kansas, where people had a good many New England ideas about them still, that he must start out when he reached the age of twenty-one. Even if he didn't go very far he ought to start out. He ought to get married, rent a farm, begin to raise corn and hogs and voters to maintain the glorious traditions of the state. Bill Dunham had passed that broad chalk-mark in his years, long since, and he had not moved a foot on the prescribed career.
Bill was overeducated, they said; that was the trouble with Bill. He knew too much about things of no use to any man. When you sifted him down, he was nothing but an educated fool. There were some who didn't even grace the designation with that qualifying word, using another, less charitable, more expressive of their indignation and contempt. For a man in his walk of life Bill Dunham was stuffed with too damn much trash.
This was a reputation undeserved by Bill, as the fame of community celebrities commonly is magnified either in derision or pride. Bill had the name of being a profoundly read man, although he owned but three books exclusive of those he had used in his preparation for a commercial career: a volume of Shakespeare's plays, which he had bought from the horse doctor for seventy-five cents, that worthy having acquired it on a debt; a copy of Tennyson's poems, won in a spelling match; a queer, fat, chunky little leather-bound Bible, left after her when his grandmother completed her earthly business and started out on the supreme adventure that lies at the end of every Kansan's career.
Now, this is the place where you grunt, and say: "Oh, hell! another one of those Shakespeare-Bible fellows. They belong in the class with the Alger boys; they simply were not there." But if you had lived back in those lean days of books in Kansas you would know better than to sniff at the Shakespeare-Bible boys. They were there; their name was legion. The reading of those two books by that generation resulted in a race of spellbinders, and orators, word-slingers and verbal sign-painters that was the wonder of the world. Jerry Simpson was one of them, and perhaps John Brown before him. There is no doubt at all about Carry Nation—and her name was Carry, not Carrie—although her bones do not repose in Kansas soil.
So much for that. Bill Dunham had his three books, and read them well. He could have cited speech and passage, verse, chapter and line in any of them if anybody had asked him to do so, which nobody ever did. Nobody in that neighborhood ever had read Shakespeare's plays. Some declared it was a mark of Bill Dunham's natural perversion; others smiled at it as an unmanly weakness. Reading the Bible, outside of strictly theological purposes, was sternly reproved as a sacrilege. And it was well known that Bill Dunham was not theologically inclined. It was said that he prized the Song of Solomon above the Psalms of David.
In spite of Bill's training in the business school, which was believed by most people with whom he had contact to be almost as sinful as the state university, he might have married and rented a farm in due course if he hadn't subscribed for a Kansas City paper and taken to reading the news. That was about the windup of the gun-throwing days in Dodge City; there were tales, and true ones, to quicken the blood of the most unromantic of men—of whom Bill Dunham was not one, in spite of his size and strength—in the regular run of news in that Kansas City paper every day.
Out at Dodge they would shoot a man for the affronts which men basely swallowed in silence in Lawrence or Kansas City. Boot Hill was full of the graves of upstarts who had died for stepping on gentlemen's toes. Bill Dunham quickened and expanded when he read of those sanguinary doings out at Dodge, and romance blossomed in his heart.
For Bill was a sore man over impositions. His place had been rather a lowly one, socially, social position in that community, as in wider ones elsewhere, grading according to financial rating. Bill's family had been miserably poor; well-fed, better-clothed boys had rolled him and pummeled him and mocked his patches with derisive cruelty. A place where a man might yank out his gun and take blazing vengeance for such wrongs appealed to Bill.
Those who had stepped on him and slurred him when he was ten, had pretty much passed out of his life by the time he was twenty-four. They had gone off to Kansas City to run street cars and drive delivery wagons, or scattered on rented or inherited farms in the established routine of starting out and never getting anywhere. Bill carried the old hurts in his heart, for he was a slow man at forgetting, long after he knew that all hope of adjustment had been outlawed by time. Now, reading the paper about the men of Dodge and Hays City, and the places whose names were romance in themselves, the feeling grew on Bill that he wanted to enlarge out of Peter Schoonover's nursery, and go out in the world and fling his feet.
Dutch Gus said the best place for a man to throw his feet in of any place in the world was Pawnee Bend. If he wasn't a married man and tied down by his wife and kids he'd hit the breeze for Pawnee Bend on the first freight he could find a side-door open. He knew a feller that went to Pawnee Bend and opened a joint—so they termed illicit saloons in prohibition Kansas in those days—and made money so fast he couldn't count it. Just had to let track of it go, it came in so fast. His name was Mooney; he used to run a section on the U.P.
So, together with the growing call of romance and the advice of Dutch Gus, Bill had cashed in at the nursery and taken a ticket straight to Pawnee Bend. He was not adventurer enough for an open side-door in a freight car. Now he was there, in Pawnee Bend, and romance seemed to have fled away out of it, leaving the town so small and bleak, the country so raw and rude, big and lonesome that it hurt the bare edges of a man just to stand there that way wondering where to go. But there was sure room for a feller to throw his feet! Dutch Gus was right about that part of it, and that was a cinch.
Bill felt pretty much as a man feels when he tries to swim a wide piece of water the first time: sorry he had attempted it, but his reputation being staked on the venture he will not turn and go back. He looked across the track at the flat, unadorned little town, knowing he had to make his beginning in it by finding a place to leave his suitcase and a bed to take his repose. The bare, heartless, unfriendly look of it depressed him more than the empty vastness of the land in which it lay. It looked like a lair of mystery; every roof in it, he believed, concealed designing beings who were only waiting his coming to spraddle all over him and rob him of his wad. It looked as sinister as a cyclone cloud; it looked like knockout drops.
Bill had all the fear of knockout drops common to his kind. He had heard woeful tales of the potency of that insidious draught, and of the harpies who beguile a man to sip it, sitting on his knee with an arm around his neck. It made him sweat to realize his proximity to that pitiless peril. He felt for his wad—some three hundred dollars, the savings of his eight years—and breathed in relief to find it still there.
It was a quiet scene to rouse so much panic in a stout young man of Bill Dunham's build. There was little activity along the wide main street, only a few men moving lazily about or lounging along the hitching-rack where numerous saddled horses, a wagon or buggy here and there, stood waiting their owners' business. There were no boisterous noises; Bill had listened, but he had not heard a gun.
The sound of children calling shrilly as they raced at play reached Bill from a part of the town he could not see. It was assuring. Children made that noise only when they played at school; there was a sort of school refinement, school repression, in the sound that Bill knew very well. It gave him a pang for something that he had touched and passed on, but it put him a little more at ease. It couldn't be such a bad place if there were children and a school.
A long string of boarding cars stood on a sidetrack back of the depot. Bill looked that way, indecisive of the next step. Everybody else who came on the train had gone his way; only he and a barrel of kerosene remained on the platform. Smoke was rising from a car in the boarding train, the cook car, Bill knew. An invisible woman in it began to sing, and this was her song:
And fond hearts be bro-o-o-ken,
Still I love you my dar-r-r-ling Daisy Dean.
Bill was further relieved by the song. He liked to think the singer was young and pretty, although he had his doubts.
For a town no bigger than Pawnee Bend there were a great many hotels, it appeared to Bill. True, some of them were not much bigger than tents, but all of them made free with the sign Hotel & Rooms. There was one near the track, only the broad dusty space representing the railroad right-of-way and the public road lying between, that appeared to be the biggest in town. It had a square front like a grocery, that much of it having been painted blue, the rest of its walls remaining as the planks had come from the mill.
While Bill's prejudice rose against this hotel on account of its painted face, which gave it the appearance of being a very Jezebel among hotels, he was assured in some measure by the sign Family Hotel which this false front presented. It was making a bid for respectable trade, although the sign might cover any amount of deceit. Bill had seen Family Entrance painted on side doors of saloons in Kansas City, through which he was morally certain no families ever entered. But he was out in the world to throw his feet; he was going to meet it as it came at him, and learn as he went along. He picked up his rush matting suitcase and headed for the hotel, unnoticed and unknown.
But perhaps it is better to go away a hero than to arrive one. Incoming heroes, even the best of them, lose their luster after a while if they stay in one place too long.