While it is possible for a healthy young man to live many days without eating, the average specimen of that genus begins to feel dissolution approaching with intolerable pangs if he must go unfed between breakfast and supper, especially when breakfast is early and supper promises to be late. Bill Dunham had a pretty good grinder inside him, and the grist he had put into it at Shad Brassfield's table that morning before sunrise was gone to the last grain before noon. He felt that he never would have the strength to lug his suitcase to Pawnee Bend if he put off starting until evening.
So it was under the lash of hunger, which has defeated armies and ruined nations, to say nothing of the tragedies it has brought into the lives of individual men, that Bill Dunham arrived at the string of cars, where the railroaders boarded and bunked, on the sidetrack at Pawnee Bend about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had put off the arrival as long as he could, mincing along from tie to tie when his normal stride was fully three feet, trying conscientiously to kill a little time.
But there he was at the edge of town in the middle of the afternoon of a bright sunny day, his great longing for a beefsteak pushing him forward harder than his desire for peace and quiet held him back.
He had heeled it off fairly lively the last mile or so, inspired by a notion at sight of the railroaders' cars. He might be able to get a meal at the boarding-car; more than likely it would not be necessary to cross the track at all or put foot in the street of Pawnee Bend. He recalled the quietude of the place when he had arrived the day before, hoping he might find it equally sleepy today. He didn't want to see MacKinnon, friendly and apparently honest as he had been, nor anybody else.
There was neither charity nor business in the boarding-car door. No, she wasn't runnin' a eatin'-house, the red-armed, large-girthed lady said. That was a boardin' train for railroaders, and she didn't have anything to give or sell to bums. No, she wouldn't slice anything off for him and hand it out, but a mean-eyed man with draggled hair who appeared in the door behind her said he'd slice something off if Dunham didn't get to hell out of there. So Dunham got, running headend into MacKinnon as he was turning in at the waiting-room door of the station.
"I thought you got to hell out o' here last night," said MacKinnon, for that was a stock phrase in Pawnee Bend, as it is elsewhere among people of quick passions and little delicacy. One might conclude that such people believe their situation the center of paradise, and all the rest of the world dedicated to the damned.
"Well, I'm back here now, anyhow," Dunham replied, thinking if he was in for it, let it begin as soon as it might.
He was ill-humored and ready for a row, the rebuff at the boarding-train having started him recounting his bill of charges against the charity and hospitality of that town. He was there for peace, but if they wanted a fuss they could have it.
"What became of the job Moore was goin' to give you? After that girl usin' her head to get you out of the pocket you put yourself in with Kellogg last night I thought they'd adopt you. What happened? Did you walk back?"
"You see me," Dunham replied, not wanting to be short or uncivil with MacKinnon, but resentful of his presence in a place where he wasn't expected to be met. "I'm goin' over to get something to eat," Bill explained. "I'll see you later."
"You made a mistake comin' back to this town," MacKinnon told him with deep earnestness. "Kellogg was blazin' sore last night when that girl tricked him and got you away. He was all set for a killin', he was ready to take a shot at me for stringin' him along to believe you were in your room. I wouldn't permit him to go up seekin' you, and he was proper sore, I'm tellin' you, lad."
"Thank you, Mr. MacKinnon. I know you're a friend of mine."
Dunham made the admission reluctantly, for he came of an undemonstrative line. He was sensible of MacKinnon's unselfish desire to see him keep a watertight skin; he could account now for the delay Kellogg made in the hotel which allowed Zora Moore to work her friendly deception on him and toll him down the road like a calf. She had meant well; he gave her due gratitude for the honesty of her purpose. But it would have been better if they had let things work out to the appointed end last night.
What is plotted in the life scheme of a man will take place, Dunham believed with the deep conviction of a fatalistic heritage. "What is to be will be." He had heard his grandmother say it, in the wisdom of her accumulated experience, times without number.
Safeguards and precautions, and the friendly interference of men, or even young ladies with lovely soft chins and nice red hair, cannot divert the predestined perils in the days of a man. They had done their best, and here he was back in Pawnee Bend, as impotent against the stream of circumstance as he would have been against the ocean's tide.
MacKinnon advised him to duck behind the string of boarding-cars, and hide out in a ravine until he heard a train coming. A reasonable expectation of a long life was worth more than a meal. No, Bill said; that wasn't his day to hide out. What was to be would be, and he was going over to a restaurant.
Well, in that case, let him take the suitcase to the hotel, MacKinnon proposed. Somebody would carry it off if he left it at the station. And where did he want it sent, and whom did he want notified, in case things came to a bad ending for him before he got out of town.
"I'll be along for it in a little while," Dunham replied to his portentous questioning. "I'll take it over myself, Mr. MacKinnon—I couldn't begin to let you go carryin' my old traps around."
As they crossed the track Dunham looked along to the place where Zora Moore had made her pretense of falling, wondering how much he had sunk in her regard when she learned that the man whom he was thought to have killed had only thrown a fit. He must have suffered a heavy come-down; no doubt she had discussed him fully with her father after arriving home, and the verdict had disqualified him for the job she had expressed her confidence of his ability to fill. He supposed he'd never see her again, and felt saddened by the reflection. She had him down wrong, and there would be no way for him ever to correct the record.
MacKinnon threw him a curious glance every few steps as they walked across the dusty road, as if he could not understand such unreasonable marching into the outspread arms of trouble when it could be so easily avoided by going the other way. He did not mention the man who rose up from his cooling-board to deny that he was dead.
Dunham parted with MacKinnon at the hotel door, from where he laid a diagonal course across the wide street toward the San Angelo café, which was the first in line from the railroad, and so called with a design on Texas trade. Several wagons were scattered along before the stores, with a number of saddled horses at the racks, which appeared to indicate unusual daylight business for that town. As he struck the sidewalk in front of the café, Dunham encountered Marsh Puckett, who had just stepped out of the barber shop next door.
There were few people moving about; up to that moment Dunham had not seen anybody, near nor far, whom he recognized. He would have dodged Puckett if he could have done so, for at the sight of him a shadow of trouble seemed to flit across the road. Puckett hurried along to cross Dunham, stopped as if struck helpless by astonishment squarely in front of the restaurant door, his dissolute face pulled in an expression of mocking surprise.
"We-ll-ll, who in the hell said I was dead?" he said, trying to carry it off as if Dunham had come out of the undertaker's to throw that scare into him.
Puckett grinned derisively, as a coward taunts a better man who is restrained by some sufficient reason from knocking him down.
"It's old six hundred come back to town!" he said, Dunham ignoring him and passing on. As the screen door slapped at Dunham's heels, Puckett put his ugly face to the wire and drawled after him: "Who in the hell said I was dead!"
This last sally of wit Puckett delivered with provocative derision that would have justified a shot. Dunham passed the nagging of this trouble-hunter by, as he had determined to ignore the taunts of others who might spring this on him, unless they accompanied it by some sufficient fighting reason.
A bony young woman in black sateen, with white collar and apron, confronted him as he sat down. She stood grinning familiarly, his identification complete in her eyes by the introduction Puckett had whined through the door. Dunham knew that everybody in town soon would be fixing their mouths to shoot that taunting fool thing at him.
No, he couldn't fight them all, as Moore had said. That being the case, he wouldn't fight any of them, no matter if the joke followed him around the globe. They seemed to think the joke was on him, as if he, and not the poor fool of a fittified man, had said it. Damn fools!
This thought, this denunciation, was in his mind when he looked up into the worldly eyes of the waiting lady. She grinned in another style, the placative, trade-winning style, rubbing what might have been her wedding ring with her apron, as if to call his attention to the fact that she was a perfectly honest woman, and neutral on all public questions as the sun.
"Make it steak and p'taters," Bill said.
There was only one other customer in the place, a muscular brown man whose freshly barbered hair and beard were pretty well salted with gray. He was a decorous grave man, who had not even turned his head at Puckett's taunt. He was dressed as men who rode the range commonly went about in summer weather, trousers in his boots, gray woolen shirt unbuttoned at his throat. His belt and pistol hung on the back of his chair, his sombrero on the wall. Dunham had taken inventory of him as he passed on to the table where he sat, reaching the instant conclusion that this man was nobody's hired hand.
This customer was also waiting to be served, evidently having come in only a little ahead of Dunham. He was still eating when Bill went out, in a deliberately dignified way which Bill thought was the kind of table conduct one expected of a man of his years, but did not always see. Plainly a man of substance, Bill surmised, with silver things on his table at home.
Bill was feeling pretty tight around the belly-band, and comfortable all over, after his liberal meal. Perhaps his heavy feeding had dulled his sense of premonition, or maybe replenishment had lifted his courage to the height that belittled danger, but he had no concern for Marshal Kellogg, or when he might appear, or what he might do.
He had the whimsical thought that it would have been a real hardship to have to die as hungry as he was half an hour ago. He could not account for that light contempt for danger that had come over him, and he did not trouble to try. He was there: if anybody wanted to crowd him, let him come on.
Dunham's immediate planning concerned a cigar, to the exclusion of activities on the street which might have engaged his attention otherwise. He was not aware of this change in the moping aspect of the street until he set foot on the sidewalk in front of MacKinnon's hotel.
Almost every club-nosed front along the street appeared to have shaken out four or five people, like dice thrown by many players lined up at a long bar. They were all craning and looking in the general direction of the depot, although Dunham had all the evidence he needed to convince him no extraordinary event was expected there.
Ford Kellogg was sauntering down the street toward MacKinnon's, as he had come sauntering last night to keep the grim tryst in which he had been disappointed.
Something was expected of Kellogg by the people who stood in front of their doors, customers grouped around them. He was approaching with the nonchalant, unhurried manner feigned by a man who moves strategically to corner a suspicious horse. If the man moves too quickly, the horse will bolt. There doubtless was no such reasoning in Kellogg's method. It was his way of doing that kind of a thing; a way of building through suspense to a crashing climax.
Dunham felt that crawling ripple of cold run over him that had braced him like a nip of something strong when the cowboy had reached for his gun last night. But he didn't wait for Kellogg to come up, there being a distance of perhaps thirty yards between them. He went on into the hotel and picked out his cigar. Kellogg came sauntering up to the door in his idling, weaving, aimless-appearing way as Dunham tossed away the match.
Kellogg stopped just outside the door, looking at Dunham not so much in malevolence as sneering, goading insult. The whites of his mottled eyes were yellowish; he constricted the lids as if he looked against the sun.
"What're you doin' back in this town?" he inquired, his words as mean as if he loathed them himself, and turned them out as ugly as they could be made.
Dunham didn't reply at once. He stood in his way of meditative consideration that he always assumed when confronted suddenly with a question, head bent a little, eyes downcast, blowing smoke deliberatively. MacKinnon, behind the desk, was nervous. He moved the register, moved the bottle of ink, cleared his throat, as if he could not stand out against the suspended reply much longer, and must speak.
"I don't know that it's a matter for official in-quiry," said Dunham, looking up with startling suddenness, disconcerting frankness, his eyes as steady as if he spoke of buying and selling, and not on a question weighing life and death. "But if you've got to know my business, mister, I'm here to take a train."
"You'll have to hit the road. You can't hang around this town."
"Now, look here, Kellogg," MacKinnon said, "I think you're stretchin' your authority when you come to my house orderin' a law-abiding guest out of town."
"This town ain't no place for a gun-flashin' granger," Kellogg replied, surly and vindictive.
"He's done nothing but defend himself and his rights," MacKinnon insisted. "What's happened in this town has been crowded on him."
"If you keep on crossin' me, MacKinnon, you'd better be reachin' for your own gun," Kellogg said with provoking insolence.
"I might even do that," MacKinnon told him soberly. "You're hired here to keep the peace, not provoke quarrels, or come around orderin' law-abiding guests out of my door."
"I'd hate like smoke to be the cause of any hard feelin's between you two gentlemen," Dunham assured MacKinnon, as cool and undisturbed to all outward appearance as a disinterested person possibly could have been. If there was some turmoil inside him, some galloping thoughts racing through his head, he covered it all by a calm exterior.
Kellogg jerked his head in a grim order for Dunham to come out. He began to back into the street, holding Dunham with his taunting, mocking, insolent eyes, unbuttoning his coat as he went.
Dunham reached up with his left hand, removed the cigar from his mouth with slow, certain movement, and with the same even, unhurried motion carried it to his side and dropped it. He straightened from his leaning posture in which his right arm had rested on the counter, and stood as if balancing for a leap, left hand out from his side a little, its bent fingers apart, just as he had dropped the cigar; his right elbow forming an angle as true as if it rested in a square.
He stood that way a moment, life intensified in him to the utmost fiber, endowed with the wary craft that had come down to him from a line of men who had fought Indians for a hundred years. He began to move toward the door, walking on his toes as if he feared the intrusion of the faintest noise might give Kellogg an advantage, or precipitate the fight before he was ready. There was nothing in his world that moment but Kellogg and himself. The rest of his surroundings was out of focus, a blur.
Bill Dunham had one thought as he went out of the door, setting his feet down as softly as if he retreated from the chamber of a child he had walked to sleep: that he must remember the law, and keep within his rights. It was Kellogg's fight; he must make the first break for a gun.
Dunham designed to put as much space between himself and Kellogg as he could before the thing broke loose, thirty feet or so if he could stretch it that far, from no reason that he could have explained. He just wanted to edge off, and edge off, and get over there by the corner of the building before it started, if he could. Kellogg seemed to be willing to give him all the rope he wanted, and Bill worked on craftily, as he thought, watching Kellogg with such unbroken intensity that his eyeballs burned.
There was a hitching-rack about twenty feet long in front of the hotel, back about four feet from the edge of the sidewalk, merely a horizontal pole bolted to upright posts. Kellogg had backed around until he was standing behind this rack, which was too low to offer either obstacle or protection. Dunham reached the corner of the hotel, where he stopped.
That simple act appeared to constitute defiance in Kellogg's eyes, and give him the slender justification which he perhaps felt his easy-going constituency would demand. Dunham stood there, set and watchful, his left hand thrown out in the exact manner he had held it when he dropped his cigar, his right arm in that rigid angle that seemed hopeless of any chance to those who watched him. He stood that way until Kellogg, his hand darting like a beam from a mirror, moved to sling his gun.
Kellogg sagged at the knees as his gun cleared the leather. He threw out his right hand, blindly, to catch the hitching-rack, his head lopping sickly, chin on his breast. He clung there a second and sank to the ground, the bullet that he had notched for Bill Dunham still in the chamber of his gun.
There was not a chance of Ford Kellogg ever rising up from his cooling-board to ask a question that would turn the laugh against the man who had given him the bulge and beaten him at the game he knew so well.