It was more like a funeral than a triumphal entry when Bill Dunham came leading the Texas herd into Kansas. Not even the belligerent Scotsman stood at the crossing to bar the way; not a voice was raised in protest, not a gun was fired. Somebody's counsel had prevailed.
The herd came down to the water slowly, the leaders stopping at knee-deep to sup a bit, then go on a little way and sup again, merely by way of sampling what they had come to, it seemed, for they were not thirsty, having been feeding on the dew-drenched grass since dawn. Dunham was across before the first of the cattle had set foot in the stream, Hughes and his son, with about half their force, coming along with the vanguard of the herd, everybody expecting a fight, and ready for it.
Dunham rode over to the Kansas shore, where he stopped, looking around as if waiting for anybody who felt disposed to dispute the way with him to make his appearance and get to work. The Kansas men had backed off from the ford, as Dunham had warned them to back. They were collected at the side of the trail a hundred yards or more beyond the ford, bunched up in what appeared to be a council.
Some of these men, of whom there must have been at least eighty, Dunham roughly computed, were watching the approaching herd with hostile front, and others appeared to be arguing vociferously, with emphasis of flourishing arms, but nobody came out in the road to challenge Dunham when he went on at the lead of the big herd which came rolling over the low hilltop, urged on by the anxious, silent cowboys, some of whom would have welcomed a little row as a fitting climax to their long drive.
They were all looking ahead at Bill Dunham, riding thirty yards in advance of the leaders, full of admiration for his single-handed challenge to seventy-five or eighty men. What powerful argument had this unknown young man used to change the attitude of the Kansas cowmen so completely and suddenly? Was his reputation as a gunman so great and fearful in his own country that his announced intention of doing something was sufficient to throw the bars down to his uncontested passage?
It appeared so, for a fact, and the marvel of it increased as they rode after him, urging the cattle across the ford and up the sloping bank. They were quivering with the daring of the enterprise, and swelling with the exultation that would be theirs as they rode by that bunch of Kansas men who had stood ready only a little while ago to enforce their rule of ruinous tyranny.
Hughes was no less struck with the marvel of this easy passage of what he lately had thought an insuperable barrier, for Dunham had not gone to the trouble of making any explanation when he returned from laying down the law at the ford. He simply had come riding down the trail, to pull up short within two hundred yards, wave his hat for them to come on, and turned to lead the way which he was keeping with such admirable poise.
How this unassuming young man, who was so green in spots the bark hadn't set, could push aside an organized opposition of such strength passed the cattlemen's conjecture. He hoped Dunham had not gone too strong on the force he had back of him, which soon must be revealed to the Kansans, who outnumbered them almost three to one.
If Hughes advanced into Kansas with more than a little trepidation he could not be blamed. It seemed unreasonable to a man who had been denied the passage of that road less than an hour before, that the program was to go on without sudden and serious hitch. He had come over there expecting to fight; the grim set of his face, his stern and watchful eyes, showed him ready to stand for his rights, now he had made the beginning to claim them. But he was an uneasy man; there was a strain on him as if each nerve of his body suspended a thousand pounds. Trouble was due to break when Dunham passed that crowd. Hughes felt it to be as certain as thunder after lightning.
Moore was not in the road, nor anywhere to the front, as Dunham approached the surly Kansas cowmen; he didn't step out to accept the challenge Dunham had given in his parting words. Dunham saw him among the others, and he had a look of thunder in his face, but he stayed where he was as Bill rode by and passed on, eyes straight ahead.
There was not a sound but the clatter and click of split hoofs on the hard road as Dunham went on his way; not a whoop out of a cowboy, not a word from the Kansas drovers. The silence was more dramatic than the noise of a fight.
This portentous stillness had the opposite of a calming effect on the cattle. They were conscious of the unusual conditions surrounding them on the march, where the racket of their human guardians hitherto had been their constant assurance that all was well. They crowded forward in little starts of panic, little rushes that massed them and disorganized the orderly formation.
The cowboys riding alertly on the flanks of the long line were quick to press forward and subdue these incipient stampedes, with many an anxious look back to see if the rear had cleared the ford. The cattle were so nervous a blowing leaf might have set them off on a blind rush away from that indefinable terror of silence.
The Kansas cowmen who watched this dark column of beef hurrying by were fully conscious of the flighty condition. That impending threat of a stampede was a greater restraint over their passions than the counsel of the older and wiser heads. Any man could see where a stampede would put them, with some of their own herds not five miles away.
Bill Dunham rode on without a glance behind. His business was in Pawnee Bend; it looked as if he intended to go right on without a stop.
Dunham did not know whether the Kansas cattlemen would allow this invasion to proceed without some attempt to do damage. He had sensed the sullen temper of the crowd in passing as plainly as he ever felt the heat of a brushwood fire beside the road. What the final outcome of it was to be, he could not guess.
He did not care particularly, now he had brought the herd into Kansas against this strong force. He had proved to Moore and the rest of them, but especially to Moore, that a man need not be raised on the range, nurtured on rawhide and schooled in the commonplace tricks of that simple trade, to be able to confound them at their own devices and defeat them at their own game.
Bill had no notion of how fast beef cattle ought to travel, or how far in a day; he had no thought of wearing off the profit by keeping up that scrambling, pushing, crowding start for Pawnee Bend, more than fifty miles away. He did have some recollection of Hughes saying it would take at least four days to drive that last stage of his long journey, but his main thought was to get the cattle as far as possible up the trail before trouble broke. Every mile along would add to the wariness of the Kansas cowmen, and the herd's security.
Dunham jogged on ahead of the nervous herd, wondering just where he was going to get off. Hughes had not hired him; he had refused indignantly the proffer of reward for his services, and he was still a man out of a job. How far should he go with his self-appointed guardianship of Hughes' cattle?
It looked to him as if he had fulfilled his obligation, both to himself and Hughes. It would be time for him to ride aside after escorting the herd a few miles, and turn his talents to finding a job that would hold still long enough for him to get a rope on its nose.
Curiously enough, he began to have a qualm of conscience over the trick he had turned against his fellow citizens. Loyalty was expected of a man in Kansas. It began to look like a kind of mean trick for no larger or nobler reason than the gratification of personal revenge.
How could he go riding by Moore's pea-green house with its turned columns and fancy gables, and tower where Zora might be watching like another Elaine for a Lancelot to come riding out of the south? Not that he could be the knight in her romance. She hadn't as much as a collar button of his to sit by the window and polish, or a slight thought of him that would draw her gaze down the road she had ridden with him when he went away to do this treason against her kin and kind.
It made Bill sweat to think of it as a treasonable act. Zora had expected something better of him than that. And she had trusted him to deliver that telegram, until this moment forgotten in the heat of his anger and the hungry gnawing of his vengeful passion. There it was in his shirt pocket, all crumpled from sleeping on it, and no telling now when he'd have a chance of handing it to Moore.
From the look of things at that moment, Dunham concluded he'd better turn Hughes loose to make his own way to Pawnee Bend and pull his freight out of that country. The cattlemen would be down on him; it would be a lucky chance if some of them didn't go gunning for him, Garland especially. Zora would have no further use for him; it was more than likely the best people in Pawnee Bend would turn the cold side of their faces to him when he went back there. Nobody but the saloon keepers got much out of the Texas cattlemen and their gangs, he knew, while present prosperity and future consequence depended on the increase of the cattle industry at the town's doors.
And there he was, Bill Dunham, a Kansan born and bred, leading in a herd of Texas cattle that might be dripping the seeds of plague which would clean the range down to bones. He felt so mean and worthless he could have sneaked off and disappeared if there had been any place to go.
There was no place to go. A man was mighty conspicuous in that country, where there wasn't a bush ahead of him as far as he could see big enough to hide a rabbit. He'd have to stick to it till night, then tell Hughes his future was in his own hands, return to Pawnee Bend, sell his horse and go on to New Mexico, where he could use the wisdom of his experience to guide him to a better start.
First he must contrive to get that letter of Zora's enclosing the telegram to Moore. The message might be important; maybe Moore had suffered damage already through the delay. Bill pulled up for a squint back to see how things were shaping, surprised to find himself at least a quarter of a mile ahead of the cattle. He must have struck a lope when he began to think about Zora, and lay the charge of treason to himself.
The Kansas cattlemen were still bunched by the side of the road, their horses headed in toward a common point as if they were discussing the next move in their completely upset plan of establishing a quarantine without sanction of law. Some of them, at least, had been sensible enough of the thing they had undertaken.
He was not seriously concerned over the case any longer, let it be as it might. Hughes was across the line, the last of the cattle were clear of the river. He was able, without a doubt, to take care of himself the rest of the way. Dunham joined him where he rode, and told him about the letter for Moore.
Hughes called a cowboy and started him back to deliver the letter to Moore.
"There's a whole lot of bad feelin' against you back there, Dunham," Hughes said, looking worried and all on edge.
"You couldn't expect them to feel very friendly," Dunham replied.
"I don't know what they're figurin' on startin', but it's something," Hughes speculated. "I could feel trouble scratchin' me like a mesquit' when I passed them fellers. If they took it in their heads to make me stick to the trail and shut me off from grazin', I'd be in a hell of a hole."
"No worse off than where you were, that I can see. Your cattle wouldn't starve to death between here and Pawnee Bend."
"No, but they'd be as flat as boards by the time I got 'em there. My profits'd go up in smoke. If they want to be mean about it, they've got me."
"It ain't likely they'd start a fuss that'd stampede your herd to hell and gone over the prairie," Dunham said.
"Well, you got me in here, Dunham, and I believe I'm purty near big enough to hold 'em."
"That's what I was thinkin' a little while ago."
"You mean you're goin' to cut loose from me now?"
"I don't see how I can do you any good, and I might do you a lot of harm. They're not half as sore at you as they are at me."
"It will be a kind of unfriendly place for you after this, Dunham. I was wonderin' what your plans might be. Wouldn't you like to help me to Kansas City with the cattle, and go back to Texas with us?"
"No, I don't exac'ly figure on goin' to Texas."
"Whatever you plan to do, Dunham, I want to show my appreciation for the way you've helped me through. I don't know how you worked it on 'em, but I know I didn't breathe for about ten minutes when you rode over here and stopped. I looked for hell to pop."
"Maybe it takes a fool for luck, the way the old folks say," Dunham replied to this respectful bid for enlightenment on his methods of breaking quarantine. He seemed to shut the door on that lead, and Hughes was wise enough to take the hint.
"You refused my offer to pay you, Dunham, but I want to do something to acknowledge the debt I'm under to you before we part."
"The best way you can do it, Mr. Hughes, will be to tell Moore and Garland and the rest of them that Bill Dunham said it wasn't a money consideration with him. Tell them he said he lost more, maybe, than you gained, and you never paid him a damn cent. Tell them that, and make it strong."
"Trust me to make it strong," Hughes said, bearing down hard on his words, turning to Dunham with a mystified look, yet a look of respectful admiration.
They rode on in silence, too much in the thoughts of each for many words. There was no sound but the clicking of the cattles' hoofs as they marched on in that uneasy, jogging way of starts and flurries.
"I'll stop to let 'em feed about two o'clock," Hughes said after a while. "If that crowd keeps hands off we ought to make nine or ten miles by then."
"I'll stay with you till evening," Dunham said, not for any assurance there might be in the promise, for he seemed to be speaking apart from his thoughts, his eyes far ahead where heat was beginning to waver like oil in water over the trail, "and then I'll go my way."