It was an uphill pull for Bill Dunham, lying in MacKinnon's hotel with fever in his wounds. A little puff of an adverse wind, and out the flickering blue flame would go, the doctor said. When it seemed at its lowest, like the failing light of an empty lamp, nature turned up the wick and lighted Bill Dunham over the grade.
Hughes had gone on to market with his herd, but he had left funds with MacKinnon to insure Dunham having the best of everything that money could provide in a bleak and comfortless place like Pawnee Bend, where men lived roughly and died with the bits in their mouths. A surgeon was brought from Wichita to operate for the complication that followed the leakage of blood into that tight compartment where blood never should be permitted to go sloshing around that way. A nurse was brought from the same center of culture and progress; she was as much of a sight as a zebra loose on the street in Pawnee Bend would have been when she walked out for a little airing in her white dress and cap.
John Moore was also taking a friendly interest in the wounded man. Moore was proud of the distinction he had come into through Dunham's singling him out for his particular mark at the ford that day. He talked about it a good deal when he came to town in those days of Dunham's slow recovery, laughing and roaring 'in his loud way. He appeared to get a lot of pleasure out of telling how Dunham had bluffed his way through with the Texas herd by threatening to fill his hide full of lead.
"Yes, and he'd 'a' done it, too—he'd 'a' done it!" he always wound the story up, seriously, full of glowing pride.
Under Moore's thick skin there was a layer of generosity and a fair sense of justice, but the humor of Dunham's big bluff, and the distinction that had come to him through it, hardly would have sufficed to square the account for him with Moore. The telegram that Dunham had brought down to the border and carried around until it was stale, was the key to that situation.
The attorney-general of Kansas had sent the telegram to Moore, as head of the organized movement to quarantine against Texas cattle. He warned against closing the public highways against commerce from any point, and especially Texas. It could not be done in the capacity of individuals without certain liability of damages. The Texas Cattlemen's Association had given warning through attorneys that damage suits would be filed immediately upon the enforcement of this unlawful quarantine.
If the Kansas cattlemen wanted to stop Texas cattle spreading fever, they must have the legislature enact a quarantine law. At present there was no such law, nor any law which would uphold their contemplated action. Damage suits would lie against every man who stood at the border to stop Texas cattle, or lent his name to such an effort. On that point the attorney-general was explicit and strong.
Dunham had told them the same thing, but they hadn't thought as much of his word that day as they came to think of it later. It was only after the Texas cattle were well inside the state that this official confirmation of what Dunham had said was put into their hands, and then some of them were ungenerous enough to say he had read the telegram before making his move. Moore at once, and always afterwards, emphatically denied this.
At any rate, the most stubborn of them saw reason in the light of the attorney-general's advice. Dunham was right; there was no sense in rairing up and going out gunning for him.
"He had more sense than any of us," Moore said. "He saved us damages in the millions by bringin' that herd over, for we'd 'a' stopped Hughes, and we'd 'a' stopped the rest of 'em that was close behind him, if it hadn't 'a' been for Bill."
Trail-riders were still on the border, directing Texas cattle to keep to designated routes. Others accompanied the herds when they entered the state to see that these restrictions were respected, all of which was near enough within the law that nobody was disposed to raise the question. This was working considerable hardship on the Texas drovers, as the grass soon was exhausted along these trails. They swore they were cured of any more adventuring with their herds along the old-time trails. That year saw the end of Texas trail-herds. The Kansas legislature enacted a quarantine law that was as good as a barbed wire fence along the border, and the railroads got the Texas business after that.
The Kansas cattlemen were indignant in their denial of complicity in the attempt on Dunham's life. It was the general opinion that the two strangers who had started the trouble had been moved by a desire to add to their own fame by laying out a man so notable as Bill Dunham. Frontier gunmen always were under that shadow of peril at the hands of obscure and sneaking creatures who hoped to grow big by putting an end to somebody greater and more courageous than themselves. They were moved by the desire that actuates a savage to waylay and slay a valorous enemy, cut out and eat his heart.
The two sconudrels who had laid claim to Dunham's horse were unknown to everybody in Pawnee Bend but the liveryman, who harbored the wounded one until he was able to go his way, which was long before Dunham was on his feet again.
When it became known that Dunham would recover, and be ready in a month or so to square accounts, there were some uneasy heads in Pawnee Bend. The solid business interests, of which MacKinnon had spoken so impressively, were represented in the gang that tried to mob Dunham by the liveryman and one blacksmith, the rest of them being low ruffians and light-headed gentry of the kind always eager to run in and take a kick at a man when he is down. They are found in all layers of society, little less vicious in the grain pit of Chicago than in the dusty, sun-stricken street of Pawnee Bend.
Zora came to see Dunham every day, even when he lay fevered and delirious, unable to recognize friend from foe, under the impression, indeed, that all the world was his enemy. She never came alone. Either her mother or one of the boys, or Shad Brassfield's wife, accompanied her and went with her to the room where Dunham lay. Pawnee Bend was censorious in matters of feminine decorum; it set straight lines, and its expressions were as obscene as its thoughts. Zora would have borne all the agonies of suspense rather than defy the conventions of the peculiar social code she had grown up to respect as the Covenanter his gloomy theology.
It was on one of these visits, after Dunham had begun to crawl like a sea-bruised wrecked mariner back to the solid shore of life, that MacKinnon took Zora and Mrs. Moore into his troubled confidence. The news that Dunham would recover had gone around town. There was a murmuring among the heads that were marked for vengeance in the day when Dunham should walk abroad with his gun. There was dark talk, and darker plotting, MacKinnon said.
He was afraid it would go beyond that some night; he shook in his boots with the fear that they would rush him and murder Dunham while he lay helpless in his bed. Such a fear was not groundless, the women knew. Not a year before that a wounded gambler had been taken from his room at night and hung to an upended wagon tongue in the middle of the street. The safer it was to undertake a vengeance so base made its probability the greater.
MacKinnon didn't know what to do. He hesitated to run the risk of throwing Dunham into a relapse through worry and watchfulness by telling him, putting a gun on the bed by his side, and giving him to understand that he might be called on any night to fight for the remnant of life that was in his veins.
But there didn't appear to be anything else to do. He would lay down his own life, MacKinnon said modestly, yet with such sincerity there could be no question of his valor, to protect his guest, but they wouldn't stop at one more life to have their evil way.
There was feeling against MacKinnon among the lawless element that had burrowed there under Kellogg's protection, the outgrowth of his efforts to argue the mob out of its design the day Dunham was cooped in the freight car. He had escaped with his life that day only by pulling out and leaving them to have their way, and he didn't want to go through anything like that again. The worry of it was wasting the heart of him in his busum like a cup of spirits left standin' in the sun, MacKinnon said. His face showed the strain of his worries. It was lined and sad, and his gray hairs had multiplied.
Mrs. Moore resolved the tangle of MacKinnon's troubles by proposing to take Dunham to the pea-green mansion on the bank of the Arkansas, nurse and all. They brought the doctor into the friendly plot to help argue down Dunham's scruples, for he was against going. It would give them too much trouble, he said, although there was another and deeper reason that restrained him. After all he had plotted against Moore, he could not become a burden on his hospitality.
They did not mention the true reason for wanting to take him from MacKinnon's friendly care. He must get out of the hot confinement of that room, the doctor said; down by the river, where it was cooler, the prospect more cheering, and the water better than the hard, gypsum liquid they got out of the wells at Pawnee Bend. Nobody but the women and children and livestock drank it, the doctor said. It was the worst possible stuff a sick man could put down his throat.
But he wasn't a sick man, Dunham protested; at least not sick in a natural sense. He was only a shot-up man, who was getting better so fast he could feel himself grow. He didn't know anything about Moore's change of attitude toward him, or the peculiar pleasure the cattleman got out of the distinction of having been picked as a mark for Dunham's gun.
Zora's pleas were more effective in the end than all the arguments. Dunham yielded; they carried him down the back stairs and through the kitchen, put him in the spring wagon and rolled down the canvas to screen him from the dust and sun, they said.
It was a little while before noon, the best possible hour for anybody who didn't want his actions to become widely public to get out of Pawnee Bend. Nobody but those directly concerned, and MacKinnon's kitchen help, knew of Dunham's removal, and those not in the plan were ignorant of his destination.
The nurse refused to go to the fresh air of the range. She welcomed the excuse for breaking with her charge, for she was longing for the refined atmosphere of Wichita, where there was a piano in every home.
Dunham's progress justified the change, his safety not considered. There was chicken broth and grape jelly, with more substantial fare as he got a little higher up the ladder. Better still, there was the service of friendship, if nothing more than friendship, which is better than any amount of paid nursing, skillful as it may be.
There was the presence of youth, and smiles, and the sound of singing in the house, and the activity of cowboys coming riding in from the range. Mrs. Brassfield could be heard at times singing that long ditty about the old man, which always made Dunham grab the edge of the bed or the arm of the chair and hold on as tight as if he feared he might take a tumble over the edge of something. It was the most risky song he ever had heard a lady lay her tongue to.
Moore often came in from the cow camps, boisterous as a March wind, curiously respectful of the young man who had used him as a pawn in the biggest single-handed game anybody ever had played on that range. He told Dunham how his defiance had worked around to the cattlemen's profit, and said the slate was clean. Nobody on the range had a grudge against him for bringing in the Texas herd.
Moore never attempted any apology for his conduct toward Dunham when he came down to the border under the belief that he had been hired to ride trail. He seemed to take it that Dunham had squared accounts for himself, and all was satisfactory. Time and again Dunham saw Moore looking at him in a queer, puzzled way, as if there was something about the whole business that he could not understand.
Perhaps it was that Moore was trying to figure out how he had come to make the mistake of misjudging a man so wildly. It amounted to about the same thing as reading a brand wrong, and getting himself into a situation hard to explain.
Bill Dunham was a happy man the day he was able to go downstairs and sit under the cottonwood trees. He was as weak as that childhood concoction which he remembered as cambric tea, and just about as pale. The boys hung around him in worshipful awe, proud of the distinction of having a man who had shot so many worthless people, and had been shot all to pieces himself in a big fight, as a guest. The family had made a place for him which he fitted so naturally and comfortably that he wondered how he was to order his life without them when it came his day to leave.
Especially Zora. With the thought of an existence in which Zora did not figure, Bill was moved by a feeling of bleakness and desolation. When he confronted that situation, drawing nearer and nearer as his strength increased, it seemed to him as if the bottom had fallen out of the world, leaving him alone on the edge of an abyss which even his imagination could not bridge.
There was not anything original in his thoughts, speculations, longings, about Zora, to be sure. That is an unvarying tune on the lyre of youth, although every young man believes his own case unique and unparalleled in all the long history of human attachment. The wooing male is the singer, the sigher, of all species. It is the female that is endowed with the wisdom of the ages. She has a demure presence, but a wise and calculative eye. Very likely Zora knew exactly how it would end from the day Bill Dunham's recovery was assured.
Bill began to grow restless as his strength increased. He was ashamed of burdening their hospitality, and said so with downcast look and humble voice. He wanted to go and find out what had become of his horse; he wanted to be stirring around looking for a job. He wanted anything, it seemed on the surface, but that luxurious inactivity which sure was going to ruin him, it would make him so lazy and trifling, he said.
To break these restless fits Zora would take him and the boys on short expeditions along the river to gather wild grapes, which were ripening, and search for blackberries, of which there never was one to be found. He could not go to Pawnee Bend yet, Zora said. And then Bill would begin to fret about his horse, and wonder who had it, and if he'd ever get it back. The bill for its keep would amount to its value if he didn't go out and find who had taken it up.
What was a horse more or less in a country full of horses? Zora wanted to be told. He could have the pick of the horses on their place, and he must be hard to please if he couldn't find one to suit him. Then she fanned him, and pushed his shaggy brown hair back from his forehead, treating him as if he was a very weak little boy.
No, he wasn't going to Pawnee Bend, and maybe run into another fight, until he was good and able to hold his own, she said. He must get over that notion of going to town and cleaning up on that gang. Bill protested he wasn't thinking of it, but she knew he was. Wait a little while, she counseled. The day was coming when they'd get theirs, and get it good and plenty.
Zora always was hot and strong when she came to that assurance, which was more like a threat, indeed. She shut him off with that, invariably, and left him wondering what she meant. He wondered if he had blabbed in his delirium of the vengeance he had laid up against that gang? Or had she read his intention in his sober face, underlying, as it was, every thought of his future activities?
For the thought of a mighty cleaning-up in Pawnee Bend had been with him from his first conscious gleam. It was a deep and solemn determination, as somber over his young soul as the shadow of a rising storm.