It looked as if the short-grass country was emptying itself into Pawnee Bend for the celebration that day. Bill Dunham heard the beat of hoofs in the road before daylight as the first skirmishers, who must have left distant cow camps at midnight, passed. These were the cowboys who had leave for the day, determined to make it a long one, hastening in to prime their appetites and lay the foundation for a proper state of hilarity fitting to the big event.
By sunrise traffic began to thicken until there scarcely was a time when somebody was not in the road, a condition of marvelous activity in that vast lonely land. Later the spring wagons and buggies came rolling along, wheeling up such a dust as never was seen on that old trail except when a Texas herd went by on the end of its long slow march.
It was such an animating sight that the Moore family were constantly rushing out with things in their hands to see, and hail distant friends, and whoop farcarrying conversations, which the travelers never paused to engage in, with satisfaction and good cheer to all concerned.
Moore was at his best in those loud-shouted hails and questions after the welfare of families and general conditions on far corners of the range. He could keep it up until the travelers were around the first bend, often shouting his last pleasantries in tremendous crescendo after they were clean out of sight over the hill. He was so red and happy in his boisterous loud style that one might have thought him the manager of the big show, his fortunes secured by the generous outpouring.
The Moore family fell in with the procession duly, Bill Dunham riding with Zora and the two older people in the spring wagon, the boys romping along on their horses. Brassfield and his wife had gone on ahead hours earlier, both in high hope of picking up with some old cronies of their past rambling life.
Bill Dunham had not known of any public square in Pawnee Bend, any more than a casual visitor from anywhere, let him be never so keen, would have been aware of its space or confines. It was an area surrounded by short-grass plains, lying entirely beyond the uttermost growth of the town. The promoters of Pawnee Bend, Bergen and Puckett, had planned grandly and the town had not overtaken their expectations, to say nothing of building around them to the formation of a hollow square.
But the square was there, duly set aside and designated, a distance of two good city blocks beyond the last business house at the end of the principal street. With the county organization now complete, the county seat assured to Pawnee Bend, there was good reason to believe the street would stretch in time until its buildings enveloped the square. There the court house would lift its cupola above brick walls, with cottonwood trees around it in due course. There is a lot of compensation in a cottonwood tree for that arid short-grass land.
Exactly in the center of this square, where the very holy of holies of the court house would be, a plank platform had been built for the ceremonies of that historic day. There was a railing around it, where flags draped over, and a table with a pitcher of water cooled by a large lump of ice. Kansas orators are great fellows for drawing on the pitcher of water. Many a bright idea has been irrigated in the pause of pouring and drinking, to spring into flowery speech as marvelously as the juggler's rose in the pot of sand.
Here on this platform the judge of the circuit sat, with the congressman and other notables, among them the officers of the new county waiting for the oath that would harness them completely to their new dignities.
Bergen was there in his impressive coat, a white vest in place of the red one of ordinary wear. Red was a good color for a business vest, but in politics a man must show a symbol of virtue, let him live up to it as he would after getting the office.
Puckett was there, his slumping, useless shoulders drooping a little more than usual, it seemed, on account of his public exposure in an elevated place without a table to put his elbows on; and Major Simmons, hat tipped saucily over his left ear; and Ruddy, the mayorhardware man, looking as ill-favored as if he never had got over the loss of his window pane broken by the fittified man.
Schubert was on the platform, calculatively solemn, perhaps thinking of boards of another kind than the fresh pine ones under his large, wedge-shaped feet.
Bill Dunham was bewildered by this gathering of people in a land that had the appearance of being so unproductive of the species, but cheered by the sight of so many children. He always had felt, since his very first hour in Pawnee Bend, that people came to the short-grass country full grown, served their time, died and passed out of review, to be replaced by mature ones from the reservoirs of that indefinite region spoken of as the East. It might be Dodge City, or Wichita, or Kansas City, or Illinois.
While he knew there were children somewhere in Pawnee City, having heard them at a distance when he stood on the station platform on his first arrival, the sight of them now in such hearty abundance made him glad. He felt patriarchal and benign. He could have blessed them all.
MacKinnon and Garland, with a number of cattlemen Dunham never had seen before, pressed around the wagon as Moore drove into the square. They were so friendly and eager to shake hands with him that Dunham's quickly raised apprehension of trouble cleared away at once. Major Simmons came down from the platform to add his hearty greetings and congratulations on Dunham's recovery.
Moore was one of the big lights of the occasion, due to his financial standing and general prominence in public affairs. He was to sit on the platform with the rest of the county's leading citizens.
"Gentlemen, we'd better take our places," Major Simmons said. "The hour is at hand for the exercises to begin. As the county's six-hundredth citizen, Mr. Dunham, we have reserved a place of honor for you."
Bill was so taken back by this public distinction that he began to fumble around mentally and look for a hole. Major Simmons had hold of his arm; he couldn't get away without rudeness, which was not his nature.
"I don't exac'ly know that I ought to set up there with you gentlemen," he said, red and uncomfortable, his collar feeling suddenly very tight. He looked appealingly at Zora, who was sitting in the wagon radiant and sparkling with what Bill very well knew was mischievous delight.
Zora nodded vehemently, drawing her brows in a pretty frown of warning, as if cautioning him to walk straight and not break the conventions. Garland slapped his back and laughed, and several other big cowmen pelted him with friendly encouragement. They pushed him along, laughing as if they had the joke on him that day, and were going to play even with him for bringing in the Texas herd.
Seats for the people had been contrived out of lumber-yard planks in front of the stand, all lying out in the blazing sun perforce, for there was not a tree nearer than the river. These benches were filling, people of experience preferring sitting in the sun to standing and shifting from leg to leg. They knew when a congressman got loose there was no telling how far he would go.
Wagons and buggies were drawn up on the sides of this seating area, their occupants comfortably sheltered from the sun. At the right of the speakers' platform there was a space which marshals of the day were keeping clear. As Dunham and the others took their seats, men on horseback began filling this reserved ground. They came riding up from town, evidently by prearrangement, ranging compactly in a certain rude order, the foremost of them with their horses' noses at the railing.
Dunham had a new qualm at this sight. It looked as if these men were there for some purpose aside from spectators. He wondered if they were expecting trouble to break about something, and he wondered if they had it in for him. They were cowboys and cattlemen, every one of them armed. More than that, the cattlemen were plainly in charge of that day's business. They had pushed the townspeople aside and were doing it their own way.
Bill began to sweat from another reason than the eleven-o'clock sun. He had a deep, troubled feeling that something was going to happen to him. There he was, surrounded by cattlemen, flanked by cattlemen, as helpless in their hands as a calf.
He looked around at Zora, caught her eye, and tried his hardest to ask her silently what it meant. She shook her head in that quick, warning way mothers do to stop a child about to tear the leaves out of the hymnal in church, drawing her nice eyebrows in admonitory frown. Bill read it as meaning: "Behave yourself, Bill Dunham! Sit still, and don't make any foolish breaks."
They let the congressman expand himself in oratory first, and he spread out over considerable territory before he finally took wing back to Pawnee Bend and settled down on the roost. The judge then had his turnat them, which he made short, and gained friends by it. He then began swearing in the county officers, beginning with the three commissioners, who were MacKinnon, Major Simmons and Ruddy, of the lost window pane.
The judge took the others as he came to them, laying an especially heavy oath on Bergen, it seemed to those who heard it. Bergen was to handle the county funds. Puckett came under the judicial scrutiny next, and took the oath with downcast eyes and a slanting stoop to his sloping shoulders, as if he was determined to let as much of it as possible glance off.
With Puckett out of the way the judge looked around and called for the sheriff, at which Hal Garland stepped forward in a sudden hush of interest, everybody leaning in a new eagerness. Garland told the judge that the original selection for sheriff, whose name was on the petition filed with the secretary of state, had withdrawn and left the county. His place had been filled by a better man, no less notable citizen than he whose name had rounded out the required number of petitioners and made the county organization possible and complete.
With that announcement Garland clapped Bill Dunham on the shoulder in the greatest wind-storm of applause that ever had swept over the short-grass country.
Bill was so completely and supremely surprised he couldn't move. He felt the thrill of hot chasing the ripple of cold up his backbone and out of his long nose, and a rising of high pride in him at this sudden realization that he had made his place in the short-grass country and stood among them a sufficient and acceptable man.
He was sensible of the honor the county was offering him, for there was an honor in the shrievalty in those immense new counties on the Kansas frontier—some of them have been split into four since then—that scarcely dignifies the office now. Much was expected of a sheriff there, and much was accomplished beyond the strict confines of his statute obligations. He was the biggest man in the community, overtopping lawyers and judges, among whom the notable sheriffs of those days stood like giants.
Still, Dunham didn't know what to do about it. He sat there feeling a tingling exaltation, the hot and cold running around and around his nervous system, up his backbone and out at the end of his nose. He didn't want to refuse, he didn't want to throw that honorable distinction slap in the faces of the hundreds of unknown friends who were conferring it, but he couldn't budge a muscle to draw himself up and take the oath.
Garland settled the matter for him by pulling him upright the way a sheriff ought to stand.
"We've drafted you because we need you, Bill. You can't go back on us now," Garland said.
Dunlam managed to lift his right hand and bow his head in solemn affirmation when the judge bound him to uphold the constitution of the United States and the state of Kansas. The judge shook hands with him when he had said the final word, a distinction he had not conferred on any of the others.
Then Garland took over the program again. He produced a gold badge of office, and another cowman, unknown to Dunham, came forward with a costly belt and pistol. Garland said he would call on one of the fair daughters of the fairest land that lay under the heavens to come forward and invest the new sheriff with his arms and badge of authority, like a knight of olden days, among whom, said Garland with a true Kansas oratorical bound, there was none more valiant than this knight of the Arkansas, the county's six-hundredth citizen, and its first.
That was cowmen's day, and Dunham was their choice. Zora Moore was the fair daughter who stepped in front of Bill and grinned provokingly as she pinned on the badge, and went on grinning still more provokingly, as if to say she had known all the time this was going to come off, while she buckled the new belt around him. Bill, red and tingling, stood lifting his hands as a man does when a tailor takes his girth, or when he surrenders, as Bill surrendered then and there, without a condition to his name.
The judge handed Bill his commission, already signed by the governor, for the cattlemen had left nothing undone to make their big day complete, down to the very end.
"Sheriff Dunham," Garland said, turning Bill to face the riders whose gathering had given rise to unpleasant speculations and apprehensive emotions in him, "here are your deputies if you need them. The cattlemen look to you to enforce the law to the limit, and they know you'll do it. They stand behind you to a man."
The new county attorney was sitting close by, a young man of ingratiating presence with plenty of barber's perfumed grease on his sleek black hair. He looked a little resentful, and colored up as if he considered a retort that would put the cattlemen right in their presumption that all the executive power of that county lay in the sheriff's hands. He held his tongue, but placed no restraint over his tricky eye, which he winked at Puckett in mocking discount of this innocent aggrandizement of power. The county attorney had a dark and sensuous eye with a slow, fat lid, suggestive of bribery and intrigue.
They gave Bill another cheer, the yipping of the cowboys like a red border on the uproar that spread wide over the townsite of Pawnee Bend. These vociferous young men kept their guns in the leather, having been warned beforehand of the peril voters' heads would be in from the indiscriminate dropping of lead around the landscape.
Yipping was only a sort of half expression for a cowboy of that day, who felt that he had something inside him unsaid unless he had shot off his gun in the climax of his exuberance. They must have something to make their happiness complete, and nothing but a speech from Sheriff Bill Dunham would seem to fill the void.
It seemed to Bill Dunham, standing before his expectant supporters, who appeared to be just one immense, good-natured, half-challenging grin, that his past was a great way behind him, indeed. He felt mature and seasoned, as a man confident of himself and his destiny should feel; he had accomplished what he had dreamed of doing back in the days when he read of those free-handed shooting men of Dodge. The world was not sitting on his chest any longer, pinning his arms to the ground with its knees. He had flopped the bully; the dust of the under dog was no longer on his back.
He stood before them tall and big-jointed, hat in his hand, the hot wind moving his shaggy brown hair, which had grown long in the weeks of his sequestration at Moore's ranch, the new belt around his gaunt middle, the new gun hanging down long on his thigh. The surprise of his new fortune was still over him, but above its confusion his pride rose high.
There was a creaking of saddle leather as the men on horseback adjusted themselves to hear the new sheriff's speech, a craning forward in intense expectation among the crowd on the benches and the vehicles gathered around. Bill stood a little while, which seemed a long time to him, head bent as if collecting his thoughts and marshaling his words, but they were the most elusive thoughts, the most unruly words, he ever had tried to corner in his life.
All his reading and accumulation of odds and ends of knowledge were of little use to Bill Dunham then. That was a gathering of practical people; they didn't want quotations from something said by other men. They wanted to hear something original, for that was a country where originality was respected. It had more of a chance in the short-grass country than in the crowded centers; it stood out there like a white picket in a brown fence.
Bill Dunham considered all that, and put the thought of books out of his mind. He looked up with his slowstretching, whimsical grin, put his hat on the chair he had occupied before his exaltation, and began to talk in a way that was as easy and natural as water running over a rock.
He didn't attempt anything sentimental; he didn't say a word about being grateful for his unexpected elevation to that position of power and trust. He just told them about his feelings that day of his arrival in Pawnee Bend, and how he had thought the country the barest, bleakest, lonesomest spot a mistaken wayfarer ever wandered into. He said he felt that day as if he had climbed to the very top of Kansas and found it bald-headed, and that he was the doctor who had been called in to make its hair grow. It was such a hopeless undertaking it had made him weak in the knees.
They rocked in their saddles and bounced up and down on the springy planks when Bill told them that part of his story, to grow grave as he turned it deftly to give them a picture of the same place transformed into a fruitful land of promise by the thousand blooms of friendship that had sprung along his way.
Those who knew him best were the greatest surprised and delighted by the revelation of a quality quite unsuspected in such a modest, quiet-tongued young man. It was as if an unpromising guest had taken up the fiddle and played them an entrancing tune.
Dunham didn't hint at any great overturn of conditions, now that the law had come to Pawnee Bend. He made no promise of faithful performance in his office, said no word that would make the most iniquitous move uneasily in their seats. But there was something under his modest, subtly humorous way that confirmed them in the wisdom of their choice.
He didn't abuse his opportunity; he had heard enough congressmen to know when to stop. He cut it off with unexpected suddenness, while their appreciation was keenest.
"I never did make a speech," he said, reaching out and grabbing his hat like he had been struck with sudden stage fright and was going to bolt, "and I'm not goin' to try to do it now. But if anybody knows the man that stole my horse, I wish they'd point him out."
"Congressional timber there," said the judge, nodding wisely to Major Simmons as the applause rose and spread, and the crowd of potential deputy sheriffs put their horses in movement for a grand rush into town.
But they were not thinking of congressional timber. They'd better take on a little refreshment and improve the shining hours: that was their thought. That dry-humored Bill Dunham was going to close the joints. He hadn't said a word about it, but they knew, to the simplest man among them, that the law had arrived in Pawnee Bend and the letter of it was going to be enforced. They would drink while they could, and if Bill Dunham called on them they'd be right there with the same rush to help him put padlocks on the doors of every joint in town. ······· It was dusk that evening when the new sheriff hired a horse at the livery barn and set off in the direction of John Moore's ranch. There had been a good deal to do in the way of consultations and establishing the county officers in temporary quarters pending the building of the court house. Zora had only slipped Bill a little handshake along with several hundred other handshakes, and gone her way without giving him a chance for a word. Now Dunham was riding in such desperation toward the pea-green mansion that people who met him on the road thought he must have got word of the man who stole his horse.
"I don't suppose it'll do a dang bit of good," said he, with a hopeless sinking inside him, but an unshaken determination that urged him on.
He stopped at the top of the hill from which he first had seen the lights of the Moore homestead. It was dark now, and the lights were twinkling through the cottonwood leaves. He thought of Zora, the kind stranger of that night, and of Zora, the kinder friend. In past days he had built up his hopes of a dearer relationship, but they had been so utterly without a foundation of such substance a man must have to come wooing a cattle baron's daughter that his mouth turned dry and his tongue got thick. He never could say the words.
Why, in those days he didn't even have a job. Things were different now. He had come into his own.
"But I don't think it'll do a darn bit of good," he sighed, sitting there looking down at the lights.
He rode on, holding his horse down to a walk, his courage stretched out in rather a tenuous line along the road behind him.
"Well, I don't know," he said, plodding along slowly, head bent, trying to think out that problem in meditative concentration as he had figured out many a one before that day. "By all rights a sheriff ought to be a married man"—a tremendous sigh, looking ahead at the lights—"but danged if I know!"
The end