Bill was more indignant than confused, although he was as red as Henry Bergen's vest. The cowboys slapped themselves on the thighs with their big hats, driving out the dust like somebody beating a carpet; they looked across at Charley Mallon, upon whom they appeared to think the joke centered, and whooped in shrill derision. Bill's companions tilted their heads in unison and put their liquor where it would do nobody any harm but themselves, still keeping their eyes on the bar when they put their glasses down.
Bill was ashamed for the embarrassment he had brought them, but not ashamed for himself. It was not through any moral objection that he had not taken whisky along with the rest of them. If he'd liked it he would have taken his shot as big as the biggest. He had tried it out a good many times when the boys brought bottles out from Kansas City, but never had come to the belief that it was made to drink. He was turning to Major Simmons to explain that it was not a moral question with him, but purely gustatory, when one of the cowboys detached himself from his group of laughing comrades and approached Bill with insolent simulation of curiosity.
He was a rather smart-appearing young man, dressed in tight-fitting trousers and fancy boots which must have cost him a month's wages at the least. He wore a red-and-black plaid shirt, loose-fitting in body and sleeves, with a blue silk kerchief around his neck. His hat was bigger by broad odds than any other in the house, a new one of the standard cream-white so much in vogue on the range from Texas to Montana in that day.
Bill's companions were filling their glasses again. Major Simmons turned a quick eye to him, in as plain an appeal as Bill ever read, to uphold the honor of the county of which he was a father. Bill was wondering if he could do it without making his case worse than it stood at present, when the cowboy laid hold of him and whirled him around from the bar.
"Look a-here, Buttermilk!" he said, "if you can't stand up and take a man's drink when you're out among men, I'll make you roll your hoop to hell out o' here. Put 'er down your neck, Buttermilk!"
The rest of them, railroaders and all, came crowding near to see the fun.
"Make it sassaferiller!" said a cowboy in high, piping voice meant to mimic innocence and simplicity, which all right-minded cow-chasers were supposed to despise.
"Now, boys, now, boys," Major Simmons said in a manner of go-easy and let—him-alone.
If Bill had made any progress toward a decision in the matter of taking a drink, the cowboy's order set him back at once to a firm determination that he wouldn't. He flung the fellow's hand from his shoulder, opened a way through those who pressed up to see the show like a breast-stroke swimmer making a mighty pull for the finish, and started for the door.
The cowboy wasn't going to have it that way. He hopped nimbly in front of Bill, slung out his gun and ordered him to go back and throw it down his neck.
Bill stopped at sight of the bare gun, the heat that had been over him so intense that it made his vision watery giving away to a sudden coldness, out of which everything stood as sharply and separately as if light had been brought to him in a dark place. He hadn't come to Pawnee Bend to submit to insult and public scorn; the days of his oppression were gone with the days of his poverty; gone with his sense of cowed inferiority among the boys from whose fathers his dad used to buy corn-meal and bacon on credit to carry them through the winter, the family to work the debt out next summer like horses. He hadn't come to Pawnee Bend to let anybody straddle his chest and wallow his hair in the mud.
"This ain't my day to drink, pardner," he said, his voice calm and steady, even though it was a little way down in his throat. "I guess you've heard of the horse any fool can lead to water. I'm not that kind of a horse."
"I don't like your shoes!" the cowboy said, with such expression of loathing his soul seemed to be in revolt at the sight.
"I reckon I could change 'em if it would save your feelin's," Bill said good-naturedly.
"I don't like your damn face!" the cowboy sneered, scowling as he pushed his own forward to grit his teeth not so very far from Bill's ear.
"I don't see how I can help you on that," Bill told him, watching him as closely as he would have watched a rattlesnake coiled in the road.
"You got to rag, you one-eared granger!" the cowboy announced, suddenly as if the thought had just taken him. "Rag, you one-eared granger, rag!"
Bill had heard stories, a good while back, from men who had been in Santa Fé and Raton, of greenhorns getting their toes shot off for refusing to dance before a crowd. But that was a number belonging so far back on the program Bill had concluded it was not being done any longer. At least he had not read about it being pulled on anybody in Dodge in the past four or five years.
There the fool fellow stood, gun lifted, wrist limbered, ready to pull off the time-worn trick; and there stood Bill facing him, feet too close together for comfort, hoping the bartender would interfere to save his floor. But Mallon made no move; nobody raised a hand.
The cowboy waited a few seconds, as long as his dignity would permit, Bill feeling a sensation creeping down him from neck to legs as if he had melted and was turning cold, but determined to die before he'd crack a heel for the edification of that crowd. His prompter jerked his gun on the hinge of his limber wrist, in a movement like a player makes when throwing a knife in a game of mumble peg.
The bullet came very close to Bill's left toe, and Bill gave a leap as if it had nipped him, to the great edification of all concerned. The whoop they raised at sight of this antic chopped off short, just as if somebody had opened the door on revelry and slammed it instantly, when Bill's big foot swung high in the most prodigious kick they ever had seen measured by a human leg, made contact somewhere above the band of those tight-legged trousers and queered the show a whole lot quicker than it takes to tell how it was done.
There was confusion and flying legs for an instant, Bill Dunham rising out of it with the gun in his own proper hand. The cowboy was throwing his legs in his effort to retrieve a dignified position, like one of the trained steers they use in the Hollywood rodeos, a good deal of feet in the air. Bill pegged a shot with a sort of nonchalant hand, taking one of the fellow's high heels off as slick as it could have been done with a hatchet.
As if to prove this wasn't a greenhorn's luck, Bill threw another shot with a funny little jerk of the wrist, just as the cowboy was scrambling up, cutting the other heel from under him as if it were made of sand.
There was no need for Bill to request them to give him room. He had more of it than any one man could use inside of three seconds. The dehorned cowboy, feeling himself flat on the floor that way, no doubt believing he had lost part of his legs, lurched for the door in ludicrous gait. He made a plunge at the swinging leaves as if to take a dive, hitting the sidewalk as the people of Pawnee Bend were accustomed to seeing men emerge from Poteet's Casino when the night bouncer was on the job.
The impetus of his rush against the swinging half-doors carried the cowboy into the dusty street. Bill Dunham was right there on the edge of the planks, with a little fatherly advice, given in a low but portentous tone. By the time the rest of them, including Charley Mallon, had taken in breath enough to carry them to the door, the cowboy was astraddle of his horse, heading for parts known only to himself. Bill Dunham turned a couple of shots loose after him to give him the key, and let him go.
When Mallon divided the latticed doors cautiously and thrust out a questioning phiz, he saw a streak of dust with a humped-over cowboy at the farther end of it, and the heads of a few citizens sticking out of doors and windows to see what it was about.
Mallon was back in his place behind the bar by the time Bill got inside, mashing half a lemon with his wooden pestle in a tall glass. The range-riders went out to think things over and get their bearings, not knowing just where the rest of them were going to get off. The few railroaders had come back to the bar, laughing and well pleased with the quick overturn the granger had made among the fresh young fellows who were not always careful where they stood their hot jokes around.
Major Simmons was nearest Bill on his progress to the bar, the captured gun in his big fist.
"Mr. Dunham," Major Simmons flung out a congratulatory hand, his dry face crinkled in humorous appreciation of the event, "that was done like a gentleman and a scholar!"
"I always did hate a fuss," said Bill, beginning to feel as if he had made a show of himself, and maybe gone a little too far.
MacKinnon was standing off a little way, looking at Bill with a gleeful grin on his broad red face. Bergen slapped Bill's back in his paternal fashion, and got hold of his hand, talking between pumps and thumps.
"Worthy six-hundredth citizen!" he said, heartily enough, although Bill felt there was something of patronage, even mockery, in his leering hard eyes and whiskery grin.
Charley Mallon was shaking his mixture with a two-arm movement, this side and that, a long loop down the center, jiggle by the right ear, jiggle by the left; his eye on Bill as if he worked to propitiate him and feared his efforts might fail. He took the copper shaker off the glass, spooned out a cherry to brighten it, and set it before Bill with a friendly nod.
"Try that, Mr. Dunham," he requested respectfully. "It's on the house. An-ny time you want a limonade, step in."
"The six-hundredth man," said Puckett, offering his hand with a sinuous, slip-along movement as if sneaking a card, his gambler's face unchanged by any gleam of friendship or sincerity. "It looks like it's going to be a lucky number for you, Dunham."
"I hope so," said Bill. "Mr. Mallon, will you hand this gun to that feller if he comes back?"
Mallon was willing, although he said the man was a stranger to him.
"Maybe some of them punchers knows him," he said. "They come and go, here today, gone tomorrow. It ain't likely he'll ever come back, losin' his heels that way. You'd as well stick it in your scabbard and keep it, Mr. Dunham."
"I've got a gun," said Bill.
"You're not railroadin'?" Mallon leaned confidentially, ingratiatingly friendly, keen as an old woman talking across the fence.
"Well, no; not exac'ly what you could call railroadin'," Bill replied.
"You don't look like one of them light-headed cowboys," Mallon speculated, feeling around in his mind for some place to put this surprising fellow. "Are you out of the army, Mr. Dunham?"
"N-o-o, not exac'ly what you could call the army," Bill replied, with that horsetrader way of his that was neither yes nor no, yet so friendly and apparently confidential that Mallon felt he was learning a great deal, and coming down to the bottom of it right along.
The four citizens were laying their heads together while Mallon and Bill carried on this little aside. Bill gathered from their talk they were discussing who should carry the petition to Topeka and present it to the secretary of state, and the advisability of a public collection to defray the delegate's expense. Major Simmons waved that detail aside from consideration. He had an annual pass on the railroad, and he was patriot enough, he hoped, to pay his own expenses in such an important civic matter. So he was spotted to go.
Bill Dunham, as the six-hundredth citizen, didn't appear to count for much any longer. He chatted along in a friendly way with Mallon, disclosing nothing at all of his past, cautious of any claim of intention on the future. He was so taken with what Mallon had to tell him about the country, on which the bartender was well and widely informed, that he switched his attention from the fathers of the county to this lanky son of it, who had come there railroading with the first string of steel that was laid.
Some of the cowboys returned, bringing two or three recruits with them to take a squint from a respectful distance at the man who talked like a greenhorn but acted like something else. They ranged along to the farther end of the bar, which was an ample one, fully forty feet long, where Mallon shifted himself to attend them.
The banker and his two adjutants, as Bergen and Puckett appeared to be, shook hands with Bill again. MacKinnon suggested a cigar, which Bill agreed to without moral or physical qualm. As they puffed along back toward the hotel, MacKinnon made inquiry on Bill's future designs.
"Thinkin' of goin' railroadin', Mr. Dunham?"
"Well, not exac'ly what you could call railroadin'," Bill replied.
"If you were, I could put you next to Jim Cunningham, boss of the surfacin' gang, that works around two hundred Eyetalian dago fellers. You might land as timekeeper to Jim; he's lettin' out the man he's got, I hear. That lad's learnt their lingo enough to do a little graftin' off of 'em, but he made the mistake of forgettin' to whack up with Jim. He's been chargin' the simple ignorant dagoes a dollar a head by the month for holdin' their jobs for 'em, he made 'em believe."
"Purty slick business," Bill said.
"Yes, and he could 'a' carried it on to no end if he'd been honest and square and split with Jim like a gentleman. Jim'll take the graft over to himself now; you couldn't hope to get a whack out of that. But a handy man could think up something else to turn an honest dollar on the side."
"He might," Bill allowed, "but I've been thinkin' of hittin' the range."
"Railroadin' pays better, and it's easier, take it all weather through," MacKinnon advised. "But of course, if a young feller went to the range and rode straight, lettin' the red booze alone like you do, puttin' his money in yearlin's and pickin' up calves here and there the way they do, there's no end of opportunity for him to make big in ten years, or maybe less if he's got a speculatin' eye. It's a gamble, though, the biggest gamblin' game, spread on the widest table, men ever set in and bucked."
"That's what makes it appeal to me," Bill confessed. "I'm out here to take a chance."
"It's a game without a limit," MacKinnon sighed, as if he had learned something by experience with it. "You can go sky high if luck's with you, but you can hit the rocks quicker than you can in any other business on earth. I've followed the range as cattlemen pushed it out here, from the time Custer cleared the Indians off of it and the Union Pacific was put through.
"Yes, I've seen fortunes made at the cattle business, and I've seen 'em lost. Men that could 'a' bought me up with their vest-pocket change one day were hittin' me for money to buy a cowpuncher's outfit the next. Market slumps and Texas fever, and winter storms and summer drouths. Yes, and the heat of gamin' that gets in a cattleman's blood, buckin' the big chance year in and year out. I've known 'em to be cleaned out in a poker game in a night, stakin' and losin' everything, down to the last horse.
"It's a great business, but I'll stick to my hotel. A man can dwindle down gradual at my business, die slow and easy. So, you're thinkin' of the range?"
"I've been thinkin' of it a good while," Bill owned, with more directness than he had answered a question since coming to Pawnee Bend.
"You could hold your own with them," MacKinnon nodded; "your own, and something more. "Well, Will-ium—" turning a shrewd eye to see how the familiarity was received, assured by Bill's slow friendly grin—"Will-ium—"
"They pronounce it Bill where they know me."
"Bill, if you take up that life let the red booze alone, and always leave it to the other man to make the break for his gun, the way you left that poor simpleton to make his play a while ago."
"I'd ruther eat than fight, any time," Bill said. "I always did hate a fuss."
Bill inquired about a likely ranch to get a job. MacKinnon named many cattlemen, but advised against striking out to ride into a job, as that might turn out a very wasteful adventure of time. The cowboy method, he said, was to hang around town and interview the cattlemen, range bosses and cowboys who came in on business or pleasure. A man could pick up a job that way almost any day.
MacKinnon had some further information to give about the requirements of horses and equipment, of which he found Bill almost entirely ignorant. They furnished a man nothing but his chuck on the range, Bill learned; every cowboy must supply his own horses, of which three was about the minimum with which a man could get along. But they were cheap. Good horses could be bought for thirty dollars. A cowboy frequently paid more for a pair of boots or a hat than he paid for a horse.
"But I'd advise railroadin'," MacKinnon said. "It's more a man's work, and it's here to stay. Range cattle will pass away in a few years, the cowboys will go with them, their occupation cut from under their feet like you cut the heels from under that lad in the saloon. There'll be nothing for them but railroadin' or farmin' then, and the old cow hands are good for neither—no, nor nothing else on earth but handlin' cattle on the range. It's a good thing to stay out of while you're young."
"I expect you're right, but I think I'll take a crack at it for a while if I can land a job."
"The best of them that come here do," MacKinnon said, shaking his head as for the things he had seen happen to them. "The life has a strong call to a young man; it lures the best of them away. Well, if I was makin' my start maybe I'd ride away with you, Bill. I expect it's altogether likely I'd take my blanket-roll and go."