"Oh, here's where you are!" said Zora Moore, coming up to Dunham quickly the very moment the moon missed its landing and plunged ears-over into the cloud across the gap. "I was looking for you at MacKinnon's. Is that right about you wanting a job?"
"I intended to see Mr. Moore when he came in and strike him for a job," Dunham replied.
"You didn't say when Mr. Ruddy was talking to you whether you'd take a job, but if you're out for one, we can use you. My father told me to be on the lookout for a few good men, and pick them up if I ran across any. You're hired; your time begins right now. Here—hang this thing on you—I'm tired packin' it around."
Dunham admired her direct way of doing business, although he wasn't ready to take on the job that minute. He took the leather pouch, the strap of which she had put in his hand as she spoke, and stood hesitantly, his eyes on the hotel door.
"I've got an appointment with a man in a few minutes, if you'll excuse me from startin' right in, Miss Moore," he said. "I'll just lay this down here and fetch it along to you later. Where—"
"No," she cut him off decisively, "I don't want it throwin' around. What did you say about an appointment with a man?"
"I'm due to meet a man in a few minutes," he replied, hoping she could be got rid of before Kellogg came out of that door.
"Well then, carry this thing over to the depot for me—it's got ammunition in it for my kid brothers, they shoot away an awful lot. I'll wait for the train, and you can come back and keep your engagement, if it's a very important one."
Dunham thought that would be a good way to clear the ground of her hampering presence. He calculated he'd have time to deposit her and the heavy sack in the depot and get back before the hour was up. He glanced back at the hotel as she led the way toward the depot, wondering if MacKinnon was trying to argue Kellogg out of it, resentful of any interference that might cast a doubt on his courage. Zora Moore, hurrying on ahead, stumbled with a scrambling noise on the loose shoulder of ballast at the ends of the railroad ties, and fell.
Dunham picked her up with deprecatory exclamation. She leaned on him heavily, with suppressed groans, bending as if she'd taken a serious bump.
"Are you hurt much?" Bill inquired anxiously.
She stood half doubled over, making that whistling sound expressive of acute suffering common to lads when they have outgrown the crying age.
"Gee! I think I busted something," she said.
"I'm sorry," said Bill, with no more consoling effect than that expression generally has on people with bumps and bruises and broken bones. "I had a right to look out for that dang railroad!"
"Oh-h-h! Fee-u-u-u! I think my stifle's out!" she said.
Bill was supporting her with one hand, carrying the pouch in the other, hoping she hadn't broken anything, but more anxious to get her off his hands at once than alarmed over her demonstration. At the worst, he thought, she couldn't have done much more than skin her knee.
"Let me help you up to the platform," he proposed, thinking anxiously of Kellogg and the last speeding minutes of his hour, twisting his neck to watch the hotel door. "You sit down in the waitin'-room and you'll be all right in a minute."
"No, I don't want to go there, I don't want to go there," she said, panting as if the pain of her hurt was hard to bear. "Take me to the wagon—the wagon, the wagon—oh-h-h! the wagon!"
"Where's it at?" Bill inquired, feeling panicky and alarmed. She must be hurt, she must be hurt badly, to take on in that tragic way.
"Back of the hotel—right down this road," she groaned. "He-elp me to the wagon!"
She leaned on him and grabbed his coat as if about to collapse, and Bill, certain now that she was going to faint, was in a sweat of alarm. He slung the troublesome pouch over his shoulder and squared off for action.
"I'll carry you over to MacKinnon's and tell him to get a doctor," he said.
"No, I want to go to the wagon," she insisted. "I'll hold to you and hobble along. Shad Brassfield, our teamster, he's down there—he'll know what to do. Fe-e-e-u-u-u! my leg!
"Dang it for lettin' you slip on that ballast!" said Bill.
She appeared to start off pretty well for a cripple, but Dunham didn't notice that. He was watching MacKinnon's door, the light of it still unbroken by the marshal's exit. He noted as well the general desertion of that part of town, taking it as an indication of public indifference of the event set for nine o'clock. He did not know that it was the kind of a show the gun-wise people who lived in and frequented Pawnee Bend avoided. They were quite content to view results.
Dunham construed this lack of interest as a sort of public expression of contempt for him, perhaps magnifying his own importance in that town a little. It had gone around that Kellogg had given him an hour to get out of town, and people had taken it for granted that he had gone. Even Kellogg appeared to believe he had dusted it, or else MacKinnon, in friendly desire to avert the meeting, had not told him the truth.
So Dunham thought, heading off down the road past the side of MacKinnon's hotel with Zora Moore on his arm, a rather lightly tripping crippled person, too, he began to realize. He wanted to take a squint at his watch, but the moon remained persistently covered. It didn't matter; it wasn't over yet. He'd leave her at the wagon and throw a surprise into Kellogg by facing him at the hotel.
They were considerably past the hotel, with nothing apparent in the landscape but the string of bunk cars on one hand, a few small scattered houses on the other. There was no wagon to be seen.
Dunham stopped, looking around in suspicious perplexity, which was not a little intensified by the girl removing her hand, which had for some minutes lain lightly on his arm. He had a flashing thought of deceit and treachery and knockout drops, his wad as the objective.
"There's no wagon anywhere around here," he said, his tone severe and accusing.
"No, it isn't here," she agreed, entirely easy and over her whimpering. There was even a little note of mockery in her voice, Bill Dunham believed.
"I don't believe you're hurt a bit," he accused her; seeing her stand unsupported on her own proper legs as well as any sound young lady in Kansas.
"Not a bit," she assured him cheerfully.
"I might 'a' known you was stringin' me when you put up that talk about your stifle bein' out. A girl ain't got no stifle joint."
"How do you know?" she asked, flippantly, boldly, Bill thought.
"Nobody but a four-legged animal's got a stifle joint, and you know it as well as I do," Bill told her, indignant over this anatomical deceit.
"Never mind, Mr. Dunham," she said gently, as serious in a moment as he would have her. She touched his arm with placative hand. "I had to string you along someway till I could get your gun."
Bill clapped hand to his scabbard, to find it as empty as when he bought it. The discovery started him with a nervous jump; a hot wave chased a cold one up his backbone and seemed to run out of his nose.
"What're you up to, sneakin' my gun that way?" he demanded, so suspicious of treachery now his hair began to crawl at the roots as if it was full of ants.
"I told Mr. MacKinnon I'd get it if I could," she said. "We didn't want to see you killed."
"You've made a fool out of me between you, and that's worse!" Dunham blurted, in full support of his own hot declaration.
"Not half as bad," she corrected him gently. "You can be a fool every day of the week and live happy, but you could only fight Ford Kellogg once."
"What did you do with it?"
"Dropped it in the weeds back there somewhere. You couldn't find it before morning."
"He'll think I'm afraid of him, he'll think he's put over his bluff!"
"Let him," she said calmly.
"MacKinnon put you up to it!"
"No, he didn't. He said it couldn't be done. Don't be sore, Mr. Dunham; you'll thank me for it when you understand what you've missed."
"Maybe I will," he replied, sulky and ungracious. "You've put me in a h—a dickens of a fix! How'm I goin' back to face that man without a gun?"
"You've got about as good a chance without it as with it," she replied, a note of asperity in her smooth low voice. "You don't know Kellogg. No man ever has touched him with a bullet; there's not a man alive that can do it. If you go back there tonight he'll kill you, gun or no gun."
"He didn't have any right to order me around that way," Dunham argued. "A man's not an outlaw because he defends his life."
"Mr. Ruddy, the man you were talking to—the mayor, you know—says Kellogg had a perfect right to order you to leave town if he thought you might create a public disturbance or cause trouble by staying there. If you had fought him and killed him you'd have been arrested and tried for murder. That's what Mr. MacKinnon said."
She was so earnest Dunham could not doubt any longer the honesty of her intention or the disinterestedness of her interference with his foolish plan of defiance.
"I—Mr. MacKinnon and I thought it was a pity to see you killed off for no reason at all," she said, with such simple sincerity it made Dunham feel very small and cheap.
"I guess you're right," he admitted contritely, breaking into a sweat at realization of the peril his misguided independence had led him so near. "But I guess it won't be any harm if I go back and kick around in the weeds to see if I can find my gun."
"Forget your gun!" she said severely. "You're a whole lot better off tonight without it."
"It's a good old gun; I hate to lose it," he pleaded.
"Well, you're not goin' back. And that's a cinch!"
"All right, Miss Moore," he yielded, as tame and humble as if she had a rope on him, thrown and hoghobbled and conquered past all hope.
"You certainly can pull a gun in a hurry, kid," she said. "You must 'a' had a whole lot of practice in your time. But you mustn't get the big notion you're too darned good at it," she hastened to amend.
"I don't suppose it takes any special amount of brains to pull a gun fast," he allowed. "Well, I guess I might as well walk on till I come to the next place where a train stops, and pull my freight out of this country."
"Why, don't you want the job?"
"Which job?"
"The one I hired you for a little while ago."
"I thought you was just stringin' me along," he said foolishly. "Well, I'm green, but I'm willin'. What kind of a job is it?"
"We'll walk on down the road and I'll tell you. I told Mr. MacKinnon we'd walk on toward the ranch if I could get your gun away from you. Pa and Shad Brassfield will pick us up when they come along."
The cattlemen of southwestern Kansas, she told him, had formed an alliance for the purpose of making a concerted stand that summer against trail herds from Texas being driven across the range to the railroad loading-points. Last summer Kansas cattlemen had suffered heavy losses from Texas fever, many of them being practically ruined. Nobody could explain it, but there was some kind of infection carried by cattle from south of a certain line in Texas, to which they themselves were immune, which seemed to blow on the wind and poison the very dust of the earth. Northern cattle grazing the range crossed by these Texas herds, or coming within several miles of their trail, contracted this devastating fever and perished.[1]
No cure was known for it; no preventive except freezing weather. Local cattle could graze with safety the polluted ranges after a winter had passed. The situation had grown so desperate, Texas cattle coming in such vastly increasing numbers year after year, that the livestock industry on the Kansas range was threatened with ruination.
Something had to be done to stop this indiscriminate invasion, this sowing of plague over the free grazing lands. There was neither state nor federal law to regulate the entry of these southern herds, it being a hard matter to convince legislators that cattle apparently entirely healthy could be carriers of this most fatal malady.
For the lack of any law to help them, the Kansas stockmen were driven to the expedient of banding together and establishing, for mutual protection, a quarantine against Texas trail herds. This quarantine line they had fixed at the southern boundary of the state, where they proposed to apply their regulation by force of arms if necessary.
Guards were already patrolling the southern border to watch for the coming of the first Texas herds and summon sufficient force to stop them at the line. It was as a recruit to this force that Zora Moore had engaged Dunham, subject to the approval of her father, who was president of the Kansas cattlemen's organization.
These guards must be trustworthy men of the highest integrity, cool men in the face of danger, inflexible men in their duty. They were having trouble finding men, as few were unemployed on the range at that time of the year, those few out of jobs generally being undesirable for the stern duty of quarantine patrol.
"Mr. MacKinnon recommended you," she said.
"He don't know any more about me than you do," Dunham told her.
"I know you're a man that will stand up for his rights, and you were willing to fight Ford Kellogg. That's recommendation enough for me, and I know it will be for my father."
"I don't know that it always pays a man to stand up too strict for his rights," he said gloomily, the question of his justification in the affair of the cowboy rising up to accuse him.
"When a man goes after his gun you've got to do something," she said, surprising him by her ready interpretation of his thoughts. "I wouldn't worry about that man. He'd 'a' got you if you hadn't beat him to it."
"Maybe," Bill granted, considerably comforted and relieved.
She was a wise one, he thought; she was as wise as they made them. And he was ready to bet his last dollar she was as straight as a plumbline.
They walked on out of town, which took no great stretching of the legs to accomplish, giving the road occasionally to riders who passed on in silence, no doubt taking them for strolling lovers. Half a mile or so beyond the edge of town the road bent southward, crossing the railroad, striking out into a land that appeared as empty of man's activities as the sky over it.
From the top of a swell in the treeless land they watched the train that Zora had come in to meet wind its way across the prairie, its two little red eyes winking out of sight at last. Its going seemed to leave the world more melancholy to Dunham, as if some last thread between him and his untroubled days had been broken, leaving him estranged and alone.
He regretted that hasty deed, that blow, given on what seemed to him now such trifling provocation, that had provoked vindictive retaliation; he was sorry for the man who had fallen in that sprawled, collapsed, flattened-out, repellent posture, his face in the dust, his wild bullet through the mayor's window pane.
He would have been glad to go back and live over again the hard years which he had surmounted to come to that tragic hour if such penance could clear his conscience of the burden that oppressed it so grievously. The farther he went from the scene, the heavier his regret weighed, like a load that had seemed light enough in the excitement of the start, but which promised to gall him and wear him down before the journey's end.
That was the outcome of all his vindictive years, his sweltering under the sting of early wrongs. A noble soul would have outlived them, he said, and hidden them in the expansive maturity of his heart, as a tree envelops old wounds, fold on fold, in its inexorable dignity.
They must have been on the road an hour; the moon had pared away the last shred of cloud, leaving its course untroubled and clear down to the very horizon's edge, when the wagon overtook them. It came with little noise along the dusty road, the glow of a cigar in the back seat showing where the cattleman rode.
John Moore did not appear to think it remarkable, or even unusual, to come across his daughter walking the public road with a stranger at night. There was no uneasiness in his manner, no displeasure. Dunham had looked forward to this meeting with apprehension, doubtful whether Moore would countenance his daughter's activity in the affairs of a stranger whose follies made him contemptible even to himself.
Moore greeted his daughter with boisterous, loudvoiced affection, leaning over the side to give her a popping kiss. He shook hands with Dunham when Zora introduced him, no reservation of inequality or suspicion in his way. There was a strong vapor of whisky on his breath, and he was a voluble, loudspoken, rough-edged unlettered man.
Dunham mounted the front seat beside the driver; the journey was resumed, Moore talking with loud impartiality for the benefit of all about his journey, which had extended as far east as Chicago, and the successful outcome of his business, whatever that had been. He said nothing of Dunham's rescue from self-appointed extinction at Ford Kellogg's hands.
The driver, apparently a man of length from his way of doubling forward in the seat, was shaded by a large hat which, together with the canvas top of the wagon—of the kind called a hack in Texas—put him in such gloom Dunham could not make anything out of his face. He could see the end of what appeared to be an unlit cigar sticking out of it, and hear the clucking that issued from that region whenever the horses slackened their brisk trot.
Dunham did not attempt any conversation with the driver, who held his tongue in that somber fashion while they proceeded four or five miles. The conversation in the back seat gradually fell to a lower, more intimate, pitch, little of it reaching Dunham's ears distinctly. He tried not to hear, feeling himself and his doings in Pawnee Bend the subject of this confidential talk.
They pitched suddenly over the brow of a long swell, beginning a quick descent into what appeared to be a broad valley: A river serpentined through it, the course marked in the moonlight by the dark border of trees at its brink. The Arkansas, Dunham knew it to be, river of erratic flood-waters and engulfing sands. The suddenly accelerated gait of the horses, and a light twinkling among the trees, was warrant that they were approaching the end of the drive.
It was at this stage of the journey that the driver found his speech. He preluded it with a chuckle, as if it started deep and sent out bubbles.
"They've got a good joke on you over at Pawnee Bend," he said, still doubled forward, elbows on his thighs, as if he addressed his team.
Dunham started. He was not sure the man had spoken, although he heard the words distinctly; and almost positive they could not have been addressed to him.
"Yeah, they got a dang good joke on you!" the driver repeated, the bubbles coming after the words this time, as if they had been pulled up by the roots out of the mud.
"I beg your pardon?" Dunham said.
"Oh, that's all right; don't mention it," the driver said with cordial magnanimity.
"What did you say about a joke, Shad?" Zora inquired, leaning forward, her voice close to Dunham's neck.
Shad took out the cork and let another little spurt of bubbles rise and drift off on the deliberate current of his humor.
"You know that feller this kid killed out in front of Ruddy's?" he said.
"Well, what about it?" Zora demanded impatiently.
"Dang good joke!" said Shad.
He lapsed off there, as if that ended the story. Dunham heard Moore snorting as if he had caught the point of the untold joke. Zora poked the driver in the back.
"What's it about, you old fool?"
"You know, when they took him to Schubert's back room and stripped him," Shad twisted his neck to talk around to Zora, although he could have been heard a quarter of a mile if he had talked straight in front, "they couldn't find a mark of a bullet on that feller from top to toe."
"No-o-o!" said Zora, incredulously.
"That's the joke!" said Shad.
"I think it's a pretty burn sort of a joke," she said, her displeasure evident, an opinion in which Dunham fully concurred.
"They felt him over, and turned him and poked him," Shad related, "but they couldn't find a shadder of a bullet nowheres. Schubert was kind of put out about it. He don't like to keep 'em around, you know. He says: 'Vell, I guess I'll haf to let him lay around two or three days to see if he's deadt.' That feller he kind of rose up and grunted. 'Who in the hell said I was dead?' he says. 'Who in the hell said I was dead?'"
Shad roared, and Moore roared. Dunham was pretty certain that Zora did some roaring of her own. But there was no mirth in Bill Dunham's breast; he didn't see where the joke came in. All he was conscious of was a vast lifting of relief, a peaceful, delicious clearing of his troubled conscience. His hands were clean: there was no blood of a man upon his hands.
"He's a fittified man," Shad explained. "I used to know him down in the Nation. He tuck a fit the wink you throwed down on him, and you missed him as clean as a drum. Dang good joke on you, kid!"
"Ain't it?" said Bill, his heart as light as a feather. "But I guess I can live it down."
So what he had thought an adventurous and tragic day had ended in an explosion of comedy, leaving him nothing to his credit but a pair of heels. Yet Bill Dunham's heart was so light that moment, his happiness so extreme, that he would have replaced the cowboy's lost underpinning with silver heels if he had met him in the road.
- ↑ The tick was not then known as the carrier of Texas fever.