Short Grass/Chapter 19
Zora was right about it: Bill Dunham was an outlaw under the moral code of the range, which moral code was purely a business one, to be sure, a code of mine and thine, with far the greater stress on mine. They'd get him, MacKinnon said. He advised Bill to hit the road at once, not waiting to sell his horse. Ride it, MacKinnon said; go on to the Panhandle or somewhere, and get a job. Go anywhere, but get out of southwestern Kansas as fast as he could hop.
No, said Bill. He was beginning to like that country; he'd continue to stick around awhile. He changed his thirty-eight gun for one that would make more noise, as well as a bigger hole in the anatomy of the species, opened a dicker for a rifle and scabbard that some Texas cowboy up with a trail herd had left with MacKinnon on an unpaid bill. Dunham got this for twelve dollars in the end, and hung it on his saddle, his horse hitched in front of the hotel as if he intended to go somewhere in a hurry, when there was nothing farther from his mind.
MacKinnon said a man might think Dunham had discovered a gold mine from the way he was determined to stay there. Bill pulled one of his rare, slow-coming, hard-going grins, and replied that a gold mine was cheap stuff compared to what he had discovered.
So that day passed, uneventfully, Dunham's horse at the rack in front of the hotel, except for the time it was putting away a stiff feed of oats in the livery barn. And then Dunham sat around waiting while the animal made its leisurely, luxurious meal. He chatted with the liveryman, who was distant, but respectful.
The story of Dunham's exploit had gone not only to the utmost sod hut in Pawnee Bend by that time, but to the far places of the range as well. He had brought the Texas herd across in the face of seventy-five or eighty men without pulling a gun. It was something to command respect, if no especial admiration. When a man came among them in Pawnee Bend who never pulled his gun except to use it, they walked humbly in his presence. He was a pretty good sort of man to leave alone.
Dunham kept his horse hitched in front of the hotel until after dark, the scuffed and worn scabbard, with its battered rifle-stock showing, hung on the saddle-horn. Nothing happened to disturb the serenity of the town, which appeared to be getting along very well without a marshal. It was nearly nine o'clock when he took the horse to the livery barn to leave it for the night. That done, he took a stroll around town, making himself as inconspicuous as possible, hoping to avoid the windy Bergen in case he might be abroad.
Few men were in town that night, probably due to the fact that everybody available had been called to the border or put under orders to stand ready to be called. Dunham thought it would be only a neighborly act to drop in and see Charley Mallon, who had treated him decently enough on a certain day. He wanted to get a line on public feeling regarding the Texas cattle, not quite convinced that the town stood a unit against him as MacKinnon had said.
Business was slack in the Casino, where Charley Mallon stood in white shirt and apron behind the bar, sleeves rolled up on his long stringy arms, ready for a rush, and in a cynical and surly humor because it did not come. A first-class bartender would not be able to maintain his social position unless things began to pick up pretty soon.
Mallon greeted Dunham like a prodigal come to spend. Here was one man who was doing something for his country, anyhow, let the rest of them in Pawnee Bend sleep on. Mallon said as much, although in different words. He was shining with admiration for Dunham's feat in conducting the Texans across the border. He suggested champagne.
When Dunham declined the drink which cattlemen regularly ordered with their catfish when out to impress the civilized centers, such as Wichita and Kansas City, with their sophistication and wealth, Mallon insisted on shaking one of his notable lemonades, to which he added an egg as a special mark of his esteem.
"You've done more for this town by openin' the trail to them Texas cowboys than any man ever done for it, Mr. Dunham," Mallon declared, or rather announced, his voice lifted for the benefit of his customers.
Bill put down the glass, which he had drained at one long pull, like the burgomaster of Rothenburg. He wiped the mucilage of raw egg from his chin, and stood thoughtfully studying the grain of the mahogany bar, which was entirely honest mahogany, no matter what other substitutes one might find in Poteet's Casino.
"I hope it won't do anybody harm," he said.
"Business in this town would have to shut up without the Texas trade, Mr. Dunham," Mallon said, hands on the bar, eyes roving up and down and across to the tables where a few gamesters tempted fortune with their slender earnings. Here was a notable guest at his bar; the news of his presence would stimulate a forward movement, quickly spread to the outside and draw trade. Curiosity could not excuse itself in a frontier saloon. To enter was equivalent to an order.
Some of the cowboys at the games looked around at the loud, rolling, Irish pronunciation of Dunham's name. Others, who were trifling with the ladies of the establishment along the bar or at card tables, quickened and began to talk between their lips.
"Name yours, gentlemen," said Mallon, in a sort of general challenge to set some money moving in his direction or heels knocking toward the door. One of the ladies got busy with the piano, a high-backed old jingle-box with the ivory coating gone from several keys, making it look as if it had lost some of its teeth. They played the piano fortissimo in Pawnee Bend those days.
Gentlemen named theirs, and ladies carried it to them on trays, partaking thereof with ingenuous cordiality. The little flurry of business made Mallon feel better. He came along to where Dunham lounged against the bar, wiping in the entirely useless and mechanical way bartenders used to do, with a circular movement as if he wound himself up.
"Pawnee Bend would dry up and blow away if it wasn't for the Texas trade," Mallon said. "There wouldn't be a decent place left runnin' in this town in six months if these Kansas cattlemen shut up the trails and kep' them Texas cowboys out like they want to. It would come down to a class of joints no decent man'd put his face in. Gentlemen, what's yours?"
The gentlemen who were targets of this pertinent shot had come lounging up to the bar in a bow-legged cowboy shamble from one of the tables. Theirs was whisky, of which each took as big a slug as the law allowed, scorning the chaser that Mallon stood out with each glass.
Some of the cowboys were attempting to follow the speedy, though somewhat erratic, course of the waltz the pianist was offering, encouraged and aided in this pursuit by the ladies of the house, who were familiar with the rapids and shallows of that tune. These ladies went to it with purely business alacrity and, like a coyote family, it was surprising what amount of noise a party so small could raise.
They rollicked and raced around, up and down the long room, cowboy enthusiasm and pleasure expressed in one of the two ways their limited resources could command. As the decorum of the occasion, as well as the safety of the ladies, did not permit shooting, they yipped.
Yipping is now a lost accomplishment; it passed with the old-time cowboy. Feeble echoes of it may be heard at times on the ranges of to-day, and at the big stockyards when cattle are being unloaded into the pens, but to one who has memories of those wide-flaring days on the Kansas frontier, the sound is a sham and theatrical imitation. There was a wild note in the yip of the old cowboy. When one hears it in these days of Hollywood vaqueros he knows the yipper is one who follows his herd in a Ford.
Not that art is much poorer, or that morality has suffered a setback in the passing of the old-time cowboy and his wild, high-pitched, tremulous howl. It was a sound to raise the hair on the head of a listener whose years did not permit his participation in such scenes as were enacted nightly in Poteet's Casino in the roaring little city of Pawnee Bend. There is something in police sirens reminiscent of that high-voiced revelry.
That sort of thing was new to Bill Dunham, but he had a good face for masking interest, curiosity or surprise. He stood like a man absorbed in some deep problem of his own while the dancers swirled around him with a more or less rhythmic scraping on the roughboarded floor. He was singularly interested in the two men who stood at the bar a few feet from him, waiting a little while between shots, talking in close-mouthed confidences between themselves.
One of these was a tall narrow man, bony, inflamed, morose; the other a hand shorter, of good proportions, younger and quite handsome in a purely animal way. The larger one was a spiny-featured man who seemed to disregard his appearances, probably in the full knowledge that no amount of adornment would do him any good. Nature had made him so lean and mean, so long-necked and gobbler-eyed, that scraping his hide would only reveal his imperfections that much plainer to the eye. His black hair was tipped with gray.
The other was a pinkish-white man, his hair fair, his lazy eyes light. He looked like he might be an overbearing fellow, give him a chance, Dunham thought, one to make a pretext for a quarrel out of very little if he had the strength of numbers and size on his side.
These two appeared to be alone, their attention strictly on their affairs. As they drank their several rounds, deliberately, giving each drink time to soak up before putting another on top of it, they talked in close-mouthed way, never turning an eye, except casually, in Dunham's direction. His fame did not appear to move their curiosity. Old-timers on the trails, Dunham thought them to be.
Others were coming in; Mallon was up to the elbows in business, taking his drinks when invited in, which he generally was, with the systematic motion of a man pouring something into a jug. He didn't get a bit livelier for these frequent jolts of raw liquor, or a shade redder. He was as pale as a fish, with lean jaws and melancholy, reproachful dark eyes, which gave him the appearance of an ascetic rather than a repository for quarts of strong liquor every week of his life.
Dunham would have gone his way when this tide of activity began to set in against the bar, only that Mallon kept up an over-shoulder conversation with him as he ranged up and down the bar. His dexterity was admirable to watch; Dunham found diversion in it, greatly as he would have been pleased to go. He did not want to be discourteous, yet the publicity which Mallon was bent on giving him made him feel that he was playing a braggart's part.
He told Mallon at last that he'd have to be traveling, and they shook hands across the bar, Charley giving him a loud invitation to make his headquarters there when in town, taking up the lemonade glass, which he had left standing, the curl of lemon peel in it proclaiming what it had contained.
That was an advertisement Charley was too shrewd to put away out of sight while it had a drop of virtue in it. This was Bill Dunham, the empty glass had said, the lemonade-drinking gunman, the fear of whom was so great in the breasts of men that he could drive a herd of Texas cattle across the line without ever throwing hand to his gun.
Dunham felt their eyes on him as he went to the door, a lull falling in the noisy diversions of the place as they forgot their pleasures to watch this slow-speaking, bashful young man go his way. A precarious way, and a doubtful one, as the way of all killers, no knowing who might be waiting for him outside to take a shot at him from the dark.
No thought like this crossed Dunham's mind as he stepped out of the door. He had only a feeling of relief at getting out of there; the fresh air was welcome to his nostrils after the fumes of Charley Mallon's hospitable presence. He walked briskly up the street in direction opposite the hotel, thinking he would stretch his legs a little while along the road before going to bed.
Things had come to him so fast in the three days since leaving Pawnee Bend for the border that his encounter with Kellogg seemed a remote incident of the past. Not so regrettable, either, as to cause him any further uneasiness. Strangely, the laughable incident of the fittified man was much fresher in his thoughts.
When Dunham returned to the Family Hotel he found MacKinnon behind the desk, smoking reflectively, the register at his elbow. There was nobody lounging in the office, although the sound of movement overhead indicated that guests had arrived. MacKinnon nodded, his behavior distant and uneasy.
"I thought maybe you'd changed your mind and gone," he said.
"Where to?" Dunham inquired, pretending surprise.
"Panhandle, as I told you. First thing you know, kid, you'll hang around this man's town a little bit too long."
"I didn't run into anybody that acted very sore," Dunham said. He turned the register as if looking for a familiar name among the late arrivals. "If I can't hook up to a job around here I guess I'll have to move."
"You can railroad, if that'd suit your tastes, like I told you before."
"No, I don't think I'm cut out for a railroader."
"Well, I tell you now, Bill, if you've got a quarter the sense I gave you credit for you'll straddle your horse and leave here tonight. You're a man that's standin' between two fires right now, either one of them likely to spring up and singe you before you can jump—unless you take an old fool's advice and get out of the way while there's time and a clear road."
"You mean the cattlemen on one hand, and—who?"
"The solid business interests of this town, if you've got to have it straight between the eyes, Bill. Texas cattle were all right in their day, but this country ain't buildin' its future on them: it's the ones on the range around us that mean life or death for Pawnee Bend. This will be the last year Texas cattle will come up the trails, if they don't close the state to 'em tight after this herd you brought in. My opinion is it will be the last herd of Texas cattle ever to come on foot to a Kansas town.
"Personally, I don't blame you for bringin' in that herd. I might go on to say it will be to my profit to have them southern cowboys here, and it would be more to my profit to have the country wide open to all corners from down that way. But my profit might be loss to my neighbors, you see. I built on the future when I put this buildin' up; I had my last movable, collapsible cardboard hotel in Caldwell. This one I built up from the ground to remain and stay. A man gets weary of roamin' and rovin', Will-ium."
"He sure does," Bill agreed emphatically, as if he, as a wanderer, had come to the end of the rope himself.
"You made friends here, and you might 'a' kep' them but for this unfortunate step, well-intended as it was, no doubt."
"Not a bit of it," Bill denied, just as emphatically as he had endorsed the preceding sentiment. "I didn't help Hughes out of any good wishes for him. I did it because I wanted to sock one man. I wanted to sock it to him so hard he'd stagger all the rest of his life."
"Vengeance is a thing that turns out sometimes to be sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly, as the Book says, Will-ium."
"I'm beginnin' to think so myself," Bill confessed frankly, giving MacKinnon a square and honest look. "It's something like the cracker of my own whip had quirled back and cut me across the face."
MacKinnon nodded, and nodded again, to express his opinion that it was very well put in those words.
"The cowmen they'll be after you—I've got it straight they'll be after you, strong—and there's a crowd of men, some of them representin' the solid business interests in this town, swearin' tonight you'll dance on air if you're here after breakfast in the morning. There you have it, Will-ium. You see the reason for my anxiety, as a friend and well-wisher, to see you on your way to-night."
There was no use trying to explain to MacKinnon that he didn't care a damn for the sentiments of the solid business interests of Pawnee Bend, and less than that for the attitude of the cattlemen. That would only open inquiries into something that could not be spoken of to any man.
"I can't exac'ly leave tonight," Dunham said slowly, pondering it in his deep, meditative way, "and I expect, more than likely, I'll be around here to-morrow. But I don't want to cause you any trouble, or make any muss around your ho-tel, Mr. MacKinnon. If my presence in your house is goin' to embarrass you, I'll take my grip and move."
"No guest of mine was ever taken out of my door to be hung!" MacKinnon said, drawing himself up in dignity and pride for the clean record of his hospitality. "No guest of mine ever shall be taken out of my door to be hung as long as I can handle a gun. You can rest on that."
Dunham said that was all the assurance any reasonable guest could ask to quiet his apprehensions, no matter how deep his guilt. As for himself, he did not stand in need of anybody's protection to insure a sound repose. The thought of a bed was a luxurious anticipation after two nights on the soft side of lumpy earth. He said good-night, and climbed the stairs, which came down steeply into the well of the office, arranged that way so MacKinnon could catch head-strong or careless guests and shake them down for the bill.