Short Grass/Chapter 2
Ross MacKinnon, proprietor of the Family Hotel to whose shelter Bill Dunham was about to entrust his body and his belongings, was spreading his elbows on the showcase reading a Kansas City paper when the guest arranged himself before the register. MacKinnon relinquished his reading reluctantly, a finger on the print to mark the point of interruption, turning abstractedly to see who was bungling across his grazing. He had given up the thought of any business from the west-bound train, which was twenty miles along its way by that time, Bill had stood so long on the edge of the station platform trying to adjust himself to the stunning perspective of the town.
The host saw a tall, but not exceedingly broad, young man, neatly dressed in a well-fitting blue serge suit, squaring off with a sort of apologetic expectancy before the counter. MacKinnon quickened to his business, seeing that it was business, giving the stranger an affable greeting, hastening along the counter to the register on its merry-go-round arrangement bordered by advertising cards of local concerns. He had a quick eye for men, and the possibilities of them; he would not have been wanting the right word if an ambassador had appeared as unexpectedly as Bill Dunham had come, the glittering adornments of his high station on the breast of his padded coat.
This was no grandee that stood waiting before his desk, to be sure: only a lank-limbed young fellow with a round black hat sitting rather soberly on his closely cut brown hair, one big hand holding the pen with a ready facility that betrayed more than a passing acquaintance with its use. The hat was dented all around the top of its crown, in the decorative style approved for such hats in that day, which was longer ago than yesterday, indeed.
No grandee, but a bold sketch that needed only the proper shading in and filling to make an acceptable man. Which was more to the liking of Ross MacKinnon than any number of ambassadors the courts of the earth could produce.
Plainly an unsophisticated young man who would not ask for a bath; a young man who had broken from his anchorage only a little while ago to sail out on the untried waters. MacKinnon knew the type well, so many of them came in that same manner of half-questioning trepidation seeking the romance of life in the short-grass country. It broke the spirit of many, and sent them back whence they came cowed, and heartless to venture forth again; and some it drew into its insidious wiles and debauched them, giving them draggled eyes. Only a few held a straight way to the thing they had come seeking in that country.
This lad looked like he might turn out one of the straight-going ones, MacKinnon thought, taking stock of him with shrewdly appraising eye.
A narrow-faced young man, with long head and dark eyes; a big nose with a hard backbone, lean cheeks that needed a shave; a mouth that had not taken much sweet pudding out of little spoons, from the stretch of it and its look of having the latch down, the string pulled inside.
"Passing through?" MacKinnon inquired, Bill waiting with poised pen to spread his college hand on the register.
"Well, no; not exac'ly passin' through," Bill re plied, with a sort of horsetrader confidence that seemed to tell much 'while disclosing no fact upon which a future action might be based. "Not what you could exac'ly call passin' through."
"I inquired on a point of information," MacKinnon explained, "not from curiosity or any wish to pry into your business. When a man steps off of the train in this town his past goes on with it, as far as we know or give a damn. He starts here with nothing behind him but his conscience, if he ever had one, and nothing ahead of him but the future. If you're goin' to be one of us for a few days you're qualified to sign our petition. We count a man a citizen if he's here a day, and an old-timer if he stays a week."
"Yes, sir," said Bill, not seeing any wordhold for a more sensible comment on the host's statement of facts relating to citizenship in the town of Pawnee Bend.
"Right here," MacKinnon directed, flipping over a section of the register to a place marked by a blotter between the leaves. "Just your name, and not where you're from. We're gettin' up a petition to organize our county and take it out of the jurisdiction of a set of robbers and thieves in the county north of us. Thanks. When we get the number of signers the law requires we'll send the petition to the secretary of state and have a little county all our own, Pawnee Bend the county seat."
"I ain't much of a citizen, but I guess there's no harm in it," said Bill, looking doubtfully at his name, written in good college Spencerian on the sheet of ruled foolscap inserted between the pages of a book.
"No, we're puttin' this thing through on the square, Mr. Dunham—night be of Scotch extraction, eh?"
"My double-great gran'dad was a Scotchman, they tell me. I didn't know him"—apologetically;—"that was before my time."
"He was a worthy man," MacKinnon declared, decisively as if they had come over on the same ship. "No, sir, no crooked work about this petition of ours. Every one of our signers is a bona fide citizen—you noticed I was particular on that before I had you sign? Look here: I have the floaters sign the register regular, as the law requires me to do, and the citizens sign the petition, in the way you've put your name to it, Mr. Dunham. Glad to welcome you, and hope you'll prosper as you deserve. MacKinnon is my name."
MacKinnon offered his hand, fraternity and equality in his ruddy face. There was even something friendly in the grinding sound of his voice to Bill. It reminded him of the cog-wheels in the cider-mill at home.
"How many names have you got on your petition?" Bill inquired, desiring to show a citizenly interest, not altogether superficial, at that. He felt that putting his name on the paper to go to the secretary of state at Topeka had made him one of the brotherhood, in fact.
"I don't know how we stand to-day, but we're close, we're close. We've got sheets in some of the dumps that go by the name of hotels in this town, as well as some of the stores. We collect 'em when they're full, and paste them in a string. We've got a roll as thick as your wrist."
Bill Dunham made his reappearance in the hotel office, and on the stage of activities in Pawnee Bend, in about an hour, after putting the razor to his face and changing his shirt. It was one of Bill's leading principles to face a new situation with a clean chin and a clean shirt. If he hadn't learned much else of high value in business college, he had learned that.
Appearances Are Everything: that was his college motto. It was not done in Latin, old Roman lettering, over the door, but in the large, flourishing, long-tailed handwriting of the president of the institution as a copy for the business aspirants training under his régime. Appearances Are Everything. Bill Dunham had written it five thousand times.
Now he came down to the hotel office feeling pretty comfortable, like a fellow who has joined a lodge and taken the first degree. It wasn't as bad as he thought it was going to be; Pawnee Bend was not such a forbidding place as he had judged it from the station platform. Here they had the same homely human aspirations as elsewhere in Kansas, the hearty ambition to get ahead for themselves and hoe their own row. It might be said of Pawnee Bend that it was just starting out on its own account, like himself.
This thought drew him closer to the brotherhood he had joined when he put his name on the petition. It made him feel so fine he came swinging down the stairs whistling a business-college tune.
Three men were lined up at the desk in close conference with MacKinnon, so engrossed in their business, which appeared to be some sort of accounting from the way they jumped their pencils along the paper as if adding figures, that they did not notice the town's newest citizen until he was about to pass them on his way to the door.
"Hey, Dunham!" MacKinnon hailed him.
The other three threw up their heads like startled horses at the sound of Dunham's name. Bill turned back at MacKinnon's excited signal, wondering if he was to be taken up for affixing his name to the petition under false pretense.
"This is the man, gentlemen!" MacKinnon said, speaking as if he had come to his climax. He seemed to offer Bill as an exhibit, with a wave of the hand.
Bill was assured at once, for there was satisfaction, even triumph and pride, in MacKinnon's way of presenting him. He felt that he had made a hit, in some way to be revealed, perhaps through his ability to write what the president of the school board back home used to call an ineligible hand.
One of the three men before the desk stepped forward briskly, hand out like a candidate for office. He was a shrewd appearing little man, his dry narrow face full of humorous wrinkles as he came smiling to meet Bill. He wore a large, cream-colored, cattleman's hat, the crown of it jauntily creased, tilted cockily to one side, which gave him an adventurous, trouble-hunting appearance quite out of keeping with his mildness and his size.
"Simmons—Major Philo Simmons, president of the Capitol Bank of Pawnee Bend," he announced himself, disarming of questionable intent as any high-pressure go-fetcher of the present commercial age. "I greet you, Mr. Dunham, as the six-hundredth citizen of this county. Gentlemen, allow me to present the six-hundredth citizen."
Bill was beginning to get a bit suspicious of some sort of a come-on. He didn't get that talk about the six-hundredth citizen. It was beyond him to understand, as it might have been to a shrewder man in his place, why the six-hundredth citizen was of any more importance than the first, but he gave himself over to the trust of Major Simmons, whose position in the community should have been sufficient to quiet all suspicion, even if it did not do so entirely.
"Mr. Henry Bergen, Mr. Marsh Puckett, of Bergen and Puckett," Major Simmons presented his companions in turn. "Mr. Bergen is our county treasurer, Mr. Puckett our recorder and clerk, or at least they will be under our new county government."
Bill shook hands with them and said he was glad to meet them, although he was not, for he didn't like the look of either Bergen or Puckett, reserving the thought to himself that he would think it over a good while before he would trust his money to the treasureship of the first or the accounting of the second.
"We owe the existence of Pawnee Bend to Bergen and Puckett," Major Simmons explained. "They are the original owners and platters of the townsite; their vision put this beautiful little city of ours on the map."
Bergen was a large bony man with a beard. He was arrayed in judicial-looking garments, his long black coat striking to his knees, the one sporty splash in his dignified appearance being his vest, which seemed to proclaim the rest of his somber garb a pretense and fraud. This vest was of red plush with white dots, a garment fit for a beau of the range. He was a voluble, ingratiating man, past fifty, one would judge, his black-gray beard, nicely trimmed to the contour of his jaw, giving a stern aspect to his face, which was extraordinarily broad between the high, round cheekbones.
Puckett was more self-contained than his partner. He had a fleshy figure, a smooth, impassible face, a foreshortened lump of nose, a little fold of double chin. His round-cornered shoulders, which never had hardened under any burden, were slightly stooped, as if he had spent much time slouching over gambling tables. He was a type of that atmosphere; one could visualize him cutting and shuffling a little stack of chips in the gambler's one-handed trick, his faculties concentrated on the turn of the card, the fall of the marble in the wheel.
One sees the traits of men as flashes of interiors are seen through revolving doors. It would have taken Bill Dunham an hour to put his impressions of Bergen and Puckett down with a pen, but his shrewd eye sized them up for an opinion in two seconds. That opinion was one that impelled Bill's hand to his hip pocket to feel for his wallet.
"Gentlemen," Bergen proposed after the formalities of introduction, "what do you say to a little drink?"
MacKinnon came from behind the counter with alacrity, his ready disposition apparently an expression of the inclination of all to the proposal. Major Simmons and Puckett led the way, Bill following between MacKinnon and Bergen, who kept his hand on the six-hundredth citizen's shoulder as if he meant to take no chance on his getting away and leaving the big thing—what it was Bill had no more notion than a rabbit—flat and a fizzle on their hands.
"You can mark this day with red ink in your book of life, Mr. Dunham," Bergen said, stepping high as they bore along the plank sidewalk toward the sign The Casino that projected toward the street from the front of a large, loose-jointed, barn-looking building a little way ahead.
"I don't git you," Bill confessed. "What in the dickens are you makin' all this fuss about?"
"My dear sir," with a slap, slap, on Bill's back, "you are our six-hundredth citizen!"
"I heard you say so before, but you can search me," Bill said.
"Under the state law, Mr. Dunham, a county is required to have six hundred legal residents before it can be organized. You were the last signer on our petition, and yours was the six-hundredth name. You see the honor of your position and fully understand your importance in our community."
"I git you now," said Bill.
"Here we are"—Bergen swept his arm around the wide horizon—"the only city or settlement in a territory of twenty-four hundred square miles! Consider the possibilities of our situation, sir; think of what this city will be as the county seat of this fertile domain, no competition within our boundaries. We are, Mr. Dunham, what might be called the fathers of our county. Every man whose name appears on that petition is, in a sense, a father of his county. You are not insensible of the honor, I know."
"I should hope not!" Bill replied, touched up a little by a genuine warmth of pride.
It was something to be the daddy of four square miles of territory, which would be his proportionate share of parental responsibility, figuring that there were six hundred legal residents in the county, which he doubted mightily.
They headed in at the Casino, Mel Poteet, proprietor, as the window sign further announced, lining up in good order at the bar. There were several customers in the place, although it was the slack hour of the day. But there had been a railroad payday a little while before, the proceeds of which were not yet quite spent; and there was a big herd of cattle from the Nation being loaded at the pens, several more waiting their turn out on the range close by with only men enough in attendance to keep them in hand, the rest being free to taste the delights of town.
Several of these cow guardians were in Poteet's place, and half a dozen or so railroaders, putting dimes in the Swiss music-box, and quarters in the device that sometimes gave up quarters in exchange, running them down to a little pan through a troubled row of brass pegs. Uniformly they were putting strong liquor inside themselves, all quite orderly, and grouped according to their calling, there being no common ground between railroaders and men of the range.
Major Simmons tilted his hat a little more toward his left ear as the bartender came down the long bar to the end they occupied.
"Charley," he said, "I want you to meet our six-hundredth citizen. Mr. Dunham, shake hands with Mr. Mallon. This is a great day for Pawnee Bend!"
"Pleased to know you," Charley Mallon recited perfunctorily, his eye up and down the bar to see that nobody sneaked a drink. "What's yours, Mr. Dunham?"
"Lemon pop," said Bill.
Charley Mallon was about as cheerful-looking as a totem pole, and almost as tall. He was so thin his flesh was blue, so morose and downcast of countenance that he might have been assigned to barkeeping as a penance for his sins in some happier and more honorable station. Not that he had been, for he was a bartender by choice, a drinking bartender of the old frontier school. The look he gave Bill when he placed that innocuous order would have curdled sour wine in a jug.
"I guess you're in the wrong joint, pardner," he said, turning away in injured dignity.
Bill's hearty companions looked hard at their glasses, fixing them with such intent eyes, indeed, as if they watched for some transformation in their contents which must be seized at the right moment or its good effects lost.
There was a sort of startled look among the cowboys ranged at the bar a little distance along. They turned to each other with incredulous faces, drinks poised, as if they had heard something they must verify by appealing one to the other. But there was a good deal of acting in it; under the play of astonishment there was a repressed uprising of hilarity that waited only a word to touch it off. Bill Dunham, in the simplicity of his green soul, supplied it.
"Make it sassaferiller," he said.