Short Grass/Chapter 23
Zora Moore heard the shooting as she rode into Pawnee Bend, but there was so much of it she did not connect it with a fight. The racket coming from the direction of the railroad station was in itself assuring. She attributed it to a gang of cowboys celebrating the loading of a cattle train, or giving one of their comrades who was about to embark on new adventures a send-off. Perhaps somebody had married.
She rode to MacKinnon's hitching-rack undisturbed by the occurrence, quiet having fallen over the town again. There was some excitement around the depot, and a general movement of the town's inhabitants in that direction, but nothing unusual for a charivari such as the boys were likely to pull off wherever they might overtake a newly wedded pair.
MacKinnon was not in the office; there appeared to be nobody at all around the place. Zora stopped a boy who was pelting breathlessly toward the depot and inquired what the excitement was about.
"They've got Bill Dunham!" he panted, eager to give the news. "He's been standin' off the whole town!"
"Bill Dunham!" she repeated blankly, staring at the boy, a feeling in her as if the whole world had dropped away from around her feet, leaving her alone on a crumbling fragment.
"He killed two more men—they've got him!" the boy said, thrilling with pride in being able to give the important news. Then he tore along to get a look at the fallen hero.
Zora ran after him, her heart heavy with the bitterness of regret that she had not come sooner. She had heard the first burst of shooting, which she knew now must have been Dunham's last desperate effort to break through, when about a quarter of a mile away. If she had been five minutes sooner she might have saved his life. By that little margin everything that was precious to her had gone down in the general ruin of the world.
It looked like the whole town had arrived at the depot ahead of her. All interest pressed to a common point, where she knew Bill Dunham had fallen, against what odds, in what heroic defense, she could only surmise. She crowded among them—men and boys they were mainly, a woman here and there—with little exclamations of appeal, so stricken of face, so white and piteous, that they yielded her the precedence which seemed to be her right.
The station agent's wife, Mrs. Hoy, was holding up Dunham's head, trying to give him water out of a tin cup. He seemed limp and lifeless. There was blood on his lips; his shirt was soaked with blood. His head moved on the compassionate woman's arm, but his eyes were Closed, and the pallor of death was on his face.
"I got him, damn him!" a man was boasting as Zora broke through the press and came to the edge of the platform. "I throwed it into him just as he was steppin' on the platform, his damn gun in his hand."
Zora looked at the boaster, a surge of hate rising so hot in her it was like a misty veil before her eyes. She did not know anything about the merits of Bill Dunham's case, nor even give it a thought; only that he was dead or dying, and this braggart stood there on the edge of the track, not five feet from Dunham's head, blowing that he had brought him down. She jerked her gun with a choking exclamation and slung it in his face.
Somebody struck her arm as she fired, the shot going safely over the fellow's head. They grappled with her, the man who had escaped his dues by a hand's breadth backing off, whiter around the gills than Bill Dunham, even in his extremity, was.
"Take that gun away from that hellion!" he said, clawing and backing to open a lane of retreat through the crowd.
Somebody had hold of her wrist; she couldn't lift the gun for another shot at him, hard as she struggled to break loose. They held her tight and took her gun away.
"You ought to know better than to go shootin' around in a crowd that way, lady," the man who held her arm said. He was a whiskered, fatherly man; he looked at her with a sort of injured reproach.
"Give me that gun!" she stormed, struggling, striking, kicking, even trying to bite the hard raspy hand that held her as fast as if her arm was set in a stone wall.
"Ca'm yourself, sister," the whiskered man soothed her. He passed her gun to somebody behind him, and it disappeared.
Zora tore loose in a white fury, only to be hemmed in by the men who pressed around her and pushed her back from the edge of the platform.
"This ain't no place for women," somebody said.
The harsher their restraint the more furious her passion rose. She cleared a way and struggled to the edge again, vengeance now out of mind as it was out of the possibility. She only thought of Dunham, stretched bloody and limp as if the last ember of life had turned to ash.
"Is he dead?" she asked, kneeling to help Mrs. Hoy in her merciful ministrations.
"He's breathing faintly," Mrs. Hoy replied. "Here—take the cup—see if you can get some water in his mouth. He was hours and hours over there without a drop, standing them all off, the cowards!"
Zora moistened his lips with her fingers, washing away the blood that welled on his breath from his congested lung, Mrs. Hoy supporting his head on her arm. The crowd pushed around, hemming them in a blazing pit of noonday sun.
"If he ain't dead he damn soon will be!" somebody said.
At the touch of water on his tongue Dunham gulped and swallowed. Palpitating in a fearful suspense, Zora pressed the cup to his lips and tilted a little stream into his mouth. Patiently, scarcely breathing, the two women worked and watched, the shuffling feet around them crowding closer, until there was only a slit in the throng the length of Dunham's body.
Blood was running along the railroad tie beneath Dunham's wounded leg, creeping sluggishly between the liveryman's feet. This fellow stood craning his long neck to watch the result of the women's compassionate labor. When Dunham began to gulp the water presently, his chest heaving between swallows, the liveryman turned to somebody behind him with an exclamation of satisfaction. There was a renewed stirring in the crowd, a surging forward to see.
Dunham opened his eyes when the cup was drained, and struggled to lift himself, shaking his head weakly to clear the obscuration of defeated death out of his vision. He felt as if he reposed on something luxuriously soft and lulling. There was a sensation of floating, an undulating, easy, restful motion of being carried along on water. He was so far over the border he had no recollection of the events which had brought him to that dusty bed where his blood was wasting away between the rails.
Zora spoke to him, bending over him, her hand on his forehead, her pleading eyes looking into his, where the image of friend and foe stood inseparable and alike. He felt that blissful sweep of water, that soft undulating motion of water, as a swimmer feels the lift of gentle surges when he lies on his back in lazy relaxation. He tried to smile, a glimmer in the dusty drawn lines of his grimy face.
"You run for the doctor, honey," Mrs. Hoy said. "I'll do what I can till he comes."
"We're the doctors in this man's case," the liveryman announced. "You done fine, sisters, you done fine!" He spread his arms to clear the crowd back, and stooped to look into Dunham's hazy eyes. "You done fine!" he repeated. "We'll take charge of this funeral now."
Zora started up with horrible apprehension. She looked around for help where there was no help, and back again in mute appeal to the agent's wife, who still knelt beside Dunham, her arm under his head.
"You'll have to step out of this now, ladies," the liveryman said.
"You'll not lay a hand on him!" Zora defied him. She looked at Dunham's belt, thinking of his gun, but it was not there. "You'll not lay a hand on him!" she stormed again, but knowing in her hopeless heart that she was powerless to stop them.
The liveryman jerked his head in signal to somebody behind Zora. They laid hold of her roughly and pulled her away, her struggles and tearful pleading unheeded.
Mrs. Hoy put Dunham's head down gently, and stood beside him, alarmed by this sudden turn against a man whom she believed to be beyond the vengeance of his most craven enemy.
"Why," she said, looking around in dismay, "why—why, gentlemen, you surely wouldn't lay hands on a dying man?"
"We'll be careful of him, ma'am," the liveryman said. "You just run along and tend to your biscuits before they burn."
They pushed her away, gently enough for men with such a base design before them, for she had won their respect, if not much sympathy, by her intervention in Dunham's behalf when they were shooting at him from the door.
They picked Dunham up roughly and slung him like a sack to the platform. With the sudden change in position, the rough breaking of his blissful half-conscious dream of floating at ease without a care, the pain stabbed him in the chest with such excruciating dart his awakening senses fled. He fell insensible to the boards, his head striking cruelly. This lapse of sense concerned the liveryman. There was no fun in hanging an unconscious man. They'd might as well hang a sack of bran.
He told his fellow-lynchers as much, with ironical stress and obscene profanity. He sent somebody after a bucket of water. When it came he stood sloshing dipperfuls of it over Dunham's face and chest, watching closely for symptoms of revival.
While this was going on Zora was fighting like a wildcat to break away from her rough captors, who hustled her along the platform to the corner of the telegraph office and headed her toward the street. Get to hell out of there, little hellion that she was! they said. Few of them knew who she was, fewer cared a curse. All women looked alike to them.
John Moore had left camp forty miles from Pawnee Bend that morning to send some telegrams to his agents in Kansas City. On his way he had fallen in with Hughes, the Texas cattleman, whose herd was then two days' drive from the loading pens. They had ridden along in good fellowship, the difficulties of their situation having been amicably adjusted.
As they approached town Moore noted the unusual activity around the depot, remarking on it to Hughes. They quickened their pace out of curiosity to find what it was about.
"Looks like a riot," said Hughes.
"Um-m-m," said Moore, tight-lipped and straightbacked, lifting himself in his stirrups to see.
"They's draggin' a woman along there," said Hughes, spurring his horse to a gallop.
"By God! that's my girl!" said Moore, and they rode abreast at a thundering pace up the white stretch of road, hands on their weapons, leaning in their saddles, their faces set for a fight.
They whirled at MacKinnon's hotel and dashed to the depot, galloping up the sloping platform and into the crowd, the ruffians who were manhandling Zora scuttling for their lives. Moore flung out of the saddle beside her, gun in hand, and gathered her into the protection of his arm.
"What're you up to here, you skimmin's of hell!" he bellowed, gun raised to spot the hide of the first man to make a break.
Zora clung to him, panting, dishevelled from her fight, her face scratched, hair tumbling over her shoulders, her hat gone, the throat of her shirt torn open. She pointed down the platform where a knot of men stood around Dunham, undecided on whether to stand or scatter. She was so agitated and breathless she couldn't find her words.
"What's the matter, honey? What have they been doin' to my girl?" Moore inquired, glaring around for somebody to plug with his big gun, which he held high and ready, a weapon of such deadly menace that the crowd thinned away like snowflakes on a hot stove.
"Bill Dunham!" she panted, pointing wildly. "They shot him—they're goin' to hang him! Don't let them! don't let them!"
"Bill Dunham?" said Hughes, bending down to hear her repeat the name, as if the sound of it astonished him beyond belief.
"Down there—the liveryman and that gang!"
Hughes started his horse with a bound, and bore down on the lynchers like the California Limited. He had his gun out, held shoulder-high, ready for as deadly business as any of that crowd ever had faced.
The liveryman was holding the bucket and dipper, Dunham's drenched form on the planks before him, half a dozen others, who did not sense the meaning of this quick turn in time to clear out, or stood with a thought of making a fight to carry their infernal program to its end, stood around him with their various weapons. The rest of the crowd had scattered.
Hughes pulled up so close to the lanky liveryman he could have knocked him stiff with his gun. Moore left his horse standing and came running, Zora a good stride in the lead.
"You've made a mistake in your date, gentlemen," Hughes said. "This ain't Bill Dunham's day to hang."