Short Grass/Chapter 4
The way of Bill Dunham's facility with a gun was this: When he had begun to get romance in the grooves of his commonplace life through reading of the doings in Dodge City and other towns of its notorious class, he had bought a twenty-two caliber pistol, intent on being ready for the company he would be called on to keep when the day came for him to face toward the short-grass country. While the current of time and circumstance was not to carry him to Dodge, or into the short-grass country until the lights of Dodge were dim and low, indeed, it had drifted him to a place where a handy man with a gun was just as highly esteemed.
Bill came of a pioneer stock. His forefathers had come foraging from Connecticut into Pennsylvania; from there down the Ohio as generations increased them; on to break the dark forests of Indiana and fight battles with the Indians there, and on again when things became too cramped, always keeping to the edge as long as there was an edge. In Bill's father the pioneering spirit had flickered down to a very weak urge, indeed, but he was the best squirrel hunter the Kaw valley ever had known.
So Bill had the eye and the hand for work with a gun of any kind whatever. He began his practice with the little twenty-two by making a target of a cornstalk stripped down to the white, brittle core. That is a narrow streak when it comes to shooting at it with a pistol, great or small. Bill's way of doing it was to start rather close, backing off as he fired, cutting the crisp pulp as true as it could have been done with a knife.
Over and over he practiced this marksmanship in the frosty fields, backing off and shooting, running forward and shooting, hopping and wheeling and shooting, lying down and springing up as from sleep and shooting, becoming so apt at the business in time that the ordinary tricks of the gunman offered him no difficulty at all.
Birds on the wing, rabbits on the run, Bill pegged with the easy confidence of his inherited deftness which incessant practice had perfected into an art. After a due time Bill bought another gun, a whopping big one, as it had looked to him at that time, a very moderately sized one as compared to that he had wrenched from the foolish cowboy in Poteet's saloon. The new one was a thirty-eight, a handsome blued-steel weapon with long barrel, self-everything but self-loading. Bill always felt he'd have time to attend to that as needed, anyhow.
It was this gun Bill had brought with him to Pawnee Bend. It was safe in his suitcase at the hotel when he encountered the cowboy who had made the mistake that better and worse men before his day had made—of judging a man by his drinks. Bill never had carried a gun around with him; he never had figured on doing so until it should become necessary to the business of his life. It appeared to him now that this time had come; that he'd better get himself a set of harness and strap the thirty-eight around his tank.
Still, he felt that he might be crowding matters a little when he came down to supper with the gun on, the new leather of his belt and holster stiff and creaking. He hid the gun as well as he could by keeping his coat buttoned, but the coat was short and the gun was long. It would assert its presence by a bulge, and a protrusion below the skirt of his coat.
He didn't want anybody to think he was out to pick a fuss, but he believed the time had come to wear a gun. That cowboy might come back looking for him, with a bunch of friends. The wise thing was to have a gun handy, even if he didn't use it. Appearances Are Everything.
With this thought standing out in his mind to excuse the unfamiliar weight of cartridge belt and gun, Dunham went out to look the town over after dark. It was a question to him where the business to maintain the place came from, situated as it was in the midst of a land believed to be far beyond the limit of agricultural possibility. Dunham had seen a few weak attempts at farming in the river valley as he approached Pawnee Bend, wide-scattered poor homesteads, looking more like temporary camps than homes.
In fact there was not much to give business stability in Pawnee Bend at that time. The custom that came to its doors was of the sort, mainly, that gets its money today, spends it tonight, and tomorrow goes off in considerable dejection to gather up another wad. There were flush times and slack times in Pawnee Bend, as in towns where the current of business ran a bit more honestly on the whole than it rippled there.
The railroaders did not count for a great deal among the parasites who spread their snares in that town, for the italians were not spenders, and the old-time tarriers turned everything loose in one grand burn-up right after payday, leaving nothing to dribble along until the next. It was from the men spread wide over the range in charge of its countless cattle, and those who rode in daily with herds to load, that the profit came.
If they couldn't get a man's money one way in Pawnee Bend they got it another. Knockout drops were no rural fiction in that town, and a knockout without drops by some limber-wristed bartender was one established method of hastening the parting of a fool and his money.
Pawnee Bend was an incorporated town of the most inconsequential class provided for under the laws of that state. It had its mayor and town council, and a marshal to represent the law. This marshal was a notable man, whose name was known from the Arkansas to the Pecos.
Ford Kellogg had progressed westward from Abilene, where he made his start, marking his way with slain men. He was a professional city marshal, a calling which, in the days of these frontier Kansas towns, was widely different from the somnolent occupation it came to be long afterwards, when the butt of a billiard cue would do instead of two guns. Kellogg killed with justification, mainly, shadowy justification at times, but he invariably killed. There were no cripples along his sanguinary road.
Kellogg was a man of no great stature, a compact, muscular man, who appeared rather compact and bunchy around the shoulders, probably from his habit of wearing a coat in all weather, let it blow as hot as Tophet in the summer days. He dressed invariably in dark blue, police-looking cloth, which he had tailored to him nicely, making by far the trimmest appearance to be encountered in town. He was a dark man, with a hint of Mexican about him, his small mustache a reddish brown, his eyes light and mottled in that peculiar breaking up of color common to people who stand on the line between a white race and a dark.
Marshal Kellogg usually woke to activity with the town after dark, his days being dedicated to sleep in the back room of the calaboose, which seldom contained a prisoner. Kellogg had the old-time officer's prejudice against prisoners; they were such troublesome people to have around. A coroner's inquest was soon over and out of the way, but a prisoner had to be fed and watered like a horse.
Kellogg was strolling past the Family Hotel, prying beeksteak out of his teeth with a goose-quill in the most genteel fashion, when Dunham started out to take his first look at Pawnee Bend by what the pioneers used to call arly candlelight. He gave Dunham a curious look, seeing him with his coat all buttoned around a gun that way, and passed on. He looked back every few steps as he sauntered in the luxurious gait of a man full of beefsteak, as if not quite decided whether he ought to allow such an unusual-looking chap to roam around unquestioned.
Bill went on about his business, which was the business of seeing all that was to be seen without spending any money, marveling at the number of people, mainly men, abroad on the street. These men had an indoors softness about them, like worms out of nuts. Bill knew them well enough for what they were, having seen many like them along gamblers' row on West Ninth Street, Kansas City, where the gambling houses were palaces, indeed, compared to the open-jointed shacks of Pawnee Bend.
Many range men had come in and hitched their horses along the racks which lined the street, many were arriving momentarily, their increasing numbers promising a lively night. A crowd of these cow hands, heading for the Casino, which Marshal Kellogg had entered for his after-supper nip, encountered Bill Dunham.
These young men had taken a few jiggers of booze and were feeling quick and devilish, as their kind generally felt at the beginning of proceedings in that town. Next day was reserved for gloom, and the evil of each each day was plenty sufficient in itself, according to their philosophy.
One of them pretended to shy at the sight of Bill's gun, dodging behind his comrades in comical simulation of alarm. They all stopped, closing in around Bill with peering curiosity, taking him for something a little bit greener, maybe, than he was.
"Well, look at this granger with a gun hangin' on him!" said one. "Where do you think"—kindly patronizing—"you're goin' to, son?"
"Just amblin' around," Bill replied.
"Where's your ma?" the humorist of the bunch inquired, keeping up his pretense of benevolent interest.
Nobody laughed, every buck of them holding a face as sober and kindly concerned as he could pull, just as if they had found some little four-year-old wandering around on the prairie miles from anywhere. Bill's appearance, in comparison with their own, was fair warrant for their comical pretense, and without doubt as ridiculous as any get-up they were able to conceive.
Dunham's blue serge suit was neat, well-made and well-fitted; his round black hat of a pattern not unknown to Pawnee Bend, or even in legislative halls, a sort of senatorial, narrow-brimmed soft felt with a narrow tape around the crown where a ribbon usually is worn. But there was something unmistakably pertaining to business with the soil about him which appeared to make the gun under his coat a rare piece of burlesque.
Bill had seen hundreds—it might be said thousands, and still be well within the facts—of cow valets such as these pass the nursery on top of cattle trains in the many years he had labored beside the railroad there. Their wide-brimmed hats with high crowns, blue woolen, gray woolen, gay plaid woolen and dirty drab woolen shirts were as familiar to his eyes as print. He knew their accouterments from spur to wrist-strap; he could have outfitted himself to fit the new scene with perfect harmony, and might have done so if he had been a little more foolish than he looked. Other young men from the farm country had made that mistake when they invaded the range. They never deceived anybody, and sometimes experienced a good deal of grief for their pretense.
Bill stood among them, half a dozen or more in the crowd, uncomfortable and somewhat uneasy, trying to grin and pass it off for the joke the best natured among them intended it to be. But there always is a more or less well developed bully among half a dozen boys who gang together, and these prairie rangers were not much above the average twelve-year-old lad in mental development. There was a bully among them; he came to the front now, a tall, shanky fellow with calves so long his boots reached only half-way to his knees. He had been shaved and clipped but a few minutes before, the scraped portion of his face clean in contrast to the rest of his unwashed surface apparent to the eye, and he smelled violently of barbarous perfume. This fellow now asserted himself as director of the entertainment.
There were no street lights in Pawnee Bend in those days, the sidewalks being illuminated by the lights of store fronts, the general custom being to place a lamp with tin reflector in the window, on the principle, perhaps, that light attracted night-roaming creatures, rather than through any design of making passage through the streets more comfortable.
Everything kept open late at night in that town, with the possible exception of the lumber yard. Bill Dunham, and the committee of humorists who had blocked his tour of exploration, stood in front of the hardware store, where a special effort was made to light up the display of arms and ammunition in the window. Bill felt himself as prominent as a lightningbug under a glass.
The long-legged cowboy, who was somewhat mature for that designation, being nearer forty than twenty, by long odds, took a judicial stand before Dunham, hat pulled down to his eyebrows to make himself look meaner than nature had designed him, although it had done a job that should have satisfied any reasonable man.
"Have you got a license to pack a gun, little feller?" he inquired, leering at Bill sharply out of the shadow of his hat.
"You fellers go on where you're headin' for, and I'll do the same," Bill returned, well enough humored in tone and appearance, but a little vexed under the skin. He resented the disposition of everybody to pick on him the minute he showed his head outside the door in that town.
"No, you're not goin' on till you perduce your license," this rough joker declared. "I'm takin' up all guns that ain't licensted. Show me your paper, or hand over that little lady gun you've got under your coat."
"Oh, quit your coddin'," said Bill.
"He ain't got no license!" somebody declared in voice of shocked conviction.
"They hang 'em down at Dodge for packin' guns without papers, but I expect they'll let you off with a spankin' here in Pawnee Bend, you're so innercent and cute. Hand me over that gun!"
Lanky made the demand sternly, reaching out his hand to receive the gun. Bill didn't know what to do, or how far they would go with it, that being a situation entirely new to him. He knew it was a joke, but he wasn't able to figure a way to get out of it and keep in their good graces. As he had told MacKinnon, he hated a fuss.
Bill stood with downcast eyes, his upward limit of vision being the cowboy's extended arm and the lowswinging holster on his thigh. Bill's resentment was rising, not alone against these foolish men and their stupid joke, but against what seemed to be a foreordained conspiracy against him among all men.
Why was he always picked as the victim? What was there about him that gave people the deceptive belief that here comes a soft-shelled weakling whom we can have our fun with, expend our combative desires upon, rob and roll and mistreat generally, with perfect safety to ourselves? Why was it so? Why was he to be called on always to defend his person from indignities, when so many despicable people walked through life in serenity?
It seemed to Bill Dunham, standing there those few seconds reviewing the past humiliations and impositions of his life, in those moments of pause before his decision, that his prearranged program had him cast for a fighting man, when there was nothing in the world so precious to him as peace.
Many a good man has been turned into a bad one by this general misreading of outward signs, by taxing a truly generous soul with impositions, by mistaking for cowardice a man's respect for order and his love for peace. This cool, deep current, once lashed to fury by cumulative wrongs, sweeps everything aside in striking for the justice which the mean oppression of cowards has denied.
That pause was the turning point in Bill Dunham's life. There sternness replaced ingenuous simplicity, and righteous resentment rose in him like a flood. He swung a jolt to the pestering cowboy's jaw that piled him off the narrow sidewalk, down among the horses lined up at the hitching-rack.
There was a commotion among the horses, a rising of dust from their trampling. The lean cowboy came scrambling out of it, clawing for his gun. His friends scattered to give him room, leaving Bill Dunham in the bright light of the window lamp alone.
Dunham ripped the row of coat buttons open with one quick pass of the left hand, baring the butt of his gun to the right. He stood with his knees crooked a little, like a man waiting an explosion, or a brakeman on top of a car, making no defensive move until the cowboy had snaked his gun from the scabbard. The fellow was throwing it down on him when Dunham slung his gun and snapped a single shot.
The cowboy's bullet struck the store window, some little distance to Dunham's left, his intention unaltered but his aim ruined by the surprising celerity of the fellow he had taken for an innocent who had been permitted to live only to make laughter for the elect.