Short Grass/Chapter 6
MacKinnon was in the door when Dunham reached the hotel, as strained and nervous as if he, and not his guest, stood under conditional sentence of death.
"Oh, here you come!" he said, greatly relieved, bustling inside with the evident intention of speeding his guest's departure. "I was wonderin' when you'd be along—you ain't got any too much time."
Dunham lounged up to the showcase, looking over the brands of cigars as if he considered a purchase. The symptoms of business were not observed by MacKinnon in his anxiety or, if noted, passed unimproved. He was waiting at the foot of the stairs, his attitude betraying his eagerness to be rid of this man, who was not in half the sweat to be on his way that the host was to have him go.
"I thought when I saw you go out with that gun on you it'd get you into trouble," MacKinnon said, feelingly deprecative of the affair.
"I had as much right to pack a gun as anybody else, didn't I?" Dunham asked, turning slowly from his study of the cigars.
"Sure; sure you did, Bill. I'm not sayin'—"
"Because I look green it don't give anybody else the right to take it away from me, dees it?"
"You was right, Bill; you acted in the law and the rights of a man. But your luck was bad when you got Kellogg jealous of you. He won't stand for anybody in this town, or any other town where he's marshal, that's got a reputation for quick action equal to his own."
"Bad luck's my old side-pardner," Bill said, sadly reminiscent, looking at the floor as if he saw the pattern of his life drawn there, with precious little in it to give him hope.
"It's too damn bad it happened, Bill!" MacKinnon said, impulsively generous. "I hoped you'd stay here and be one of us. It's too damn bad you've got to leave this way!"
"Which way?" Bill inquired, looking up in what appeared almost startled surprise.
"Under orders."
MacKinnon shook his head sadly, but he stood with a foot on the stairs, expecting the word that would send him tearing up after the guest's belongings. When the word was not forthcoming at once, he leaped off without it, leaving his comment on the manner of going unanswered.
MacKinnon was back in three jumps. He put the suitcase down at Dunham's toes, his face as red as if he had rushed into fire to bring it down.
"I've got that confidence in you I'll lend you a horse, if you want it," MacKinnon offered. "Or I'll sell you one, dirt cheap," he amended, not too eager to have his generosity placed under any great or sudden strain.
"What did you bring that down for?" Dunham inquired, giving MacKinnon a cold look. "Ain't my money good?"
"Better than any man's that's crossed my door in many a day. It was to save you a step and help you on your way, lad. You've only got thirty-five minutes left."
"If you'll let me leave it here till the nine-thirty train comes in I'll relieve you of my unwelcome presence," Dunham proposed, very high and cold about it. "I want to see a man that's comin' on that train."
"But—but—I understood, Bill—they were tellin' me, Bill—your hour will be up at nine."
"Nobody but the man that pays me for my time sets my hours for comin' and goin'," Dunham said. "I'm not hired out to anybody in this town. I'll go and come when it suits me."
MacKinnon's hearty countenance slowly lost its ruddy tint as he stood looking at Dunham in stunned amazement.
"You mean you're not goin' when that hour's up?"
"I don't know of anybody that's authorized to set my clock."
"He'll kill you!" MacKinnon whispered. He looked around fearfully, as if he expected to suffer for connivance in this man's defiance. "You've got no more chance than my old woman would have against that man with a gun in her hand. It'll be murder—you'll be throwin' your life away!"
"There's a girl named Zora up at the hardware store," Dunham said, calmly irrelevant, it seemed to MacKinnon. "Do you know the rest of her name?"
"She's John Moore's girl," MacKinnon replied, impatient with the interposition of such a trivial thing as a girl in a serious business like this.
"She said her father might give me a job. I'm goin' to strike him for one when the train pulls in. After I see him I'll take my carcass to some other hotel, if my room's worth more than my money to you."
"If you're alive after the nine-twenty goes you can have my house and lot!"
"The same room I had will be enough," Dunham replied.
"It's lookin' like rain," MacKinnon said, sniffing at the door as if he smelled it, uneasy over his presence there, Dunham knew. "It'll be a bad night for shootin', at the best. By nine o'clock you'll not be able to see a man twenty feet away unless you catch him passin' a light. You wasn't intendin' to wait here for him to come, Bill?"
"No, I'll not wait here," Dunham assured him.
He had lapsed again into that cloud of gloomy introspection that had caused the hardware—mayor to set him down for a dunce. He did not lift his eyes when he answered MacKinnon, standing with back to the showcase, thumbs hooked in his belt, head drooping, thinking not so much of the man whom he was to meet in battle for his life as the one they had picked up lately out of the street and carried away on a board.
He regretted the deed poignantly, but he was not sorry for the man. He might have compromised with his self-respect, grinned weakly and stood their devilment like a coward, or snarled and twisted impotently like the under dog he used to be when he hadn't it in his power to snap. The same situation confronted him with Kellogg, only that it was far more important, so important, indeed, that his entire future hinged on his actions in the next few minutes.
He might walk away into the dark and save his life, leaving his honor behind; walk away and admit that he was a natural-born under dog, and go on living the life of an under dog for evermore. It wasn't to be done that way. He had come to that country to lift up his face and be a man. If people would persist in picking him for the goat, they must learn to their own grief that they were trifling with a red-eyed bull.
Dark as the night might deepen, precarious as his chance against that confident, sneering, blood-hungry man might be, the biggest business of his life lay in staying there to meet him and prove himself a man who was not to be shoved with impunity out of anybody's way. Even if he must die in proving it, no doubt must be left standing to cloud his title.
"No, I'll not wait here," he said again, drawing a deep breath and letting it out with a sigh, as a man does when he has settled some question that he has balanced on in doubt and fear.
MacKinnon put the suitcase behind the counter with a sort of bustling air of finality, as if to say there the matter of Dunham's entertainment in that house was terminated for the present, and wouldn't he be going on about his dangerous affair and lift the peril from that door? Dunham looked at his watch. He still had twenty minutes.
"If anybody comes here lookin' for me"—turning to MacKinnon, watch in his hand—"I'll be out there in the middle of the road between here and the depot."
"I'll tell him," MacKinnon promised, throwing that suspicious, scared look around again. Then cautiously: "When you see him step out of here and start over that way, plug him while you've got him in the light!"
"I'll meet him on the square, man to man," Dunham replied, fixing MacKinnon with a reproving stern look. "Tell him that when he comes."
It was not as dark out in the road as MacKinnon had thought it would be. The moon was in the waxing half, paring the clouds like a scimiter as they slid before it, showing in bright transitory gleams as it seemed to gain little victories over the racing hosts of fleecy vapors; now smothered completely and obscured, now dim and befogged. It was an uncertain light at the brightest for seeing a man's movements with a gun, and shaping one's own actions by them to keep within self-justification and, as Dunham thought, the law.
Dunham stationed himself in the middle of the town's business street, at the point where the road which came in from places unknown to him joined it and merged dust with dust like the sandy rivers of that land in summer-time. The railroad was a little way behind him, and across that, the station, its long plank platform, step-high to passenger coaches, lying dark before it.
He could see the night operator sitting in the bay window before his chattering instruments, a shade over his eyes. The semaphore signal was white, showing a clear line. Dunham wondered if the nine-twenty was going to be late.
From his post of waiting Dunham had the same view of the street that he had studied from the platform on his arrival. That seemed long ago, as the case always is when one measures by events instead of time, and the street appeared little more assuring than by day, although noise and activity revealed now much of what had been mysteriously silent then. People cut across the blocks of light lying before store windows, in some spots only their legs revealed, in others shoulders and heads, depending on the depth of the window and the position of the lamp.
There was the sound of horses coming and going. Now and then a troop or pair of riders, seldom one alone, swept past Dunham on the turn from the dusty highroad into the dusty street. There was no shrilling of children in the night; not a slip of childish figure flitted from beam to beam along the clattering sidewalks.
From Poteet's Casino the whine of a fiddle sounded, the running jounce of a hard-mauled piano in tight pursuit of its melody, and the rude rhythm of dancing feet. Dunham recalled the bartender's information, given with pride, that Poteet's was the only place in town where ladies were in attendance at night, ready to move a foot with any gentleman who desired to shake a shirt-tail in a dance. Charley Mallon had expressed it in those words, pressing Dunham cordially to come in when it got lively and welt the planks.
Few people came up as far as MacKinnon's hotel, as it was on the outer boundary of activities, the first house one came to on arriving, the last one he sought when his load got too heavy to carry around. It would be hours before unsteady feet began to thread the wavering planks toward MacKinnon's door. But one man would come there presently, Dunham knew, sauntering insolently, to learn if his order had been obeyed.
Dunham was not greatly disturbed over the issue of the adventure before him; he did not march up and down in feverish anticipation, nor fret himself with unpleasant conjectures. He was engaged chiefly with thought of the impositions they had attempted to put on him in that town, bitterly resentful of the persistent, mocking misunderstanding that seemed to follow him. It was as if the shadow of his past days of poverty and oppression had taken wing like a swift bird and arrived at Pawnee Bend with him.
He was too wise, he knew too much about a gun and the chances of unexpected variation, to lay any plans for action ahead of the moment Ford Kellogg should confront him. By a moongleam he read his watch. Seven minutes to nine; and the girl called Zora was coming out of MacKinnon's door.
Strange that he hadn't seen her go in. She must have come while he was on his way to that spot, and now she was heading in that direction, going to the depot to wait for her father's train. He walked to the other side of the broad street, to avoid startling her in case the moon flared suddenly and revealed him in his grim appointment.
Across there was the livery stable, where the forty-five-dollar horse and saddle waited a buyer. Dunham stood looking at the dim light in the dusty webbed windows of the office, thinking it might pay him to look that horse over in the morning. The moon jumped a crevasse between two snowbanks of cloud, lighting up the white road with sudden gleam.
Dunham turned at the soft sound of footsteps in the dust. The girl called Zora was cutting hurriedly across the road: in the intermittent beam and dark of the sidewalk, Ford Kellogg was sauntering toward MacKinnon's door.