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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?"

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 "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 in-

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 quired, 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?"

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 "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 devil-

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 ment 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

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 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.

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 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 ex-

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 pressed 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

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 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.

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, here's where you are!" said Zora Moore, coming up to Dunham quickly the very moment the moon missed its landing and plunged ears-over into the cloud across the gap. "I was looking for you at MacKinnon's. Is that right about you wanting a job?"

"I intended to see Mr. Moore when he came in and strike him for a job," Dunham replied.

"You didn't say when Mr. Ruddy was talking to you whether you'd take a job, but if you're out for one, we can use you. My father told me to be on the lookout for a few good men, and pick them up if I ran across any. You're hired; your time begins right now. Here—hang this thing on you—I'm tired packin' it around."

Dunham admired her direct way of doing business, although he wasn't ready to take on the job that minute. He took the leather pouch, the strap of which she had put in his hand as she spoke, and stood hesitantly, his eyes on the hotel door.

"I've got an appointment with a man in a few minutes, if you'll excuse me from startin' right in, Miss Moore," he said. "I'll just lay this down here and fetch it along to you later. Where—"

"No," she cut him off decisively, "I don't want it

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 throwin' around. What did you say about an appointment with a man?"

"I'm due to meet a man in a few minutes," he replied, hoping she could be got rid of before Kellogg came out of that door.

"Well then, carry this thing over to the depot for me—it's got ammunition in it for my kid brothers, they shoot away an awful lot. I'll wait for the train, and you can come back and keep your engagement, if it's a very important one."

Dunham thought that would be a good way to clear the ground of her hampering presence. He calculated he'd have time to deposit her and the heavy sack in the depot and get back before the hour was up. He glanced back at the hotel as she led the way toward the depot, wondering if MacKinnon was trying to argue Kellogg out of it, resentful of any interference that might cast a doubt on his courage. Zora Moore, hurrying on ahead, stumbled with a scrambling noise on the loose shoulder of ballast at the ends of the railroad ties, and fell.

Dunham picked her up with deprecatory exclamation. She leaned on him heavily, with suppressed groans, bending as if she'd taken a serious bump.

"Are you hurt much?" Bill inquired anxiously.

She stood half doubled over, making that whistling sound expressive of acute suffering common to lads when they have outgrown the crying age.

"Gee! I think I busted something," she said.

"I'm sorry," said Bill, with no more consoling effect than that expression generally has on people with

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 bumps and bruises and broken bones. "I had a right to look out for that dang railroad!"

"Oh-h-h! Fee-u-u-u! I think my stifle's out!" she said.

Bill was supporting her with one hand, carrying the pouch in the other, hoping she hadn't broken anything, but more anxious to get her off his hands at once than alarmed over her demonstration. At the worst, he thought, she couldn't have done much more than skin her knee.

"Let me help you up to the platform," he proposed, thinking anxiously of Kellogg and the last speeding minutes of his hour, twisting his neck to watch the hotel door. "You sit down in the waitin'-room and you'll be all right in a minute."

"No, I don't want to go there, I don't want to go there," she said, panting as if the pain of her hurt was hard to bear. "Take me to the wagon—the wagon, the wagon—oh-h-h! the wagon!"

"Where's it at?" Bill inquired, feeling panicky and alarmed. She must be hurt, she must be hurt badly, to take on in that tragic way.

"Back of the hotel—right down this road," she groaned. "He-elp me to the wagon!"

She leaned on him and grabbed his coat as if about to collapse, and Bill, certain now that she was going to faint, was in a sweat of alarm. He slung the troublesome pouch over his shoulder and squared off for action.

"I'll carry you over to MacKinnon's and tell him to get a doctor," he said.

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 "No, I want to go to the wagon," she insisted. "I'll hold to you and hobble along. Shad Brassfield, our teamster, he's down there—he'll know what to do. Fe-e-e-u-u-u! my leg!

"Dang it for lettin' you slip on that ballast!" said Bill.

She appeared to start off pretty well for a cripple, but Dunham didn't notice that. He was watching MacKinnon's door, the light of it still unbroken by the marshal's exit. He noted as well the general desertion of that part of town, taking it as an indication of public indifference of the event set for nine o'clock. He did not know that it was the kind of a show the gun-wise people who lived in and frequented Pawnee Bend avoided. They were quite content to view results.

Dunham construed this lack of interest as a sort of public expression of contempt for him, perhaps magnifying his own importance in that town a little. It had gone around that Kellogg had given him an hour to get out of town, and people had taken it for granted that he had gone. Even Kellogg appeared to believe he had dusted it, or else MacKinnon, in friendly desire to avert the meeting, had not told him the truth.

So Dunham thought, heading off down the road past the side of MacKinnon's hotel with Zora Moore on his arm, a rather lightly tripping crippled person, too, he began to realize. He wanted to take a squint at his watch, but the moon remained persistently covered. It didn't matter; it wasn't over yet. He'd leave her at the wagon and throw a surprise into Kellogg by facing him at the hotel.

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 They were considerably past the hotel, with nothing apparent in the landscape but the string of bunk cars on one hand, a few small scattered houses on the other. There was no wagon to be seen.

Dunham stopped, looking around in suspicious perplexity, which was not a little intensified by the girl removing her hand, which had for some minutes lain lightly on his arm. He had a flashing thought of deceit and treachery and knockout drops, his wad as the objective.

"There's no wagon anywhere around here," he said, his tone severe and accusing.

"No, it isn't here," she agreed, entirely easy and over her whimpering. There was even a little note of mockery in her voice, Bill Dunham believed.

"I don't believe you're hurt a bit," he accused her; seeing her stand unsupported on her own proper legs as well as any sound young lady in Kansas.

"Not a bit," she assured him cheerfully.

"I might 'a' known you was stringin' me when you put up that talk about your stifle bein' out. A girl ain't got no stifle joint."

"How do you know?" she asked, flippantly, boldly, Bill thought.

"Nobody but a four-legged animal's got a stifle joint, and you know it as well as I do," Bill told her, indignant over this anatomical deceit.

"Never mind, Mr. Dunham," she said gently, as serious in a moment as he would have her. She touched his arm with placative hand. "I had to string you along someway till I could get your gun."

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 Bill clapped hand to his scabbard, to find it as empty as when he bought it. The discovery started him with a nervous jump; a hot wave chased a cold one up his backbone and seemed to run out of his nose.

"What're you up to, sneakin' my gun that way?" he demanded, so suspicious of treachery now his hair began to crawl at the roots as if it was full of ants.

"I told Mr. MacKinnon I'd get it if I could," she said. "We didn't want to see you killed."

"You've made a fool out of me between you, and that's worse!" Dunham blurted, in full support of his own hot declaration.

"Not half as bad," she corrected him gently. "You can be a fool every day of the week and live happy, but you could only fight Ford Kellogg once."

"What did you do with it?"

"Dropped it in the weeds back there somewhere. You couldn't find it before morning."

"He'll think I'm afraid of him, he'll think he's put over his bluff!"

"Let him," she said calmly.

"MacKinnon put you up to it!"

"No, he didn't. He said it couldn't be done. Don't be sore, Mr. Dunham; you'll thank me for it when you understand what you've missed."

"Maybe I will," he replied, sulky and ungracious. "You've put me in a h—a dickens of a fix! How'm I goin' back to face that man without a gun?"

"You've got about as good a chance without it as with it," she replied, a note of asperity in her smooth low voice. "You don't know Kellogg. No man ever

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 has touched him with a bullet; there's not a man alive that can do it. If you go back there tonight he'll kill you, gun or no gun."

"He didn't have any right to order me around that way," Dunham argued. "A man's not an outlaw because he defends his life."

"Mr. Ruddy, the man you were talking to—the mayor, you know—says Kellogg had a perfect right to order you to leave town if he thought you might create a public disturbance or cause trouble by staying there. If you had fought him and killed him you'd have been arrested and tried for murder. That's what Mr. MacKinnon said."

She was so earnest Dunham could not doubt any longer the honesty of her intention or the disinterestedness of her interference with his foolish plan of defiance.

"I—Mr. MacKinnon and I thought it was a pity to see you killed off for no reason at all," she said, with such simple sincerity it made Dunham feel very small and cheap.

"I guess you're right," he admitted contritely, breaking into a sweat at realization of the peril his misguided independence had led him so near. "But I guess it won't be any harm if I go back and kick around in the weeds to see if I can find my gun."

"Forget your gun!" she said severely. "You're a whole lot better off tonight without it."

"It's a good old gun; I hate to lose it," he pleaded.

"Well, you're not goin' back. And that's a cinch!"

"All right, Miss Moore," he yielded, as tame and

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 copper-stone). It is not found in such large quantity as copper pyrites, but still it is fav from being rare. It is found in large quautities in the province of Dewa at Akita.

Third.— Seems to be rarer in Japan than the two former ores. Burger (l.c. page 10) states that it occurs in large quantities in Sendai, Nambu, mount Monoko, where it is smelted together with copper pyrites. I was not able to learn the exact Japanese name and did not find a description of this ore in the above mentioned Japanese sources. In many pieces of copper pyrites out of different provinces, I saw an admixture of peacock copper. In Iö and Toza especially it occurs in considerable quantity mixed with copper pyrites.

Fourth.— or “Fahlertz,” a very compound mineral, containing variable quantities of sulphites of copper, iron, arsenic, antimony, lead and often silver. This ore is not rare in Japan; we have seen good specimens from Satsuma, Hiüga, Cho-shu, Toza, Iö, Setsu, etc. Grey copper ore and copper-pyrites are the chief ores of Sumitomo’s large copperworks at the mountain Besi-san in the province Iö (Shikoku) where the silver is also extracted by a process of cupellation.

These four ores are the sources of Japanese copper; the two first named are the most important for copper metallurgy. The last named is also of value in gold and in silver smelting. These minerals have produced the enormous quantities of copper smelted in Japan since the 10th century; they formed the chief trade of the Dutch and Chinese at Nagasaki during the period 1609-1858. The quantity of copper exported by the Dutch during that time amounts at least to more than four millions of piculs, whilst the Chinese undoubtedly have exported a still larger quantity. Besides the use of copper in daily life for all kinds of household goods, doors of godowns, ornaments, temple-furniture, mirrors, smoking utensils, bronzes and especially copper money, has been for many centuries and is still so common and general, that it may be just called “the national metal of the Japanese.”

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 humble as if she had a rope on him, thrown and hoghobbled and conquered past all hope.

"You certainly can pull a gun in a hurry, kid," she said. "You must 'a' had a whole lot of practice in your time. But you mustn't get the big notion you're too darned good at it," she hastened to amend.

"I don't suppose it takes any special amount of brains to pull a gun fast," he allowed. "Well, I guess I might as well walk on till I come to the next place where a train stops, and pull my freight out of this country."

"Why, don't you want the job?"

"Which job?"

"The one I hired you for a little while ago."

"I thought you was just stringin' me along," he said foolishly. "Well, I'm green, but I'm willin'. What kind of a job is it?"

"We'll walk on down the road and I'll tell you. I told Mr. MacKinnon we'd walk on toward the ranch if I could get your gun away from you. Pa and Shad Brassfield will pick us up when they come along."

The cattlemen of southwestern Kansas, she told him, had formed an alliance for the purpose of making a concerted stand that summer against trail herds from Texas being driven across the range to the railroad loading-points. Last summer Kansas cattlemen had suffered heavy losses from Texas fever, many of them being practically ruined. Nobody could explain it, but there was some kind of infection carried by cattle from south of a certain line in Texas, to which they themselves were immune, which seemed to blow

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 on the wind and poison the very dust of the earth. Northern cattle grazing the range crossed by these Texas herds, or coming within several miles of their trail, contracted this devastating fever and perished.

No cure was known for it; no preventive except freezing weather. Local cattle could graze with safety the polluted ranges after a winter had passed. The situation had grown so desperate, Texas cattle coming in such vastly increasing numbers year after year, that the livestock industry on the Kansas range was threatened with ruination.

Something had to be done to stop this indiscriminate invasion, this sowing of plague over the free grazing lands. There was neither state nor federal law to regulate the entry of these southern herds, it being a hard matter to convince legislators that cattle apparently entirely healthy could be carriers of this most fatal malady.

For the lack of any law to help them, the Kansas stockmen were driven to the expedient of banding together and establishing, for mutual protection, a quarantine against Texas trail herds. This quarantine line they had fixed at the southern boundary of the state, where they proposed to apply their regulation by force of arms if necessary.

Guards were already patrolling the southern border to watch for the coming of the first Texas herds and summon sufficient force to stop them at the line. It was as a recruit to this force that Zora Moore had engaged Dunham, subject to the approval of her

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 father, who was president of the Kansas cattlemen's organization.

These guards must be trustworthy men of the highest integrity, cool men in the face of danger, inflexible men in their duty. They were having trouble finding men, as few were unemployed on the range at that time of the year, those few out of jobs generally being undesirable for the stern duty of quarantine patrol.

"Mr. MacKinnon recommended you," she said.

"He don't know any more about me than you do," Dunham told her.

"I know you're a man that will stand up for his rights, and you were willing to fight Ford Kellogg. That's recommendation enough for me, and I know it will be for my father."

"I don't know that it always pays a man to stand up too strict for his rights," he said gloomily, the question of his justification in the affair of the cowboy rising up to accuse him.

"When a man goes after his gun you've got to do something," she said, surprising him by her ready interpretation of his thoughts. "I wouldn't worry about that man. He'd 'a' got you if you hadn't beat him to it."

"Maybe," Bill granted, considerably comforted and relieved.

She was a wise one, he thought; she was as wise as they made them. And he was ready to bet his last dollar she was as straight as a plumbline.

They walked on out of town, which took no great stretching of the legs to accomplish, giving the road

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 occasionally to riders who passed on in silence, no doubt taking them for strolling lovers. Half a mile or so beyond the edge of town the road bent southward, crossing the railroad, striking out into a land that appeared as empty of man's activities as the sky over it.

From the top of a swell in the treeless land they watched the train that Zora had come in to meet wind its way across the prairie, its two little red eyes winking out of sight at last. Its going seemed to leave the world more melancholy to Dunham, as if some last thread between him and his untroubled days had been broken, leaving him estranged and alone.

He regretted that hasty deed, that blow, given on what seemed to him now such trifling provocation, that had provoked vindictive retaliation; he was sorry for the man who had fallen in that sprawled, collapsed, flattened-out, repellent posture, his face in the dust, his wild bullet through the mayor's window pane.

He would have been glad to go back and live over again the hard years which he had surmounted to come to that tragic hour if such penance could clear his conscience of the burden that oppressed it so grievously. The farther he went from the scene, the heavier his regret weighed, like a load that had seemed light enough in the excitement of the start, but which promised to gall him and wear him down before the journey's end.

That was the outcome of all his vindictive years, his sweltering under the sting of early wrongs. A noble soul would have outlived them, he said, and hidden them in the expansive maturity of his heart, as a tree

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 envelops old wounds, fold on fold, in its inexorable dignity.

They must have been on the road an hour; the moon had pared away the last shred of cloud, leaving its course untroubled and clear down to the very horizon's edge, when the wagon overtook them. It came with little noise along the dusty road, the glow of a cigar in the back seat showing where the cattleman rode.

John Moore did not appear to think it remarkable, or even unusual, to come across his daughter walking the public road with a stranger at night. There was no uneasiness in his manner, no displeasure. Dunham had looked forward to this meeting with apprehension, doubtful whether Moore would countenance his daughter's activity in the affairs of a stranger whose follies made him contemptible even to himself.

Moore greeted his daughter with boisterous, loudvoiced affection, leaning over the side to give her a popping kiss. He shook hands with Dunham when Zora introduced him, no reservation of inequality or suspicion in his way. There was a strong vapor of whisky on his breath, and he was a voluble, loudspoken, rough-edged unlettered man.

Dunham mounted the front seat beside the driver; the journey was resumed, Moore talking with loud impartiality for the benefit of all about his journey, which had extended as far east as Chicago, and the successful outcome of his business, whatever that had been. He said nothing of Dunham's rescue from self-appointed extinction at Ford Kellogg's hands.

The driver, apparently a man of length from his

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 way of doubling forward in the seat, was shaded by a large hat which, together with the canvas top of the wagon—of the kind called a hack in Texas—put him in such gloom Dunham could not make anything out of his face. He could see the end of what appeared to be an unlit cigar sticking out of it, and hear the clucking that issued from that region whenever the horses slackened their brisk trot.

Dunham did not attempt any conversation with the driver, who held his tongue in that somber fashion while they proceeded four or five miles. The conversation in the back seat gradually fell to a lower, more intimate, pitch, little of it reaching Dunham's ears distinctly. He tried not to hear, feeling himself and his doings in Pawnee Bend the subject of this confidential talk.

They pitched suddenly over the brow of a long swell, beginning a quick descent into what appeared to be a broad valley: A river serpentined through it, the course marked in the moonlight by the dark border of trees at its brink. The Arkansas, Dunham knew it to be, river of erratic flood-waters and engulfing sands. The suddenly accelerated gait of the horses, and a light twinkling among the trees, was warrant that they were approaching the end of the drive.

It was at this stage of the journey that the driver found his speech. He preluded it with a chuckle, as if it started deep and sent out bubbles.

"They've got a good joke on you over at Pawnee Bend," he said, still doubled forward, elbows on his thighs, as if he addressed his team.

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 Dunham started. He was not sure the man had spoken, although he heard the words distinctly; and almost positive they could not have been addressed to him.

"Yeah, they got a dang good joke on you!" the driver repeated, the bubbles coming after the words this time, as if they had been pulled up by the roots out of the mud.

"I beg your pardon?" Dunham said.

"Oh, that's all right; don't mention it," the driver said with cordial magnanimity.

"What did you say about a joke, Shad?" Zora inquired, leaning forward, her voice close to Dunham's neck.

Shad took out the cork and let another little spurt of bubbles rise and drift off on the deliberate current of his humor.

"You know that feller this kid killed out in front of Ruddy's?" he said.

"Well, what about it?" Zora demanded impatiently.

"Dang good joke!" said Shad.

He lapsed off there, as if that ended the story. Dunham heard Moore snorting as if he had caught the point of the untold joke. Zora poked the driver in the back.

"What's it about, you old fool?"

"You know, when they took him to Schubert's back room and stripped him," Shad twisted his neck to talk around to Zora, although he could have been heard a quarter of a mile if he had talked straight in front,

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 "they couldn't find a mark of a bullet on that feller from top to toe."

"No-o-o!" said Zora, incredulously.

"That's the joke!" said Shad.

"I think it's a pretty burn sort of a joke," she said, her displeasure evident, an opinion in which Dunham fully concurred.

"They felt him over, and turned him and poked him," Shad related, "but they couldn't find a shadder of a bullet nowheres. Schubert was kind of put out about it. He don't like to keep 'em around, you know. He says: 'Vell, I guess I'll haf to let him lay around two or three days to see if he's deadt.' That feller he kind of rose up and grunted. 'Who in the hell said I was dead?' he says. 'Who in the hell said I was dead?

Shad roared, and Moore roared. Dunham was pretty certain that Zora did some roaring of her own. But there was no mirth in Bill Dunham's breast; he didn't see where the joke came in. All he was conscious of was a vast lifting of relief, a peaceful, delicious clearing of his troubled conscience. His hands were clean: there was no blood of a man upon his hands.

"He's a fittified man," Shad explained. "I used to know him down in the Nation. He tuck a fit the wink you throwed down on him, and you missed him as clean as a drum. Dang good joke on you, kid!"

"Ain't it?" said Bill, his heart as light as a feather. "But I guess I can live it down."

So what he had thought an adventurous and tragic day had ended in an explosion of comedy, leaving him

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 nothing to his credit but a pair of heels. Yet Bill Dunham's heart was so light that moment, his happiness so extreme, that he would have replaced the cowboy's lost underpinning with silver heels if he had met him in the road.

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was one of the barons of the Arkansas. He owned several thousand acres of land, which in all did not represent a great outlay of money in that time, much of it good for nothing but grazing, good for nothing else to this day. In the valley of the Arkansas, where his house stood on a little lift that brought it above flood-water, his possessions embraced much land that could have been turned to agricultural use if its owner had been a farming man.

But such would have been a contemptuous use of the land to John Moore, who did not so much as cultivate a garden to give his family summer greens. He was a cattleman of the old type; cattle was all he knew, or wanted to know. His value of the valley lands was not based on their productive potentiality under the plow, but on the amount of herbage grown there during the summer months for the use of his herds when the upland ranges were covered with snow.

At such times the cattle were worked down into the valley, where they found tall grass that had been carefully guarded against trespass all summer, fairly succulent still, and life-sustaining; and shelter against the cruel sharp blasts of winter storms under the shallow banks of the river, among the willows and cottonwood

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 trees, and in the deep washes which carried the summer torrents from the sod-roofed hills into the stream. The one use that John Moore saw for the land was to take off of it with his cattle what nature had put on it for no other purpose under the clouds, according to his understanding and belief.

Cattlemen along the Arkansas were enjoying prosperous days. Moore had been one of the first with the courage to risk his capital on the belief that cattle could live off the range and withstand the winters of that bleak, unsheltered land. He hadn't much to risk in the beginning, to be sure, and he always played a lone game. He had been twenty years on the Arkansas, and now he was in the middle fifties, a man with a reputation for sagacity and good judgment, whose word was as good as money paid.

Moore had married late, going back to Missouri, his native state, for a woman of his own kind. She had become a typical range wife; his children were range born. His house was a rangeman's conception of distinction and comfort, a hideous gabled thing with a tower—an architect from Wichita had designed it, after the current cattle baron style—built of lumber, painted a bilious green, with staring white trimming around cornice, windows and doors. A veranda with spindling columns filled its front and curved around the tower, suggesting leisure, elegance and ease, three things as completely strange to the habits and desires of John Moore as a feather bed to a horse.

A few cottonwood and soft-maple trees had been planted around the house, but otherwise the situation

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 was unadorned, and bare as trampling hoofs could beat it. The house stood on the north bank of the river, beside what once had been the Santa Fé Trail. The notches in the river bank where the old trail crossed were still there, the road still between them, although romance was a stranger to it now, and its adventurous days were gone.

Behind the house were corrals, fenced in untidy patchwork of barbed wire, planks and poles; and a long low shed-like structure for housing cattle hands and stores. There was no other dwelling nearer than Pawnee Bend, which seemed very close by, indeed, to John Moore and his hardy family.

It was in this bunk house behind the bilious villa that Bill Dunham woke next morning at the lusty call of Shad Brassfield. It was only faintly dawn, paling stars were still to be seen, but no earlier than Dunham had been accustomed to piling out of bed ever since reaching what preachers used to be fond of calling the age of accountability. Bill was aware of the responsibility, but he never could be quite convinced of the sense. He didn't stop to question it now any more than he had done back in his grafting days, when Schoonover used to get him out before he could even smell the dawn.

There appeared to be nobody else in the bunk house, no noise of movement, no rummaging around for boots. Dunham arrayed himself in his blue serge, uncertain of what waited him that day, or what kind of clothes the job, if there was to be a job, might demand.

His belt was hanging just inside the door, but he

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 was dubious of the propriety of putting it on, even if he had a gun to grace it. He thought he'd put it out of sight in the suitcase, which MacKinnon had sent in the wagon, and leave it there until he had lawful need of it in a business where he might shoot without regret if he must shoot at all.

He was greatly surprised to find his gun in the holster. So, that girl Zora hadn't thrown it away at all; she'd had it stuck around her somewhere all the time. She had given it to that old Shad fellow, and he had sneaked it back.

Bill was glad to have the old gun back again, although there seemed to be something of belittlement in the act of restoration. It was as if his unsophistication had been brought up with derision before his face. Stringing him along that way, with his gun stuck around her all the time!

She had treated him like a boy, going on the presumption that he was too green to suspect her, and too timid to take her by the neck and make her give it back. He grew hot under the collar at the unavoidable admission that both her conclusions were true.

He was green, and he was soft. But he would ripen and grow hard, hard as they made them, so hard they could cut their on him if they tried to bite through his rind. He felt resentful and injured, where he knew he should have been humble and grateful.

That redheaded girl had saved his life, and he wasn't man enough to admit it without a grudge; she had given his gun back that way to save his feelings, and he was

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 too low-down and onery to be grateful for her delicacy. This self-arraignment braced him up like a good friendly kick. He grinned as he rubbed his hand over the long blue gun, and looked toward the house, wondering if she was up, and whether he was to have breakfast with her, and how the day was going to start.

He had liked that girl from the very first sight, he recalled. Even before the first sight, when her well-modulated, soft voice had spoken in his defense at the hardware merchant's door. The farther they walked together last night the higher his opinion had mounted. She was the right kind of a girl, and it would be a comfort to any man to hold her pretty soft chin in the cup of his hand.

But there would not be much chance of further intimacy, judging from the evidence of wealth around the place. Bill looked at the house, which he approved in all particulars, and considered very fine. There was nothing lacking in its environment to him, any more than there was to its owner. There are that kind of people everywhere, not alone in the cattle lands, to whom a house is the same as a diamond. What is the difference where you wear it, as long as people can see you've got it?

It was a very fine house indeed, a house after his own desire. The Moores were people of consequence, plainly. It would take a footless man like him a long time to get up to the level where he might hope to enter that house on terms of equality and hold Zora Moore's nice little friendly hand.

There was a smell of coffee in the cool air, and a

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 quick broadening of day. Shad Brassfield came along with a saddle on his shoulder, looking somewhat trifling and mean, Dunham thought, hatchet-faced and half-whiskered that he was; lean and gangling in the legs, spare in the body as a snake.

"Oh, you got up, did you?" Shad said, in a voice somewhat between derision and surprise.

"I made a stagger at it," said Bill, wide awake and alert, according to his habit, for he was a chap who left sleep on the pillow when he rose up, be it early or late.

"I got to go and chase up some horses," Shad informed him. "If you want to make a hit around this ranch grab that milk-bucket offen that bainch over there by the kitchen door and pump them two cows in the lot yonder. It'll save me the job when I git back, and I may have to go to hell-an'-gone after them damn horses."

The two cows got up when they saw Dunham coming with the pail, stretching their backs with the incredulous curves cows can put into that section of their anatomy when framing themselves up for the day's business. Brassfield hung around to see how the stranger would go about relieving the animals of their milk, his very attitude one of sardonic expectation, for the belief that Dunham was a railroader had got mixed up somehow in Shad's small and not too active brain. A railroader's ignorance of the workings of a cow was one of the standard jokes of the range.

Shad was more disappointed than pleased to see Dunham go about the operation from the proper side, sitting on the little tack of a one-legged stool that was

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 Shad's special pride, owing to the difficulty of maintaining a balance if the cow began to shift. Shad heard two streams hitting the pail at a clip that beat his own, and went on, with backward looks, and hopeful. He had much simple faith in the stool.

Brassfield didn't have to go very far afield after the horses; he was back shortly after Dunham had finished the milking, peering into the pail to see if his substitute had drained as much out of the unprolific cows as his own refined efforts produced. He seemed to be satisfied, and said he reckoned breakfast was ready and they'd better go. They could strain the milk or leave it stand till the cream rose, for all he give a damn.

Brassfield and his wife inhabited one end of the long bunk house, where Dunham was introduced to the lady and breakfast at the same time. Mrs. Brassfield was moving about with a sort of philosophic deliberation, smoking a little gray clay pipe with cane stem. She was tall, flat and flaccid, brown as the tobacco which she smoked out of the "hand," a loquacious, friendly soul, unfeigned in her hospitality.

She appeared to be about fifty, but probably was not more than thirty-eight, the business of wife to Shad Brassfield being a wearing one, full of hardships and privations, as Dunham was soon to hear. She put her pipe away on a little shelf behind the stove, exclaiming and wondering over Dunham as if her husband had brought a rare curiosity to the house. But there was such sincerity in her manner, and unfeigned welcome, that Dunham felt more at ease than he had since wak-

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 ing up to discover the evidences of opulence around him.

Mrs. Brassfield had everything ready, which is to say the bacon and canned hominy, and sorgum to be dipped out of a yellow bowl with a spoon, with a crock of batter on the back of the stove and a smoking griddle waiting to fry the corn cakes. She placed Dunham at the table, which was big enough to seat twelve or fourteen men, with great solicitation for his comfort, as she might have treated a boy one-third his years, and turned her attention to the griddle, greasing it with a distressing dark rag which she dipped in a can.

They held out their plates to receive the first batch of cakes, which Mrs. Brassfield did not stir from the stove to deliver, flipping them deftly from her caketurner, never missing a word or a shot. It was a very interesting procedure to Dunham, lending a certain gambling element to the meal as well as establishing a feeling of fellowship between them that could not have been reached by more conventional means of deilvering corn cakes to a plate.

Mrs. Brassfield inquired into Dunham's sources of origin and his reasons for coming to that country, exclaiming in depreciation of his misguided ambition when he explained that he had been moved by a desire to throw his feet.

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham," she said, feelingly and affectionately, her sharp brown face not a tint livelier for all the close operation above her griddle, "I've been throwin' my feet for nineteen years I've

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 been married to Brassfield, traipsin' around lookin' for a better place than the one I was at. I don't see why a young man like you wants to leave a country where you can grown roastin' years and snap beans to come out here and rummage your livin' out of tin cans."

"Corn and beans'd grow here, right here in this valley, if anybody had sense enough, and git-up enough, to plant 'em," Brassfield said.

"If they wait on you to do it they'll never see it done," she said placidly, not a shade of accusation or mockery in her tone.

"If I had the land I'd show 'em," Brassfield declared. "But a pore man's got about as much show of gittin' him a piece of land in this valley as he has of findin' him a gold-mind. These rich cattlemen they've spraddled all over the country, grabbin' and stealin' till a pore man ain't got—"

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunhan, it don't pay to roam around," Mrs. Brassfield broke in, serenely indifferent to her husband's effort to excuse his own trifling habits in the indictment of more enterprising men, a human weakness so general and so mean that it deserved squelching, just as Mrs. Brassfield squelched Shad, by passing over him as if he was not there.

There was so little of Brassfield above the ears with his hat off that Dunham would have been slow to accept him as an authority without Mrs. Brassfield's 'calm demonstration of how a cipher should be placed in the sum of human consequence. Brassfield had his hair cut short all over his head, which came to a point at the top as if it had been tied in a pudding-cloth and

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 carried around before it set. His hair had a mean sandy tint, about the color of a Duroc hog.

"We've traipsed up and down between Kansas and Texas five times the last eight or nine years," Mrs. Brassfield went on with her argument against roving, "Shad always lookin' for some place where he could git along with less work than he could in the last one. I buried all of my children, one after another, on that long road between this state and Texas. I feel sometimes like I've left a grave ever' hundred miles between here and Waco, Mr. Dunham."

"It wasn't movin' that was to blame, Mollie," Brassfield said, a note of gentleness and kindness in his tone that lifted him considerably in Dunham's regard. "You know they tuck the aiger in Arkansaw—it's the worst place for aiger in the world—I wouldn't live in that state if they 'lected me gov'ner and crowned me with a solid gold crown."

Out of Brassfield's shingled baldness his big eyebrows stood on his face with a surprising, almost startling, effect. He worked them when he talked, especially when he denounced, his pale eyes weak and purposeless, his half-whiskers giving a sternness to the lower part of his features which there was nothing in his gizzard to sustain.

"If I had me forty acres of this river land," he said, "and a couple of good teams, I'd show these stockmen corn and oats'll grow here as good as they'll grow anywhere. I'm goin' to get the gover'ment after—"

"If I had five acres back in Henry County, Missouri, and a cow and some hens, I'd be happy, and you could

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 have the rest of the world to do whatever the notion struck you to do," Mrs. Brassfield said.

She said it with a sigh, so hopeless and sad that Dunham knew at once she had no vision of a better day. She brought her stack of corn cakes, which she had accumulated on a sort of percentage basis, adding one to her own pile out of the three she cooked on the griddle at each round, to the table and sat down to her break fast.

Brassfield pushed back, his barrel full. Dunham rose with him. The sun was yellow on the kitchen wall, and the clatter of a horse on the gallop sounded down the road from the south.

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rider was a messenger from the border, bringing disturbing news. He reported a big herd of Texas cattle not more than three days' drive from the line, the owner pushing along on forced marches, evidently with the design of getting across before the quarantine guard could be reënforced sufficiently to stop him. He had a big gang of men, and was driving the largest herd that had come over the Texas trails in many a day.

Moore was up on edge at this news, for the first cattle over the Texas trails were not expected quite so soon. He prepared to set off at once to collect his forces and hold up the herd at the line. His two boys, the elder about twelve, the other a year or two younger, came out of the house with molasses around their gills, clamoring to go with their father on the expedition against the Texas drover.

The cattleman was very proud of their desire to begin mixing in the affairs of that rough life at an early age, but told them it was strictly men's business, and to run along and hunt coyotes of another kind. Moore was a rough specimen, and the boys were a true pattern. A tall man, broad in the shoulders and flat, one of those enduring kind that defies wind and weather, let the elements pelt as they may. He was a bigboned fellow, uncouth in his movements, set with that

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 questionable adornment so greatly favored by cattlemen and sheriffs of that period, a heavy, long mustache, which he had a habit of roaching up from his mouth with a backward rubbing of the hand, until it stood away from his lips, giving his mouth the appearance of being cleared for action with either words or teeth, as the occasion might require.

Dunham approached him after he had turned the messenger over to the boys to be regaled at his own table, and asked him about the job. Moore looked him over with humorous eye, and grinned.

"You heard what I told the kids," he said. This is men's business; we don't want any boys along. Kid, it's all over the range by this morning the way you shot that feller up at Pawnee Bend last night. You'd hear 'em yellin', "Who in the hell said I was dead!' from here to Nation if you was to take a little sashay around to-day."

Dunham felt that sense of insufficiency, that impression of being a speck in the vastness, that had made his resolution falter when he first looked at that country from the station platform at Pawnee Bend. He had no argument to make for his case; he realized he'd only make it worse by saying he was glad the poor cuss wasn't dead, or that it was not an unprecedented thing for a good shot to miss a man at eight feet, sometimes when he needed to hit his mark above all things in the world.

An old Texas ranger had told him once how he had missed a man five times, starting at not more than a rod away, closing up to six feet, finally picking up a

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 rock and knocking him foolish and taking him along to jail with a whole rind. It wouldn't do a bit of good to argue like that with a man in the cynical, patronizing manner Moore had assumed toward him. Dunham was as green to the range as they ever came, but he was wise enough to see that.

"No-o-o, they'd laugh you off of the range, kid," Moore told him, that intolerable gleam of laughter in his eyes, "they'd make it so hot for you you'd swivel up in your hide. I'll tell Brassfield to drive you over to town this morning, and you can take a train back home. I'll tell him to have Ruddy speak to Kellogg and keep him off of you—if he still feels like he wants to pick a fuss with a innocent misguided stray like you. 'Who in the hell said I was dead!

Moore quoted with simulation of indignant repudiation that was evidence of considerable rehearsal. Dunham knew no fertile places would he left unsown in Moore's travels for many a day. The thought made him feel so much like fighting that his face must have betrayed his desire, for Moore looked at him quite soberly, shaking his head.

"You couldn't fight it down, kid. Hell! you'd have to fight the whole country. The best thing a feller in your fix can do is to travel on till he gits to where they either know him well and pass over his cracks, or never heard of him. Brassfield'll take you to town after a while."

Brassfield was engaged just then in saddling a horse for his employer, listening with all his ears, although no great effort was required to hear Moore when he

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 talked in the open. Dunham knew the teamster hadn't lost a word. Moore went into the house and Brassfield went dawdling off about some business of his own, both of them quitting Dunham as a trivial person worthy of no further notice.

Dunham returned to the bunk house where he had slept, turbulent with resentment of this treatment. He scorned the hospitality of a man who was so blatant and coarse. Maybe he knew his business, but he didn't know anything else. It was humiliating, degrading, to be under obligation to such a boor. Bill buckled on his gun, picked up his suitcase and started away.

He was hot to the backbone over the treatment he had received there, mocked and derided by this loud-mouthed ruffian because good fortune had made his aim poor and saved the life of a man. If he had killed the afflicted simpleton Moore would have been talking softly out of the other side of his mouth.

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham! you're not goin' to walk, are you?"

It was Mollie Brassfield shouting after him. She was standing in the door with her little pipe, which was stronger for its size than any pipe Dunham ever had met. She came hurrying after him when he lifted his hat and waved his hand in farewell without a word. There was one little piece of sincerity and courtesy around that place, he thought, with a sympathetic feeling for the poor soul whose long wanderings were marked with her children's graves.

"You wait till after dinner and Shad he'll haul you over," she begged, rather than invited, her manner was

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 so pleading and earnest. She appeared shocked to see him starting out on foot, as if her hospitality were being shamed.

"I like to walk, thank you," Dunham said, wonder—ing whether he ought to offer her something for his breakfast. He felt that he might, since she was plainly very poor.

"I didn't intend to run away without payin' for my breakfast," he said, "but I guess I'd 'a' done it if you hadn't come out."

She drew back at his offer of half a dollar, looking more sad than insulted.

"I'd break my last hunk of cornbread with you and be happy of the company," she said. "But this grub ain't mine: I'm only cookin' for the men when any of them come in off of the range. It's Mr. Moore's grub, and he'd be so mortified he couldn't speak if he knew you offered to pay."

"Then do me the favor to give it to him, ma'am," Dunham requested earnestly. "If I can mortify that man for fifty cents I'll consider it the biggest bargain for the money a man ever got."

She looked at the vehement young man shrewdly, her head a little to one side, a sharp light of understanding in her wise black eyes.

"I'll give it to him, Mr. Dunham, if I and my old man gits chased off of the place for it," she declared. "And I wish you well wherever you may go."

Dunham struck off up the road, eager to get around the first bend and out of sight before Moore came out with any more of his humorous cracks or de-

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 risive allusions. He hoped Zora would not see him, feeling a bit sneaking at leaving without a word of gratitude to her, for he knew she had acted with a kind and generous impulse to get him out of his perilous situation last night. There had been nothing behind that deed but a generous desire to save the life of a foolish young man who had an old-fashioned notion about rights and dignities that seemed to be out of place in and around Pawnee Bend.

No doubt Moore was in the house that minute telling the cowboy messenger about the dead man rising up from Schubert's board and demanding to be told who had slandered him. The whole family would be there, laughing over this joke that would not lose its savor for many a day and year.

Yes, he believed even Zora would be there, passing biscuits to that turnip-faced cowboy who was go bow-legged he interfered. She would be as loud as any of them in her enjoyment of this rare piece of humor in which the granger who wore a gun was the chief comedian. All the respect he had won in her eyes by his quick draw and apparently effective shot had been lost in the ridiculous anticlimax. A man must kill when he pulled out and took a crack at another to be respected in that country, it appeared.

As he trudged along the road Dunham considered what his next move should be. He disliked to give up his romance, begun so far back, all built around the short-grass country; it was against his principles to retreat from anything begun because it turned out a bigger and harder job than he had estimated. But it

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 was going to be a difficult matter to live down that joke. Moore was right; he couldn't fight the whole country.

It might be the wiser thing to travel on to the next town and start over, but it was a long way between towns in the short-grass country, and his suitcase weighed around forty pounds. Tramping it was not to be considered. On the other hand, his appearance in Pawnee Bend would be equal to the arrival of a circus. Everybody would cut loose at him with their humorous jibes. He'd hear that fool cowboy's indignant question fired at him from every door as he passed.

Kellogg's attitude was to be considered, also. Kellogg would take it that he had left town once on his command. Going back would appear to be an open defiance and a bid for trouble. There wouldn't be a shadow of lawful defense on his side in such case, Dunham feared. It was a hard country to break into; it looked as if they had the door locked against him, for a fact.

Dunham left the road after two or three miles, shy of meeting anybody coming from town, oppressed by the dread that is at least as painful to sensitive innocence as any recriminations of conscious guilt. He wanted to sit down in a hollow, somewhere out of sight, and think out the answer to his problem.

There was plenty of room for solitary meditation in that country, even close as it was to the railroad and town, neither of which was in sight. He drew away from the road a safe distance, shaping his course with a sort of subconscious intention toward the railroad track. Here the country was unpastured; the gray

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 green short grass, growing in little bunches, the unkind gray soil showing bare between, was uncropped and plentiful. Dunham put down his heavy suitcase in a little swale where a different grass grew thick and promising, nurtured by the down-wash of the richest soil. Here were some rose-brambles, matted in impenetrable clumps, and stunted bushes, of which the higher ground was uniformly bare.

As Dunham sat there in a mood of dejection, the feeling of being an outcast heavy upon him, the sun growing warm on his shoulders, it occurred to him that Appearances Are Everything. It illuminated his gloomy mind, it lifted his spirit with new hope. Foolish of him to have lost sight of that business-college maxim, which was not nearly so platitudinous to him as it doubtless seems to you. There was where he had bungled it, thought Bill. Appearances Are Everything, and he had put in the wrong kind of appearance at Pawnee Bend.

A gun, for example, didn't go along with that kind of clothes, at least a gun dangling in leather undisguised to the eyes of men. It was a combination so incongruous as to amount to a flaunting of custom; it had made him conspicuous and rushed him into the very thing he had hoped to avoid. Now, if he should go back to Pawnee Bend in overalls and boots, a woolen shirt and wide-brimmed hat, as most of the cowboys were dressed, he'd seem out of place without a gun.

The best thing to do, Bill concluded at last, was to go on west to the next town, get the proper outfit and make the proper appearance. To avoid making it look as if

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 he had come back hunting trouble, he would wait until dark to enter Pawnee Bend, get the necessary information from the agent, and take the nine-twenty to a new and, he hoped, happier field of adventure.

It was a hard country to break into, but he was bound to get in if he had to take the hinges off the door.

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it is possible for a healthy young man to live many days without eating, the average specimen of that genus begins to feel dissolution approaching with intolerable pangs if he must go unfed between breakfast and supper, especially when breakfast is early and supper promises to be late. Bill Dunham had a pretty good grinder inside him, and the grist he had put into it at Shad Brassfield's table that morning before sunrise was gone to the last grain before noon. He felt that he never would have the strength to lug his suitcase to Pawnee Bend if he put off starting until evening.

So it was under the lash of hunger, which has defeated armies and ruined nations, to say nothing of the tragedies it has brought into the lives of individual men, that Bill Dunham arrived at the string of cars, where the railroaders boarded and bunked, on the sidetrack at Pawnee Bend about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had put off the arrival as long as he could, mincing along from tie to tie when his normal stride was fully three feet, trying conscientiously to kill a little time.

But there he was at the edge of town in the middle of the afternoon of a bright sunny day, his great longing for a beefsteak pushing him forward harder than his desire for peace and quiet held him back.

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 He had heeled it off fairly lively the last mile or so, inspired by a notion at sight of the railroaders' cars. He might be able to get a meal at the boarding-car; more than likely it would not be necessary to cross the track at all or put foot in the street of Pawnee Bend. He recalled the quietude of the place when he had arrived the day before, hoping he might find it equally sleepy today. He didn't want to see MacKinnon, friendly and apparently honest as he had been, nor anybody else.

There was neither charity nor business in the boarding-car door. No, she wasn't runnin' a eatin'-house, the red-armed, large-girthed lady said. That was a boardin' train for railroaders, and she didn't have anything to give or sell to bums. No, she wouldn't slice anything off for him and hand it out, but a mean-eyed man with draggled hair who appeared in the door behind her said he'd slice something off if Dunham didn't get to hell out of there. So Dunham got, running headend into MacKinnon as he was turning in at the waiting-room door of the station.

"I thought you got to hell out o' here last night," said MacKinnon, for that was a stock phrase in Pawnee Bend, as it is elsewhere among people of quick passions and little delicacy. One might conclude that such people believe their situation the center of paradise, and all the rest of the world dedicated to the damned.

"Well, I'm back here now, anyhow," Dunham replied, thinking if he was in for it, let it begin as soon as it might.

He was ill-humored and ready for a row, the rebuff

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text:
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Richard the Third, V. iii If you do fight in safeguard of your wives,

Your wives shall welcome home the conquerors;

If you do free your children from the sword,

Your children's children quits it in your age.

Then, in the name of God and all these rights,

Advance your standards, draw your willing swords.

For me, the ransom of my bold attempt

Shall be this cold corpse on the earth's cold face;

But if I thrive, the gain of my attempt

The least of you shall share his part thereof.

Sound drums and trumpets, boldly and cheerfully;

God and Saint George! Richmond and victory!

Exeunt.

K. Rich. What said Northumberland as touching Richmond?

Rat. That he was never trained up in arms.

K. Rich. He said the truth: and what said Surrey then?

Rat. He smil'd, and said, 'The better for our purpose.'

K. Rich. He was in the right; and so, indeed, it is.

Tell the clock there. Give me a calendar.

Who saw the sun to-day?

Rat. Not I, my lord.

K. Rich. Then he disdains to shine; for by the book

He should have brav'd the east an hour ago:

A black day will it be to somebody.

Ratcliff!

 265 Advance: raise

266 ransom: forfeit

277 Tell: count the strokes of

279 book: i.e. the calendar

280 brav'd: made splendid

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 at the boarding-train having started him recounting his bill of charges against the charity and hospitality of that town. He was there for peace, but if they wanted a fuss they could have it.

"What became of the job Moore was goin' to give you? After that girl usin' her head to get you out of the pocket you put yourself in with Kellogg last night I thought they'd adopt you. What happened? Did you walk back?"

"You see me," Dunham replied, not wanting to be short or uncivil with MacKinnon, but resentful of his presence in a place where he wasn't expected to be met. "I'm goin' over to get something to eat," Bill explained. "I'll see you later."

"You made a mistake comin' back to this town," MacKinnon told him with deep earnestness. "Kellogg was blazin' sore last night when that girl tricked him and got you away. He was all set for a killin', he was ready to take a shot at me for stringin' him along to believe you were in your room. I wouldn't permit him to go up seekin' you, and he was proper sore, I'm tellin' you, lad."

"Thank you, Mr. MacKinnon. I know you're a friend of mine."

Dunham made the admission reluctantly, for he came of an undemonstrative line. He was sensible of MacKinnon's unselfish desire to see him keep a watertight skin; he could account now for the delay Kellogg made in the hotel which allowed Zora Moore to work her friendly deception on him and toll him down the road like a calf. She had meant well; he gave her due

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 gratitude for the honesty of her purpose. But it would have been better if they had let things work out to the appointed end last night.

What is plotted in the life scheme of a man will take place, Dunham believed with the deep conviction of a fatalistic heritage. "What is to be will be." He had heard his grandmother say it, in the wisdom of her accumulated experience, times without number.

Safeguards and precautions, and the friendly interference of men, or even young ladies with lovely soft chins and nice red hair, cannot divert the predestined perils in the days of a man. They had done their best, and here he was back in Pawnee Bend, as impotent against the stream of circumstance as he would have been against the ocean's tide.

MacKinnon advised him to duck behind the string of boarding-cars, and hide out in a ravine until he heard a train coming. A reasonable expectation of a long life was worth more than a meal. No, Bill said; that wasn't his day to hide out. What was to be would be, and he was going over to a restaurant.

Well, in that case, let him take the suitcase to the hotel, MacKinnon proposed. Somebody would carry it off if he left it at the station. And where did he want it sent, and whom did he want notified, in case things came to a bad ending for him before he got out of town.

"I'll be along for it in a little while," Dunham replied to his portentous questioning. "I'll take it over myself, Mr. MacKinnon—I couldn't begin to let you go carryin' my old traps around."

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 As they crossed the track Dunham looked along to the place where Zora Moore had made her pretense of falling, wondering how much he had sunk in her regard when she learned that the man whom he was thought to have killed had only thrown a fit. He must have suffered a heavy come-down; no doubt she had discussed him fully with her father after arriving home, and the verdict had disqualified him for the job she had expressed her confidence of his ability to fill. He supposed he'd never see her again, and felt saddened by the reflection. She had him down wrong, and there would be no way for him ever to correct the record.

MacKinnon threw him a curious glance every few steps as they walked across the dusty road, as if he could not understand such unreasonable marching into the outspread arms of trouble when it could be so easily avoided by going the other way. He did not mention the man who rose up from his cooling-board to deny that he was dead.

Dunham parted with MacKinnon at the hotel door, from where he laid a diagonal course across the wide street toward the San Angelo café, which was the first in line from the railroad, and so called with a design on Texas trade. Several wagons were scattered along before the stores, with a number of saddled horses at the racks, which appeared to indicate unusual daylight business for that town. As he struck the sidewalk in front of the café, Dunham encountered Marsh Puckett, who had just stepped out of the barber shop next door.

There were few people moving about; up to that moment Dunham had not seen anybody, near nor far,

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 whom he recognized. He would have dodged Puckett if he could have done so, for at the sight of him a shadow of trouble seemed to flit across the road. Puckett hurried along to cross Dunham, stopped as if struck helpless by astonishment squarely in front of the restaurant door, his dissolute face pulled in an expression of mocking surprise.

"We-ll-ll, who in the hell said I was dead?" he said, trying to carry it off as if Dunham had come out of the undertaker's to throw that scare into him.

Puckett grinned derisively, as a coward taunts a better man who is restrained by some sufficient reason from knocking him down.

"It's old six hundred come back to town!" he said, Dunham ignoring him and passing on. As the screen door slapped at Dunham's heels, Puckett put his ugly face to the wire and drawled after him: "Who in the hell said I was dead!"

This last sally of wit Puckett delivered with provocative derision that would have justified a shot. Dunham passed the nagging of this trouble-hunter by, as he had determined to ignore the taunts of others who might spring this on him, unless they accompanied it by some sufficient fighting reason.

A bony young woman in black sateen, with white collar and apron, confronted him as he sat down. She stood grinning familiarly, his identification complete in her eyes by the introduction Puckett had whined through the door. Dunham knew that everybody in town soon would be fixing their mouths to shoot that taunting fool thing at him.

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 No, he couldn't fight them all, as Moore had said. That being the case, he wouldn't fight any of them, no matter if the joke followed him around the globe. They seemed to think the joke was on him, as if he, and not the poor fool of a fittified man, had said it. Damn fools!

This thought, this denunciation, was in his mind when he looked up into the worldly eyes of the waiting lady. She grinned in another style, the placative, trade-winning style, rubbing what might have been her wedding ring with her apron, as if to call his attention to the fact that she was a perfectly honest woman, and neutral on all public questions as the sun.

"Make it steak and p'taters," Bill said.

There was only one other customer in the place, a muscular brown man whose freshly barbered hair and beard were pretty well salted with gray. He was a decorous grave man, who had not even turned his head at Puckett's taunt. He was dressed as men who rode the range commonly went about in summer weather, trousers in his boots, gray woolen shirt unbuttoned at his throat. His belt and pistol hung on the back of his chair, his sombrero on the wall. Dunham had taken inventory of him as he passed on to the table where he sat, reaching the instant conclusion that this man was nobody's hired hand.

This customer was also waiting to be served, evidently having come in only a little ahead of Dunham. He was still eating when Bill went out, in a deliberately dignified way which Bill thought was the kind of table conduct one expected of a man of his years, but did not

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 always see. Plainly a man of substance, Bill surmised, with silver things on his table at home.

Bill was feeling pretty tight around the belly-band, and comfortable all over, after his liberal meal. Perhaps his heavy feeding had dulled his sense of premonition, or maybe replenishment had lifted his courage to the height that belittled danger, but he had no concern for Marshal Kellogg, or when he might appear, or what he might do.

He had the whimsical thought that it would have been a real hardship to have to die as hungry as he was half an hour ago. He could not account for that light contempt for danger that had come over him, and he did not trouble to try. He was there: if anybody wanted to crowd him, let him come on.

Dunham's immediate planning concerned a cigar, to the exclusion of activities on the street which might have engaged his attention otherwise. He was not aware of this change in the moping aspect of the street until he set foot on the sidewalk in front of MacKinnon's hotel.

Almost every club-nosed front along the street appeared to have shaken out four or five people, like dice thrown by many players lined up at a long bar. They were all craning and looking in the general direction of the depot, although Dunham had all the evidence he needed to convince him no extraordinary event was expected there.

Ford Kellogg was sauntering down the street toward MacKinnon's, as he had come sauntering last night to keep the grim tryst in which he had been disappointed.

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 Something was expected of Kellogg by the people who stood in front of their doors, customers grouped around them. He was approaching with the nonchalant, unhurried manner feigned by a man who moves strategically to corner a suspicious horse. If the man moves too quickly, the horse will bolt. There doubtless was no such reasoning in Kellogg's method. It was his way of doing that kind of a thing; a way of building through suspense to a crashing climax.

Dunham felt that crawling ripple of cold run over him that had braced him like a nip of something strong when the cowboy had reached for his gun last night. But he didn't wait for Kellogg to come up, there being a distance of perhaps thirty yards between them. He went on into the hotel and picked out his cigar. Kellogg came sauntering up to the door in his idling, weaving, aimless-appearing way as Dunham tossed away the match.

Kellogg stopped just outside the door, looking at Dunham not so much in malevolence as sneering, goading insult. The whites of his mottled eyes were yellowish; he constricted the lids as if he looked against the sun.

"What're you doin' back in this town?" he inquired, his words as mean as if he loathed them himself, and turned them out as ugly as they could be made.

Dunham didn't reply at once. He stood in his way of meditative consideration that he always assumed when confronted suddenly with a question, head bent a little, eyes downcast, blowing smoke deliberatively. MacKinnon, behind the desk, was nervous. He moved

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 the register, moved the bottle of ink, cleared his throat, as if he could not stand out against the suspended reply much longer, and must speak.

"I don't know that it's a matter for official in-quiry," said Dunham, looking up with startling suddenness, disconcerting frankness, his eyes as steady as if he spoke of buying and selling, and not on a question weighing life and death. "But if you've got to know my business, mister, I'm here to take a train."

"You'll have to hit the road. You can't hang around this town."

"Now, look here, Kellogg," MacKinnon said, "I think you're stretchin' your authority when you come to my house orderin' a law-abiding guest out of town."

"This town ain't no place for a gun-flashin' granger," Kellogg replied, surly and vindictive.

"He's done nothing but defend himself and his rights," MacKinnon insisted. "What's happened in this town has been crowded on him."

"If you keep on crossin' me, MacKinnon, you'd better be reachin' for your own gun," Kellogg said with provoking insolence.

"I might even do that," MacKinnon told him soberly. "You're hired here to keep the peace, not provoke quarrels, or come around orderin' law-abiding guests out of my door."

"I'd hate like smoke to be the cause of any hard feelin's between you two gentlemen," Dunham assured MacKinnon, as cool and undisturbed to all outward appearance as a disinterested person possibly could have been. If there was some turmoil inside

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 him, some galloping thoughts racing through his head, he covered it all by a calm exterior.

Kellogg jerked his head in a grim order for Dunham to come out. He began to back into the street, holding Dunham with his taunting, mocking, insolent eyes, unbuttoning his coat as he went.

Dunham reached up with his left hand, removed the cigar from his mouth with slow, certain movement, and with the same even, unhurried motion carried it to his side and dropped it. He straightened from his leaning posture in which his right arm had rested on the counter, and stood as if balancing for a leap, left hand out from his side a little, its bent fingers apart, just as he had dropped the cigar; his right elbow forming an angle as true as if it rested in a square.

He stood that way a moment, life intensified in him to the utmost fiber, endowed with the wary craft that had come down to him from a line of men who had fought Indians for a hundred years. He began to move toward the door, walking on his toes as if he feared the intrusion of the faintest noise might give Kellogg an advantage, or precipitate the fight before he was ready. There was nothing in his world that moment but Kellogg and himself. The rest of his surroundings was out of focus, a blur.

Bill Dunham had one thought as he went out of the door, setting his feet down as softly as if he retreated from the chamber of a child he had walked to sleep: that he must remember the law, and keep within his rights. It was Kellogg's fight; he must make the first break for a gun.

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 Dunham designed to put as much space between himself and Kellogg as he could before the thing broke loose, thirty feet or so if he could stretch it that far, from no reason that he could have explained. He just wanted to edge off, and edge off, and get over there by the corner of the building before it started, if he could. Kellogg seemed to be willing to give him all the rope he wanted, and Bill worked on craftily, as he thought, watching Kellogg with such unbroken intensity that his eyeballs burned.

There was a hitching-rack about twenty feet long in front of the hotel, back about four feet from the edge of the sidewalk, merely a horizontal pole bolted to upright posts. Kellogg had backed around until he was standing behind this rack, which was too low to offer either obstacle or protection. Dunham reached the corner of the hotel, where he stopped.

That simple act appeared to constitute defiance in Kellogg's eyes, and give him the slender justification which he perhaps felt his easy-going constituency would demand. Dunham stood there, set and watchful, his left hand thrown out in the exact manner he had held it when he dropped his cigar, his right arm in that rigid angle that seemed hopeless of any chance to those who watched him. He stood that way until Kellogg, his hand darting like a beam from a mirror, moved to sling his gun.

Kellogg sagged at the knees as his gun cleared the leather. He threw out his right hand, blindly, to catch the hitching-rack, his head lopping sickly, chin on his breast. He clung there a second and sank to the

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 ground, the bullet that he had notched for Bill Dunham still in the chamber of his gun.

There was not a chance of Ford Kellogg ever rising up from his cooling-board to ask a question that would turn the laugh against the man who had given him the bulge and beaten him at the game he knew so well.

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text:
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 We will now mention some other Japanese copper-minerals, which are not used in copper smelting, but find, nevertheless, some useful applications in other branches of industry or in daily life.

Fifth.— (green) is found mostly scattered with the former ores, but seems not to be found in any large quantity. It occurs in irregular stalactitic aggregates of a radiate, fibrous structure with a silky lustre on the fracture and also in amorphous masses. The Japanese names for it are or, Syn. Seki-roku, Hitsu-seki, Kon-ron-roku. The best kinds are found in the coppermines of Ota in the province of Setsu, Ani in the Dewa province, Yamashire-yama in Choshu, Ashiwo-yama in Kotsuke, Kusagura in the Aidsu district of the province of Sendai, etc., although very fine kinds of malachite used as a drug and paint were formerly imported by the Chinese at Nagasaki.

It is used in the Japanese porcelain-industry as a green porcelain-paint, and also as an ordinary painting or drawing stuff. It can be found in the drug shops and is also used as an external medicine against some diseases of the eye and skin. For the use of painting, powder of malachite is mixed with chalk and water; from this paste small half spheroïdal grains are made, which are known under the name of Tama-roku-sho or Mume-roku-sho (Bean-malachite), and which are sold in every drug-shop. An impure, sandy variety of malachite-sand, which is much cheaper, will be found under the name of and a greenish-white coloured kind of  silicic-malachite (earthy variety), is sold under the name of.

Sixth.— or (earthy variety), [Erdige Kupferlasure or Bergblau] occurs in amorphous earthy masses. We did not see any fine chrystallized specimens. It is dissolved easily in acids, with evolution of carbonic acid. It should be found—according to Ono Ranzan—in coppermines—the Ani in Dewa, Ota in Setsu, Ashiwo-ynma in Kotsuke; at Uweno in the province of Sagami an inferior kind is said to occur. It bears the names: or ,

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was not a chance shot nor a lucky one, as the qualified judges of such encounters in Pawnee Bend very well knew. Bill Dunham was no longer a man to be laughed at, but one to be given the road if he wanted it, and spoken to with respect. Marsh Puckett, lately so free with his derisive pleasantries, was not among those who came to stand around the fallen city marshal in astonished silence, waiting for Schubert to come with the broad board that had served as stretcher for better men and worse before that day.

Bill Dunham turned back to the hotel door, where MacKinnon waited him with friendly hand.

"That was beautiful, Will-ium—beautiful!" MacKinnon said.

He drew Bill inside, kicking the discarded cigar out of the way, hurrying behind the counter in an unprecedented rush of generosity, offering to replace the lost smoke out of the highest-priced brand in his case. Dunham shook his head glumly in refusal, for he was feeling far more depressed than jubilant over the outcome of the fight. He turned his back to the door, where curious people were beginning to string by for a look at him. He wanted to go off somewhere to himself and think over the new turn this tragedy had given his affairs.

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 There was one thing certain now: he had broken into that country, or at least he had one foot inside the door. Should he go ahead on that ground, take the nine-twenty westward as he had intended, or leave it all and return to less romantic and more peaceful fields?

As for this romance that beckoned with such seductive smile from afar, there wasn't so much to it when a man got up so close he had to use his gun. Maybe there was a gentler brand of romance in the short-grass country—his heart quickened at the thought of Zora Moore—that would compensate a man for the brutal things he had to do to hold his own.

But there was no use standing around on one leg thinking about Zora Moore. Because of one wild shot, for which Dunham now was doubly glad, she had turned on him with the rest of them. He knew as well as he knew rain on a roof without seeing it that she was in the kitchen that morning when he left the ranch, pointing him out to that beaver-toothed cowboy as the granger who had illusions about a gun.

She had been taking a large wreath of credit for saving his life about that time, he was sure. Let her have it; maybe it was coming to her. If he had met Kellogg in the night it might have had a different ending. Let her have credit, with gratitude added to it, for what she had done. She was a smart girl to think of working him that way, and she had a lovely chin. But she was out of it as far as he was concerned.

Schubert arrived with his board under his arm—it was said in Pawnee Bend that he grabbed it every time he heard a shot—and the unimpressive remains of Ford

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 Kellogg were carried away. Some followed, more stopping in front of the hotel to edge up a little nearer the door for a look at Dunham, and hang around there in the hope of hearing him say something.

It would have been counted a great distinction to have such a notable hand with a gun to speak to a man. There were plenty of sycophants waiting around who would have broken a leg to do this suddenly made hero a favor.

Dunham was uncomfortable under this sudden notoriety. MacKinnon did the best he could to put him at ease by inquiring into his future plans, whether he still intended to go on west or stay there and pick up a job. Dunham confessed that this latest development had confused his plans. He wanted a little time to get them straight again.

Anyway, there was no need for leaving Pawnee Bend now unless he felt that he could better himself elsewhere, MacKinnon said.

How about being arrested and tried for that unfortunate affair with Kellogg? Dunham wanted to know. Not that anybody ever heard of, MacKinnon said. There must have been a hundred witnesses to the fact that Kellogg had forced him to defend his life, and that without the faintest color of legal excuse. Trust him, old foxy MacKinnon, to lay the groundwork for proper defense if anybody raised the question. Hadn't Dunham heard his protest against law-abiding guests being driven from his house? That was all there ever would be to that case. It had opened and it had closed. MacKinnon confessed that he hadn't enter-

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 tained a ghost of a hope that Bill would survive that meeting, but he had laid the groundwork in case it might flip around the other way.

Men would walk easy when they went by him now; he would be considered by not a few, MacKinnon himself among the number, a public benefactor, for, to tell the truth about it, Kellogg had been more feared than respected in that town. They were becoming weary of his killings, his growing disposition to take the whole works into his own hands.

It always was that way with one of those killing city marshals, MacKinnon said. They got so vicious and snarly the men who hired them were often afraid to fire them. He had seen it happen before: in MacPherson, and Dodge City, and other places where he had conducted family hotels.

And so on, to a great length, MacKinnon doing all the talking, for which he was very well qualified, without a doubt. Bill didn't want to go to the expense of hiring a room for his meditations, and there was no place in MacKinnon's little lobby that was out of the eyes of men. So he stood there and took it, when his soul ached for silence, with that curious crowd outside the door, not one of them with the courage to come in and speak to him man to man.

Into this phase of Bill Dunham's perplexity, not half an hour after his bullet had cut the thread of Ford Kellogg's altogether vile and worthless life, there walked Mayor Ruddy, the hardware merchant, and Henry Bergen, townsite promoter, with his long coat, red vest, big lodge emblem and all the outward embellishments

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 upon which his consequence depended. Those outside felt they might slip in safely under the shadow of these important men, and in a moment the little office was full.

Mayor Ruddy advanced, looking so glum and severe Dunham thought they had come to arrest him. His mission was pacific, as his extended hand proved, greatly to Dunham's relief. The mayor said nothing at once, just stood there shaking hands with Bill, pumping slowly and solemnly, Bergen standing by, his large grabber out, ready to take over the now notable six-hundredth citizen when the mayor was through.

"It's a pleasure to meet you again under these circumstances, Dunham," the mayor said.

"Thanks," said Bill.

"Congratulations," said Bergen, looking at Bill knowingly as he worked his arm in the come-on handshake of which he was master. He seemed to say in that shrewdly confidential look that they were two of a kind; they understood each other from backbone to buttons. He got hold of Bill's elbow with his left hand while he gripped him with the right. "Congratulations," he repeated, his eye as knowing as if he had just discovered Bill to be a brother in the lodge whose emblem clanked against his vest buttons as he shook.

"Thanks," said Bill again, but not very heartily. He was not up to their game; he viewed them with suspicion.

"Dunham," said the mayor, as stern as if he was about to lay an accusation of homicide, "I don't know how you'll take it, but we'd like to put you in as city

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 marshal. We want an officer of the law, not an oppressor. The salary is sixty dollars a month."

He came to it the way Bill would have expected a business proposal from him. No wasting of words or making rabbit trails by that man. Bill was as grateful for the offer as he was surprised by it and relieved of all doubt on his standing.

"I'm afraid I'm not cut out for that kind of a job, Mr. Ruddy," Bill replied, without even taking time to meditate over it and turn it around in his mind.

"The city council has held an informal meeting to consider filling the vacated office," the mayor continued. "The salary is sixty dollars a month."

"I'm complimented—"

"Not at all, not at all," Bergen interposed, lifting his hand to check the conventional words on Bill's tongue, as well as the refusal that they seemed determined not to entertain. "Consider the opportunities of this city, situated as it is in this empire of cattle, with its rapid development, its untouched resources, its tremendous future!"

Bergen waved his arms, he declaimed, not so much to convince Dunham that he would throw away the main chance of his young career by refusing that job, as to impress his true importance on the rest of them in the room. It was his opportunity of calling their attention to what they had missed in passing him on the street that way.

"Yes, I think it'll be a good country when they start farmin' it," Dunham agreed.

"The salary," Mayor Ruddy repeated, looking

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