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 Dunham heard her stop, and her voice, almost a whisper:

"Mr. Dunham! Mr. Dunham!"

He turned in surprise. She was standing near, one hand at her throat as if fright or emotion oppressed her, panting through her open lips. Whatever had given her that turn, Dunham saw at once, it was not the sight of him.

"They're after you!" she whispered, pointing up the street where all seemed so placidly empty. "You must go—quick, quick!"

"After me?" he said incredulously, forgetting MacKinnon's warning in his astonishment.

"In the livery barn—a crowd of them with guns! Get out of town, quick!"

She flitted past him, out of sight in a moment around the corner of the depot, her friendly fear for his safety no greater-than her concern that somebody had seen her warning him, and would lay up a grudge that would make life unendurable for her and her husband in that town.

Dunham understood now why the street was empty. They expected him to pass along there from his horsehunt, his movements having been spied on all the time. Nobody wanted to be seen speaking to him, even to the exchange of the slightest word, for fear of the taint of treason that might attach.

He was angrily contemptuous of the crowd that had collected to give him a rough handling—how rough he plainly understood—waylaying him in the barn, to which they expected him to return when he had failed

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 to find his horse, as they knew quite well he should do. Taking his horse was part of the scheme to cut off his legs, so to speak, and trap him in that miserable hole.

There was no use attempting to follow the woman's advice and go, for an attempt to get away now would bring the bunch of them whanging bullets at his heels. It was a long way to the next water-tank where trains stopped, a matter of sixty miles, too much of an undertaking in cowboy boots. The only thing to do was let the horse go—no, he'd be damned if he'd let that horse go!

But how was he going to compel them to hand over the horse? They'd stick together, nothing could be done. The better course would be to carry along the pretense that he believed the horse had run away, tell the liveryman to turn it over to MacKinnon if it was taken up and returned. When a train came along going his way, he'd ride out of town, but no bunch of tin-horn gamblers and four-flushers was going to tell him when to leave.

What was there about him that led people to believe he was easy to ride? There must be a flaw in his face that his partial eyes never had discovered. Did he carry the unmistakable brand of meekness, the mark of the under dog? That was where people made their mistake. He had turned the position of under dog. His teeth were grown, his were cut, his wisdom-teeth were an inch long.

That was where they made their mistake, taking him for the under dog, thinking him an easy man to roll. Invariably they brought it on themselves. Those two

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 men had persisted in making the same fool blunder a little while ago and brought it on themselves. Now these fellows over in the barn, whoever they were, seemed determined to repeat the mistake. It was his business to show them he wasn't that kind of a man.

There he stood in plain sight of all the street, making these foolish cogitations, when he no doubt should have been burning up the road getting away from there. If he had realized his danger fully he probably would have attempted to make a quiet exit, but he was so scornful of that gang he couldn't reason straight.

He'd go over there and let them know he was wise to the fact they'd made away with his horse, and tell them he would take his own time about leaving that town. With this thought all ready in words behind his teeth he stepped off the platform, considering, as his foot struck the track, that he'd better ask the agent when the next train west was due. It wouldn't do to fiddle around over there and miss it.

Bill turned to go back and consult the agent and, turning, felt something slap his left shoulder like the flip of a bough when one rides through the woods. There was the quick, sharp sound of a rifle in the quiet of the morning, and Bill Dunham stumbled and caught himself from a fall by throwing out his hands to the platform boards.

Dunham was up in an instant, and facing the livery barn, gun in his hand. Nobody was in sight there; nothing to tell where the shot that got him in the shoulder came from but a little drift of blue smoke outside the opening in the gable for hoisting baled hay.

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 He threw two quick shots in there, stepped to the platform and dodged over to the corner of the building, ducking for shelter as fast as he could go, a burst of shooting behind him, bullets splintering the planks at his heels.

His left arm felt numb, but there was no pain; blood was pouring out of the wound down his sleeve. Thinking of getting the agent to help him, not knowing how serious his wound might be or how long he could keep going, Bill headed for the telegraph office. He was about to enter when the agent, white and scared to the rims of his eyeballs, slammed the door and locked it.

"Don't come in here!" he yelled through the door, his high-keyed unmanly voice quavering. "For God's sake, don't come in here!"

It was more a supplication than a command. Dunham saw the woman's piteous face at the window, her eyes pleading forgiveness for this inhospitable barring of refuge to a forsaken man. He turned away, thinking what next.

He thought of MacKinnon and the hotel, of fighting his way over there, win or lose, but doubted, when he came to the decision, whether he would be any more welcome there than in the railroad office. His conscience was so entirely unclouded that he found it hard to realize himself an outlawed man.

They had got him pretty well up in the left shoulder, above the lung he believed, as there was no blood rising in his throat. Maybe it was only a slight wound, but it began to feel as if it might be serious. He must cut for some shelter where he could stand them off while he

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Richard the Third, V. iii

Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;

For conscience is a word that cowards use,

Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.

March on, join bravely, let us to 't pell-mell;

If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?

Remember whom you are to cope withal:

A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and run-aways,

A scum of Britaines and base lackey peasants,

Whom their o'ercloyed country vomits forth

To desperate adventures and assur'd destruction.

You sleeping safe, they bring you to unrest;

You having lands, and bless'd with beauteous wives,

They would restrain the one, distain the other.

And who doth lead them but a paltry fellow,

Long kept in Britaine at our mother's cost?

A milksop, one that never in his life

Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow?

Let's whip these stragglers o'er the seas again;

Lash hence these overweening rags of France,

These famish'd beggars, weary of their lives;

Who, but for dreaming on this fond exploit,

For want of means, poor rats, had hang'd themselves:

If we be conquer'd, let men conquer us,

And not these bastard Britaines; whom our fathers

Have in their own land beaten, bobb'd, and thump'd,

And, on record, left them the heirs of shame.

Shall these enjoy our lands? lie with our wives?

 315 Cf. n.

316 cope withal: have to do with

317 sort: set

323 distain: defile

325 Britaine: Brittany

329 overweening: presumptuous

335 bobb'd: banged

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 examined it, and tried to do something to dam up that waste of blood that was soaking his shirt and running down into his boot.

There was a car of baled hay on a siding about forty feet from the station platform, a little way below the depot, which the liveryman had begun to unload that morning. The door was open, showing tumbled bales of hay. Dunham headed for it, watching back as he ran. The wound was beginning to burn like a hot rod driven through him; blood squashed in his boot when he stepped.

As he swung into the car Dunham heard the pelting of feet on the platform. Somebody yelled, "We've got him! Come on!" Bullets thumped the bales of hay as he rolled out of the door to shelter behind them.

Dunham's pursuers stopped where they could take shelter behind the depot, from the corners of which they shot into the side and open door of the car. Dunham quickly arranged bales of hay, making his situation safe for the time. He couldn't see the shooters from where he lay, and didn't like to bang loose blindly for fear of hitting the agent or his wife.

His silence led them to think they must have got him. They came around the corners and peered cautiously, Dunham arranging his bales to make a slit through which he saw their movements. When some of the more adventurous had come far enough to clear the depot, Dunham threw a shot close to their feet to show them he was still in business and able to account for himself if they should attempt a rush.

There was a scramble for cover; they put the depot

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 between him and themselves again. There they lurked, somebody cracking away at him every time he moved a bale of hay.

Dunham felt the numbness going out of his arm, which began to tingle to the ends of his fingers with the increasing pain of his wound. He reloaded his gun and worked fast to make himself secure while his strength lasted, arranging hay bales to give him command of both doors, only one of which was open.

Examination of his wound disclosed that the bullet had passed cleanly through his shoulder about opposite his armpit. From the burn of it inside him he believed it must have nipped the lung. It was bleeding scandalously, he thought, for such a little wound, and it was in such an awkward place there didn't appear to be a thing he could do to help. But with teeth and sound hand he tied the blue handkerchief that he wore around his neck as tightly as he could draw it, under his arm and over the wound, hoping the compression might assist nature to some degree in shutting off the blood.

That was all he could do, and he realized it was not much. Having done it, he sat on a bale of hay, well protected behind his bulwark, to try to figure out, as he put it to himself, exac'ly where he was at.

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was Dunham's conclusion that he had made a mistake in taking refuge in that car. They knew he was wounded, for they had seen him stagger when the shot from that high-powered rifle got him. Any desperate chance that he might have taken looks better than his choice to a man when he realizes its worthlessness. Dunham now thought he should have gone to the barn and had it out with them, win or lose.

A number of possibilities which seemed shut off to him now, presented in that lost chance. He might have found his horse, he might have been able to get to the doctor, who would have stood them off if he was half the man he looked. Anything would have been better than the course he had taken. They had him now; all they had to do was wait. Unless he could open the opposite door and slip out on the other side of the car.

The thought revived him with hope. He began to move the hay to come at the door. About one load had been taken out of the car, he calculated as he worked; just about one load. He cleared the closed door presently and tried to push it back. The pin was in the hasp outside; it wouldn't move.

It was a question on both sides of what to do next. Dunham had little choice of any course except to lie there and wait in the hope that MacKinnon and some

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GILLIAN.

63

father so pale, and filled that strong man’s eyes with tears.

“It is a beautiful view,” she added, softly, “some day, my cousin, we will go all over it. bear me! who is that?”

The two girls had walked into the hall as Gillian was speaking, and stood in the door of the family sitting-room. Opposite them was a long, old-fashioned mantle-glass, and in it Gillian saw the figure of a little woman shrinking away behind the window drapery, so pale and terrified, that it made her start and open her eyes with wonder.

“Oh! it is only aunt Hetty; you are sure to like aunt Hetty; come in and speak to her!” cried Hannah, cheerfully, “she’s a little backward with company, bat the dearest, nicest—oh! indeed—-”

Hannah broke off with a little start, for that instant aunt Hetty came forward, with a swift, noiseless movement, and stood close to Gillian, gazing in her face, with a scared, earnest look. “Sister! oh, sister I”

The words dropped rapidly from her lips, and she caught bold of Gillian’s dress, with a tender, pleading motion that perplexed the young girl exceedingly.

“Why, aunt, what is the matter? You haven’t get a sister in the wide world that I know of. This is our lady cousin from foreign parts. I told you all about it upstairs,” said Hannah.

“I know—I know!” said aunt Hetty, lifting me little hand to her forehead. “It is Sarah's child, not—not herself: I know that, but cannot realise it. Let me look at myself.”

She went up to the mantle-glass, and peered over the pale face that met her for more than a minute. When she turned away, the most wan smile that Gillian ever saw gleamed on her lips.

“Can you believe it?” she said, mournfully, pointing to Hannah, “I was like her then!”

“Why, aunt, how strangely you talk,” said Hannah, bewildered by this singular address.

“Do I?” murmured the old lady. “Do I? What was it all about?” She seemed tempted to address Gillian again, in the same vague way, but with one of her warm-hearted impulses, the young girl threw her arms around the little woman and kissed her two or three times. “So you were my mother’s sister. I understand it oow—and I look so much like her; of course that must be it. No wonder it disturbs you, aunt Dear! how strange it seems to call any one aunt Won’t you kiss me, dear lady?”

The old lady began to tremble under the caresses which the bright girl lavished on her, and Gillian remembered, after, that she did not return her kiss, but rather struggled in her embrace than responded to it.

“Oh, that’s right,” the farmer called out, entering the hall. “That’s right, Mehitable, welcome the gal with a whole heart; she must not feel strange among us.”

“I could not feel strange here, uncle Daniel,” cried Gillian, smiling brightly while the tears leaped to her eyes. “See how pat I have got all the names! I, who never had a relative before. Uncle, aunt, cousin! isn’t it delightful?”

“That’s kind and hearty,” replied the farmer. “Take our cousin upstairs, Hannah, while this young chap and I bring in the trunks. Aunt Hetty will see about supper while you get acquainted.”

The two girls went upstairs, but directly Hannah came down again to hurry the trunks. John Downs had one on his shoulder, mounting the stairs. Hannah stepped aside to let him pass, and then she observed, with a blush, what remarkably fine eyes the young fellow had. Amid all her excitement this thought would come back to her mind all the evening; for, according to the custom of those times, the driver sat down at the same table with his passengers, and Hannah was placed directly opposite him during supper.

I don’t pretend to know how it happened, but when Hannah Hart went to bed that night she had learned that John Downs owned two-thirds of a sloop on the river, beside the iron-grey horses, the Pennsylvania wagon, and some bank stock in New York. That his father had been one of the first settlers in the river town where he made his home; and altogether she gathered a very satisfactory account of his antecedents, though she certainly hail no sort of business with the information whatever.

That night, when all the family were in bed and the hush of repose lay on everything, Mr. Bentley and Daniel Hart sat together over the brands of a hickory wood fire that had burned low on the sitting-room hearth. There was a strong contrast between the two men, both in character and in person; not the contrast of good and evil qualities, but of intellectual organization. One was delicate, sensitive, and reflective by nature; all these qualities had been sharpened and refined by an education which few Americans could boast. The other was grand in his honesty, brave as a lion in every sense of the word, large-hearted and of vigorous mind, well informed, and yet almost entirely without absolute education. He was progressive in thought, but pronounced his words exactly as


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 of the better citizens would come to his assistance. He could not believe that the solid interests of the town, as MacKinnon had described them, were in the crowd; it was impossible to conceive such a quick shift of public sentiment against him. Only three days ago they had asked him to take the office of city marshal, grateful to him then, it seemed, for ridding them of a man-destroying oppressor whom they feared.

Kellogg had not been a friendless man, however. There were certain shady characters who found a safe harbor in Pawnee Bend under his protection, who had followed him in his shifting from town to town. Some of these were thieves and sharpers of the vilest type, who now found themselves standing out naked, as it might be said, before an unfriendly world.

These men could not entrench behind the law any longer; there was no other frontier open to their trade. Horse-thieves and bank-robbers, these men were, cattlerustlers and the gentry who plied blackjacks on the heads of drunken cowboys at night.

There were a few crooked gamblers and pimps among them, outlawed and despised even in that free-going society. Wolfish people, who clung together in a slinking pack, an under-current of the town of which Dunham knew nothing. These were vicious in their desire to avenge the death of their protector and friend, and Bill Dunham was the last man they wanted to see in his place.

It does not matter what the beginning of such a crowd may be, there always are plenty of men, respectable enough in their ordinary lives, ready to rush in and take

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 a hand. There is no sport so exciting as hunting down a man, no entertainment quite as thrilling as a hanging. Men go mob-drunk when one of their kind is being worried down to death. The fact that he is a fugitive condemns him, without any other evidence in the case.

So there were not wanting fathers of families and men with beards on their faces in the mob that sought Bill Dunham's life that day. The hardware merchant was not among them, nor Bergen, nor the dough-shouldered Puckett, but the liveryman was there, a sharp-faced, pale stooping lank scoundrel who had stolen enough horses in his time to remount the Seventh Cavalry. He was the cavalier who fired the shot from the hayloft when Dunham turned his back.

The solid interests of the town could not be said to be present and bearing a hand, but they were keeping circumspectly within their own doors, making no effort to stem or turn the tide of disfavor against Bill Dunham and save his life.

Fifty or sixty men, with the half-grown boys of the town pushing and nosing on the edge of the crowd like excited pups, quickly gathered on the lee side of the depot, eager to drag Bill Dunham from the freight car and hang him to the railroad bridge half a mile east of town.

Some of them never had seen Dunham; some of them had talked with him in staring awe only a little while before, when he had passed their sod hovels and plank shanties looking for his horse. The more notable the man in the case, the more glory in being able to say they bore a hand in hanging him.

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 Bill Dunham, lying bleeding in the freight car, his hasty bulwarks of hay protecting him front and flank, a solid pile of it roof-high behind him, felt himself in a pretty tight hole. It was so tight, and apparently so hopeless, that he believed his time had come to say good-by to daylight. Romance had led him into this pass, and there was no romance in such an end.

His wound was a streak of fire; the torture of sudden thirst that flares up from the drain of such a hurt was in his throat. Such a torment, growing as he knew his would increase as the sun mounted and beat down on the thin roof, might drive a man to face even the rope. He knew nothing, could know nothing, of the character of the mob, except there was no valor in it.

And a man could not make a compromise with cowards who held the advantage. He knew of old from the maulings, taunts and humiliations he had suffered at bullying hands, that no compromise could be made with cowards. He must lie there and suffer, and save his precious ammunition, wait for night and the chance it might bring him to escape or fight it out.

He could feel the crowd growing, even though he could not see it, for they were keeping carefully behind the depot, although he knew he was watched closely. He had only the ammunition in his belt and gun. He ran his thumb around the belt, thinking how few cartridges there were for so many scoundrels in that town who ought to be shot, wondering what the end would be.

His honest soul protested against the unfair deal they were giving him in that town, rising up that way against him because he had defended his rights. The cattlemen

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 might have sent the two ruffians who had provoked a quarrel to plead an excuse for killing him, but the cattlemen were not in on this. There was not even a cowboy in town, except those who might be lying in the stupor of whisky in some brothel, or stretched on the floor of a saloon.

They began shooting into the car again, probably to find out if he was still alive, or to provoke him to useless waste of his ammunition. He did not reply, lying still behind the bales of hay, eye to the crack he had made commanding the depot.

Presently he heard them at the end of the car, behind him, talking about smoking him out. There was stiff objection to this procedure in the voice of the liveryman, to whom the hay belonged. Then a sly movement along the side, somebody sneaking up with what design he did not know.

The door moved, grating noisily on its rusty bearings. They were planning to shut him in, the purpose of the maneuver not plain to Dunham, as he could not understand how they expected to get him any sooner by that. He threw a shot through the door as it slid forward, to let them know he was still up and coming, then tumbled a bale of hay in position to block the closing of his precious airhole. The activity outside stopped suddenly, and the genius of that enterprise made a hurried retreat.

Dunham's throat was as dry as if he had been eating the rough brittle forage that formed his defense. If they shut him in, the torture of his situation would soon become past human fortitude to endure. Perhaps

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 that had been their thought. The door was still about half open; he was determined to keep it that way, ready to drop out of when his time came to leave.

He believed they might cool off a little if he could hold them on the watch until evening. At least some of them would get tired of the game and leave, and the more sensible ones might see the unfairness of their enterprise and quit even before then. He wasn't going to keep their anger hot by provoking them. He wouldn't take a crack at anybody unless he had to do it to drive them out of the car. They couldn't rush him without somebody getting hurt, and they were not out for that. There was no fun in hanging a man if somebody had to be killed to do it.

It was something past eight o'clock when Dunham settled down, back to a bale of hay, to fight his fierce thirst and wear out the long day in defiance of the mob. Night was his only chance now, he knew. There would be a moon, but luck might cloud it up. Shooting even at close range was uncertain in the night; there would be as many chances for as against him then.

Wait until dark, which would not be until nearly nine o'clock in those lengthening days, twelve hours, and more than twelve hours, to stick it out. He did not believe he would bleed to death, for no artery appeared to be cut, although he might be weakened by the drain. He began to rehearse how he would do it when night came.

It was always darker in railroad yards than anywhere else, happily for his chance. He would slip noiselessly out of the door, let them have it good and

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 strong if they were hanging around, throw himself under the car and scramble through to the other side.

From where his car stood it was only a little way to the kitchen of the boarding-train. He would make a dash for that, fight his way in if he had to, and get a drink of water. Already the anticipation of that drink, twelve hours away, intensified the fire of his thirst. Then he would drop out on the other side of the boarding-train, where the world lay open to his feet. Getting away in the dark would not be hard; they would be careful how they crowded him in the dark.

Once clear of them, he would lay a line for Moore's ranch and ask Zora to help him. It would be a cheap thing to do, a despicable resort to the charity of a man whom he had tried to ruin, but it would be his one chance to come out of that scrape alive.

That was the program; he sat there rehearsing it over and over, the presence of the mob a shadow in the background of his thoughts. It was as if he had withdrawn from them a long distance, or to some inaccessible altitude, but that the way of escape would bring him back in peril of them again. Just now he was safe, but there was no way around; to escape he must pass again dangerously near. Down to the last detail of every conceivable exigency he rehearsed that plan. Over and over, with Zora and refuge at the far-away end of it, so far and so uncertain as to seem the fortune for which a man strives under long and cruel stress to see only in a dream.

Outside the sun blazed and the hot wind blew. Dunham's eyes were fevered and blood-lined; his head

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 throbbed with a quickening beat like the desire that increased in him to perfect that plan for night. His wound was painful; his tongue felt like dry sand.

Strange how that little wound in his shoulder kept on bleeding. Time and again he shifted when he found himself sitting in a puddle of blood. It kept running down, and running down, in a way to provoke a stout fellow like Bill Dunham. That burning in his pleural cavity was still there, evidence of a slow leak internally. It was a pain so hot and terrific as to seem the pure flame of pain. Alcohol poured into his chest could not have set up a torture more acute, he thought, wondering how a man's blood out of its proper place could bring him so much agony.

When he looked out, peering cautiously around the corner of his barrier, things wavered as if the heat glimmered between him and what he could see, twisting them out of shape. They seemed to be keeping pretty quiet out there; he wondered if they had given it up and gone away. He moved a bale of hay; it toppled and fell, tumbling through the door to the ground. They began to shoot, thinking he was coming out.

No, they had not given it up. They were there, viciously and persistently there, dogging him without a quarrel to back them, laying for him in pure meanness without an excuse that would turn an ant. If he ever got clear of there and out where he could throw his feet, there would be a reckoning with that gang, especially the man that shot him in the back, shot him in the back—the back—shot him in the back.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, vexed at that

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 repetition which went on like a mechanical thing without a voice in the back of his head. He had a feeling of dizzy sickness, as he had felt once when a little boy in a swing. What was the sense of a man feeling that way over a little hole through his shoulder? There wasn't a damn bit of sense!

He leaned on his hands against a bale of hay, and shook his head, and shook it, like one in a horrible nausea of useless retching. It would not clear. It whirled, and seemed to sink and rise, sink and rise, like something on water, something detached from him, not belonging to him at all. A troublesome head, a foolish, pain-shot head, with that hammer-beat in the temples, that dancing glare, as if he looked at things beyond a fire, in his eyes.

Bill sat down again, his back against the wall of hay, feeling weak and miserable. The pain he could bear, and that floating detached feeling of his head he could endure, but thirst was growing into a hideous torment that he could not bear much longer. He tried to get away from the longing for water, running over his hundred-times repeated plan for getting out of there after dark.

He would go cautiously to the door, lying flat, and look out and listen. If they moved a foot he would hear them, if they breathed within a rod of him he would know. Then out, a quick stoop, a silent dive under the car, taking care of the rods, which came low in the center across the beam, and out on the other side, making a dash for the boarding-car and water.

At each rehearsal of it now he hurried over the pre-

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 liminaries, making the cut shorter to the boarding-car and a drink of water. After a little he could see nothing but himself before the water pail, the dipper in his hand, pouring the delightful draught down his burning throat. He could hear the click of his palate as the big cool swigs went down, feel the blissful satisfaction of a torment assuaged. There the scheme began, do what he might to make it begin where it should; there it ended; at the bucket in the boarding-car.

A train came in, a passenger train, Bill knew by the way the bell was ringing, something gallant and dashing about it that did not sound in a freight engine bell. The brazen clangor of it, the palpitating, imperious, impatient clamor, seemed to come to him in rings of sound; spreading, expanding, wide-circling rings of hard, bright sound. There was a clanking of metal spout, chains and weights at the water-tank, then a gushing burst of downpouring water, a cool plashing overflow of water, a liquid, gurgling, rushing of cool water, that tried the strength of a man to hear.

Dunham started up, urged by desire to tempt destruction if he might die with water on his tongue. He was in the door, his blood-veined hot eyes on the wavering water-tank; his foot was feeling for the edge of the door, his eyes on that gushing, wasteful, white-rushing torrent down into the black tank of the panting engine. A shot splintered the timber not a foot from his head; he dropped back behind the bales of hay.

He heard the clank of the pipe as the fireman shut off the water and released it for the weights to lift, and the last dribbling of that wasted stream. He could not go;

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 it was not time to go. They were still there, hatefully, maliciously alert, waiting for thirst to strangle him, or that draining ebb of blood to weaken him until he could no longer hold his gun. Then they'd come. They'd come when he fell insensible, and shoot his old hide full of holes.

More than half delirious from the pain of that pleural effusion, Dunham had no thought of how long he had been in the car. Only that it was not night, it wasn't time to go. He began rehearsing the plan for getting out of there again, which took him with impetuous rush to the boarding-car and the bucket.

He got to thinking of Charley Mallon after that, how he shook the lemonade with the chipped ice in it, and put it down heaped with creamy foam, rich and cool with the soothing mucilage of raw egg. And then he thought of water in the springs he knew back home, and of water in creeks and the swift clear river, and water over ice at the time of spring thaws, when the smell of sap was in the maple trees. Water, any kind of water: water in the ruts of the road, water in horse tracks in the road, water in scum-green ponds, fetid water where vile creatures tracked the slime, but all of it blessed water that he would have flung himself down and drunk until he had drowned the fearful fire of his thirst.

And then of Charley Mallon again, his hot eyes bulging from his head, it seemed, with the pressure of pain behind them that crowded his brain so full of agony it was puffing in horrible enlargement, like a kernel of corn in the fire. Charley Mallon and the copper

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 shaker, and the half of lemon in the tall flaring glass.

He thought of it with such intense longing, such fiery, tortured longing, that Charley Mallon and the cool barroom seemed only a step away. What kind of a man was he to lie there and suffer when Charley Mallon was only a step away, waiting to shake him a lemonade?

What did it matter who was out there, or what they wanted, or how many stood in the way? What a fool he had been not to think of old Charley Mallon before! He scrambled up dizzily, the floor of the car rocking under him as if somebody had hitched it to a train.

A frenzy of insane rage was on him. He jerked out his gun, kicked the bale of hay out of the door, and slid out after it, staggering weakly as he struck the ground. But he struck shooting, and the mob that had swarmed around the depot at the report that he was breaking away scattered like leaves in the wind.

Look at them go! Look at them go! They were flickering and flitting like butterflies in his sick fevered vision, dim and wavering, dancing and floating and waving their long skinny arms, like nothing in the world but butterflies over cabbage plants on a hot, white day.

Dunham went on toward the depot platform, walking slowly, shooting as he advanced, heedless of any danger, unconscious of any peril, driven by the rage of thirst and the delirium of pain. Five or six men made a dash for the door of the freight-room, and from that shelter they began to shoot.

Dunham's gun was empty, but he went on, ploddingly, heavily, sickly on. The agent's wife, with heroic

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 desire to save a brave man's life, ran out of the office and stood in front of the freight-room door, stretching out her arms as if to gather the shots to her own breast. The scoundrels stopped shooting, but one of them slipped by, threw down his gun and let Dunham have it as he was trying weakly to heave himself to the platform by his knee.

It was a frustered quick shot, and wild, but it got Dunham in the thigh and tumbled him between the rails of the sidetrack which ran along the rear of the station. He fell so close to the platform, which was about three feet high, that he was sheltered from the storm of bullets that broke over him. They had him, they yelled exultingly across the street and from their scattered places of hiding, and they came pelting to put a curtain to the long-drawn tragedy.

It was then about noon. Dunham had been in the car four hours. A long time until night, indeed, but it looked as if it had come Bill Dunham's time to say good-by to daylight for the last time in his life.

The mob was in a more vicious mood than it had been at the beginning, due to there being two pieces of human wreckage lying on the station platform for Schubert to carry away. And a third man was running wildly, holding his hand to the side of his head, where Dunham's last shot had nipped his ear off as clean as shears. For a man in a tipping, rocking, film-obscured world, Bill Dunham had done some pretty fair shooting, indeed.

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heard the shooting as she rode into Pawnee Bend, but there was so much of it she did not connect it with a fight. The racket coming from the direction of the railroad station was in itself assuring. She attributed it to a gang of cowboys celebrating the loading of a cattle train, or giving one of their comrades who was about to embark on new adventures a send-off. Perhaps somebody had married.

She rode to MacKinnon's hitching-rack undisturbed by the occurrence, quiet having fallen over the town again. There was some excitement around the depot, and a general movement of the town's inhabitants in that direction, but nothing unusual for a charivari such as the boys were likely to pull off wherever they might overtake a newly wedded pair.

MacKinnon was not in the office; there appeared to be nobody at all around the place. Zora stopped a boy who was pelting breathlessly toward the depot and inquired what the excitement was about.

"They've got Bill Dunham!" he panted, eager to give the news. "He's been standin' off the whole town!"

"Bill Dunham!" she repeated blankly, staring at the boy, a feeling in her as if the whole world had dropped

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 away from around her feet, leaving her alone on a crumbling fragment.

"He killed two more men—they've got him!" the boy said, thrilling with pride in being able to give the important news. Then he tore along to get a look at the fallen hero.

Zora ran after him, her heart heavy with the bitterness of regret that she had not come sooner. She had heard the first burst of shooting, which she knew now must have been Dunham's last desperate effort to break through, when about a quarter of a mile away. If she had been five minutes sooner she might have saved his life. By that little margin everything that was precious to her had gone down in the general ruin of the world.

It looked like the whole town had arrived at the depot ahead of her. All interest pressed to a common point, where she knew Bill Dunham had fallen, against what odds, in what heroic defense, she could only surmise. She crowded among them—men and boys they were mainly, a woman here and there—with little exclamations of appeal, so stricken of face, so white and piteous, that they yielded her the precedence which seemed to be her right.

The station agent's wife, Mrs. Hoy, was holding up Dunham's head, trying to give him water out of a tin cup. He seemed limp and lifeless. There was blood on his lips; his shirt was soaked with blood. His head moved on the compassionate woman's arm, but his eyes were Closed, and the pallor of death was on his face.

"I got him, damn him!" a man was boasting as Zora broke through the press and came to the edge of the

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 platform. "I throwed it into him just as he was steppin' on the platform, his damn gun in his hand."

Zora looked at the boaster, a surge of hate rising so hot in her it was like a misty veil before her eyes. She did not know anything about the merits of Bill Dunham's case, nor even give it a thought; only that he was dead or dying, and this braggart stood there on the edge of the track, not five feet from Dunham's head, blowing that he had brought him down. She jerked her gun with a choking exclamation and slung it in his face.

Somebody struck her arm as she fired, the shot going safely over the fellow's head. They grappled with her, the man who had escaped his dues by a hand's breadth backing off, whiter around the gills than Bill Dunham, even in his extremity, was.

"Take that gun away from that hellion!" he said, clawing and backing to open a lane of retreat through the crowd.

Somebody had hold of her wrist; she couldn't lift the gun for another shot at him, hard as she struggled to break loose. They held her tight and took her gun away.

"You ought to know better than to go shootin' around in a crowd that way, lady," the man who held her arm said. He was a whiskered, fatherly man; he looked at her with a sort of injured reproach.

"Give me that gun!" she stormed, struggling, striking, kicking, even trying to bite the hard raspy hand that held her as fast as if her arm was set in a stone wall.

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 .) Lately the art of refining has been better understood in the provinces where the ore has been dug and smelted. This industry still flourishes especially in the districts round Osaka.

The extraction of the metal from the ore in Japan rests principally on the same basis as our Western continental copper smelting. The melting process according to Japanese methods is divided into several sections.

1.—Calcining or roasting the ore to expel part of the sulphur, arsenic, water &c. and powdering in order to obtain the black powder Kudzu.

2nd.—Fusion with silicate to remove the oxide of iron formed by the roasting process, to convert at the same time the oxide of copper, formed by the roasting, into copper sulphide, and to obtain finally a coarse metal (spur stein) Jap. =Sheave copper.

3rd.—Calcination of the coarse metal: a. to convert the still remaining parts of sulphide of iron into oxide of iron: b. fusion with some of the clay of the covering to remove the whole of the iron in the slag: and c. boiling the metal to expel the sulphur as sulphurous acid. =Crude copper.

4th.—Refining, to remove the cuprous oxide and bring the copper to tough-pitch. Tough copper, bar copper, =Copper melted bar.

1st.—Roasting the ore.

The coarsely powdered ore is calcined in a broad loamy furnace of about 25 metr. in length and 12 metr. in breadth. The furnace is covered with a shed, and, near to the bottom of it, has many openings for the entrance of the air. On the bottom of this furnace a layer of dry wood is placed, then a layer of ore, and thus alternately wood and ore till there are five double layers. Fire is then placed below, and the whole left for a period of 20-25 days. Part of the sulphide of iron is converted into sulphate of iron, by absorbing oxygen at the beginning of the roasting, and this sulphate is afterwards decomposed by a higher temperature, evolving sulphurous acid and leaving oxide of iron. A very small portion of the sulphide of

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38 ran we heard our mine explode behind us, and were gratified to find that it was not without effect, for a boiler-plate and funnel-head fell unpleasantly near us a moment later.

Reaching the bridge head we were surprised to see a woman's figure at the other end making frantic signs to us to go back. What could this mean? The engines were still pursuing, and I was about to proceed in spite of the warning figure when Gell touched my arm—"It is Aurelia," he said.

My girl Aurelia, though I say it, was one of a thousand. I had not a very high opinion of the generality of her sex, or of my own either for that matter, in sudden crises of danger, but I never knew her lose her courage or coolness of head, and felt sure that if she signed me back it was for some good and sufficient reason, though what I could not guess. So I paused.

Well for me that I did so. For with a crash and a roar the central portion of the bridge between us and her suddenly mounted to the sky in a cloud of smoke and flame. The poltroons of Jefferson City had filled up the measure of their cowardice. Too


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 "Ca'm yourself, sister," the whiskered man soothed her. He passed her gun to somebody behind him, and it disappeared.

Zora tore loose in a white fury, only to be hemmed in by the men who pressed around her and pushed her back from the edge of the platform.

"This ain't no place for women," somebody said.

The harsher their restraint the more furious her passion rose. She cleared a way and struggled to the edge again, vengeance now out of mind as it was out of the possibility. She only thought of Dunham, stretched bloody and limp as if the last ember of life had turned to ash.

"Is he dead?" she asked, kneeling to help Mrs. Hoy in her merciful ministrations.

"He's breathing faintly," Mrs. Hoy replied. "Here—take the cup—see if you can get some water in his mouth. He was hours and hours over there without a drop, standing them all off, the cowards!"

Zora moistened his lips with her fingers, washing away the blood that welled on his breath from his congested lung, Mrs. Hoy supporting his head on her arm. The crowd pushed around, hemming them in a blazing pit of noonday sun.

"If he ain't dead he damn soon will be!" somebody said.

At the touch of water on his tongue Dunham gulped and swallowed. Palpitating in a fearful suspense, Zora pressed the cup to his lips and tilted a little stream into his mouth. Patiently, scarcely breathing, the two women worked and watched, the shuffling feet around

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 them crowding closer, until there was only a slit in the throng the length of Dunham's body.

Blood was running along the railroad tie beneath Dunham's wounded leg, creeping sluggishly between the liveryman's feet. This fellow stood craning his long neck to watch the result of the women's compassionate labor. When Dunham began to gulp the water presently, his chest heaving between swallows, the liveryman turned to somebody behind him with an exclamation of satisfaction. There was a renewed stirring in the crowd, a surging forward to see.

Dunham opened his eyes when the cup was drained, and struggled to lift himself, shaking his head weakly to clear the obscuration of defeated death out of his vision. He felt as if he reposed on something luxuriously soft and lulling. There was a sensation of floating, an undulating, easy, restful motion of being carried along on water. He was so far over the border he had no recollection of the events which had brought him to that dusty bed where his blood was wasting away between the rails.

Zora spoke to him, bending over him, her hand on his forehead, her pleading eyes looking into his, where the image of friend and foe stood inseparable and alike. He felt that blissful sweep of water, that soft undulating motion of water, as a swimmer feels the lift of gentle surges when he lies on his back in lazy relaxation. He tried to smile, a glimmer in the dusty drawn lines of his grimy face.

"You run for the doctor, honey," Mrs. Hoy said. "I'll do what I can till he comes."

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 "We're the doctors in this man's case," the liveryman announced. "You done fine, sisters, you done fine!" He spread his arms to clear the crowd back, and stooped to look into Dunham's hazy eyes. "You done fine!" he repeated. "We'll take charge of this funeral now."

Zora started up with horrible apprehension. She looked around for help where there was no help, and back again in mute appeal to the agent's wife, who still knelt beside Dunham, her arm under his head.

"You'll have to step out of this now, ladies," the liveryman said.

"You'll not lay a hand on him!" Zora defied him. She looked at Dunham's belt, thinking of his gun, but it was not there. "You'll not lay a hand on him!" she stormed again, but knowing in her hopeless heart that she was powerless to stop them.

The liveryman jerked his head in signal to somebody behind Zora. They laid hold of her roughly and pulled her away, her struggles and tearful pleading unheeded.

Mrs. Hoy put Dunham's head down gently, and stood beside him, alarmed by this sudden turn against a man whom she believed to be beyond the vengeance of his most craven enemy.

"Why," she said, looking around in dismay, "why—why, gentlemen, you surely wouldn't lay hands on a dying man?"

"We'll be careful of him, ma'am," the liveryman said. "You just run along and tend to your biscuits before they burn."

They pushed her away, gently enough for men with

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 such a base design before them, for she had won their respect, if not much sympathy, by her intervention in Dunham's behalf when they were shooting at him from the door.

They picked Dunham up roughly and slung him like a sack to the platform. With the sudden change in position, the rough breaking of his blissful half-conscious dream of floating at ease without a care, the pain stabbed him in the chest with such excruciating dart his awakening senses fled. He fell insensible to the boards, his head striking cruelly. This lapse of sense concerned the liveryman. There was no fun in hanging an unconscious man. They'd might as well hang a sack of bran.

He told his fellow-lynchers as much, with ironical stress and obscene profanity. He sent somebody after a bucket of water. When it came he stood sloshing dipperfuls of it over Dunham's face and chest, watching closely for symptoms of revival.

While this was going on Zora was fighting like a wildcat to break away from her rough captors, who hustled her along the platform to the corner of the telegraph office and headed her toward the street. Get to hell out of there, little hellion that she was! they said. Few of them knew who she was, fewer cared a curse. All women looked alike to them.

John Moore had left camp forty miles from Pawnee Bend that morning to send some telegrams to his agents in Kansas City. On his way he had fallen in with Hughes, the Texas cattleman, whose herd was then two days' drive from the loading pens. They had ridden

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 along in good fellowship, the difficulties of their situation having been amicably adjusted.

As they approached town Moore noted the unusual activity around the depot, remarking on it to Hughes. They quickened their pace out of curiosity to find what it was about.

"Looks like a riot," said Hughes.

"Um-m-m," said Moore, tight-lipped and straightbacked, lifting himself in his stirrups to see.

"They's draggin' a woman along there," said Hughes, spurring his horse to a gallop.

"By God! that's my girl!" said Moore, and they rode abreast at a thundering pace up the white stretch of road, hands on their weapons, leaning in their saddles, their faces set for a fight.

They whirled at MacKinnon's hotel and dashed to the depot, galloping up the sloping platform and into the crowd, the ruffians who were manhandling Zora scuttling for their lives. Moore flung out of the saddle beside her, gun in hand, and gathered her into the protection of his arm.

"What're you up to here, you skimmin's of hell!" he bellowed, gun raised to spot the hide of the first man to make a break.

Zora clung to him, panting, dishevelled from her fight, her face scratched, hair tumbling over her shoulders, her hat gone, the throat of her shirt torn open. She pointed down the platform where a knot of men stood around Dunham, undecided on whether to stand or scatter. She was so agitated and breathless she couldn't find her words.

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 "What's the matter, honey? What have they been doin' to my girl?" Moore inquired, glaring around for somebody to plug with his big gun, which he held high and ready, a weapon of such deadly menace that the crowd thinned away like snowflakes on a hot stove.

"Bill Dunham!" she panted, pointing wildly. "They shot him—they're goin' to hang him! Don't let them! don't let them!"

"Bill Dunham?" said Hughes, bending down to hear her repeat the name, as if the sound of it astonished him beyond belief.

"Down there—the liveryman and that gang!"

Hughes started his horse with a bound, and bore down on the lynchers like the California Limited. He had his gun out, held shoulder-high, ready for as deadly business as any of that crowd ever had faced.

The liveryman was holding the bucket and dipper, Dunham's drenched form on the planks before him, half a dozen others, who did not sense the meaning of this quick turn in time to clear out, or stood with a thought of making a fight to carry their infernal program to its end, stood around him with their various weapons. The rest of the crowd had scattered.

Hughes pulled up so close to the lanky liveryman he could have knocked him stiff with his gun. Moore left his horse standing and came running, Zora a good stride in the lead.

"You've made a mistake in your date, gentlemen," Hughes said. "This ain't Bill Dunham's day to hang."

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was an uphill pull for Bill Dunham, lying in MacKinnon's hotel with fever in his wounds. A little puff of an adverse wind, and out the flickering blue flame would go, the doctor said. When it seemed at its lowest, like the failing light of an empty lamp, nature turned up the wick and lighted Bill Dunham over the grade.

Hughes had gone on to market with his herd, but he had left funds with MacKinnon to insure Dunham having the best of everything that money could provide in a bleak and comfortless place like Pawnee Bend, where men lived roughly and died with the bits in their mouths. A surgeon was brought from Wichita to operate for the complication that followed the leakage of blood into that tight compartment where blood never should be permitted to go sloshing around that way. A nurse was brought from the same center of culture and progress; she was as much of a sight as a zebra loose on the street in Pawnee Bend would have been when she walked out for a little airing in her white dress and cap.

John Moore was also taking a friendly interest in the wounded man. Moore was proud of the distinction he had come into through Dunham's singling him out for his particular mark at the ford that day. He talked

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 about it a good deal when he came to town in those days of Dunham's slow recovery, laughing and roaring 'in his loud way. He appeared to get a lot of pleasure out of telling how Dunham had bluffed his way through with the Texas herd by threatening to fill his hide full of lead.

"Yes, and he'd 'a' done it, too—he'd 'a' done it!" he always wound the story up, seriously, full of glowing pride.

Under Moore's thick skin there was a layer of generosity and a fair sense of justice, but the humor of Dunham's big bluff, and the distinction that had come to him through it, hardly would have sufficed to square the account for him with Moore. The telegram that Dunham had brought down to the border and carried around until it was stale, was the key to that situation.

The attorney-general of Kansas had sent the telegram to Moore, as head of the organized movement to quarantine against Texas cattle. He warned against closing the public highways against commerce from any point, and especially Texas. It could not be done in the capacity of individuals without certain liability of damages. The Texas Cattlemen's Association had given warning through attorneys that damage suits would be filed immediately upon the enforcement of this unlawful quarantine.

If the Kansas cattlemen wanted to stop Texas cattle spreading fever, they must have the legislature enact a quarantine law. At present there was no such law, nor any law which would uphold their contemplated action. Damage suits would lie against every man who stood at

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 the border to stop Texas cattle, or lent his name to such an effort. On that point the attorney-general was explicit and strong.

Dunham had told them the same thing, but they hadn't thought as much of his word that day as they came to think of it later. It was only after the Texas cattle were well inside the state that this official confirmation of what Dunham had said was put into their hands, and then some of them were ungenerous enough to say he had read the telegram before making his move. Moore at once, and always afterwards, emphatically denied this.

At any rate, the most stubborn of them saw reason in the light of the attorney-general's advice. Dunham was right; there was no sense in rairing up and going out gunning for him.

"He had more sense than any of us," Moore said. "He saved us damages in the millions by bringin' that herd over, for we'd 'a' stopped Hughes, and we'd 'a' stopped the rest of 'em that was close behind him, if it hadn't 'a' been for Bill."

Trail-riders were still on the border, directing Texas cattle to keep to designated routes. Others accompanied the herds when they entered the state to see that these restrictions were respected, all of which was near enough within the law that nobody was disposed to raise the question. This was working considerable hardship on the Texas drovers, as the grass soon was exhausted along these trails. They swore they were cured of any more adventuring with their herds along the old-time trails. That year saw the end of Texas trail-herds.

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 The Kansas legislature enacted a quarantine law that was as good as a barbed wire fence along the border, and the railroads got the Texas business after that.

The Kansas cattlemen were indignant in their denial of complicity in the attempt on Dunham's life. It was the general opinion that the two strangers who had started the trouble had been moved by a desire to add to their own fame by laying out a man so notable as Bill Dunham. Frontier gunmen always were under that shadow of peril at the hands of obscure and sneaking creatures who hoped to grow big by putting an end to somebody greater and more courageous than themselves. They were moved by the desire that actuates a savage to waylay and slay a valorous enemy, cut out and eat his heart.

The two sconudrels who had laid claim to Dunham's horse were unknown to everybody in Pawnee Bend but the liveryman, who harbored the wounded one until he was able to go his way, which was long before Dunham was on his feet again.

When it became known that Dunham would recover, and be ready in a month or so to square accounts, there were some uneasy heads in Pawnee Bend. The solid business interests, of which MacKinnon had spoken so impressively, were represented in the gang that tried to mob Dunham by the liveryman and one blacksmith, the rest of them being low ruffians and light-headed gentry of the kind always eager to run in and take a kick at a man when he is down. They are found in all layers of society, little less vicious in the grain pit of Chicago than in the dusty, sun-stricken street of Pawnee Bend.

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 Zora came to see Dunham every day, even when he lay fevered and delirious, unable to recognize friend from foe, under the impression, indeed, that all the world was his enemy. She never came alone. Either her mother or one of the boys, or Shad Brassfield's wife, accompanied her and went with her to the room where Dunham lay. Pawnee Bend was censorious in matters of feminine decorum; it set straight lines, and its expressions were as obscene as its thoughts. Zora would have borne all the agonies of suspense rather than defy the conventions of the peculiar social code she had grown up to respect as the Covenanter his gloomy theology.

It was on one of these visits, after Dunham had begun to crawl like a sea-bruised wrecked mariner back to the solid shore of life, that MacKinnon took Zora and Mrs. Moore into his troubled confidence. The news that Dunham would recover had gone around town. There was a murmuring among the heads that were marked for vengeance in the day when Dunham should walk abroad with his gun. There was dark talk, and darker plotting, MacKinnon said.

He was afraid it would go beyond that some night; he shook in his boots with the fear that they would rush him and murder Dunham while he lay helpless in his bed. Such a fear was not groundless, the women knew. Not a year before that a wounded gambler had been taken from his room at night and hung to an upended wagon tongue in the middle of the street. The safer it was to undertake a vengeance so base made its probability the greater.

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 MacKinnon didn't know what to do. He hesitated to run the risk of throwing Dunham into a relapse through worry and watchfulness by telling him, putting a gun on the bed by his side, and giving him to understand that he might be called on any night to fight for the remnant of life that was in his veins.

But there didn't appear to be anything else to do. He would lay down his own life, MacKinnon said modestly, yet with such sincerity there could be no question of his valor, to protect his guest, but they wouldn't stop at one more life to have their evil way.

There was feeling against MacKinnon among the lawless element that had burrowed there under Kellogg's protection, the outgrowth of his efforts to argue the mob out of its design the day Dunham was cooped in the freight car. He had escaped with his life that day only by pulling out and leaving them to have their way, and he didn't want to go through anything like that again. The worry of it was wasting the heart of him in his busum like a cup of spirits left standin' in the sun, MacKinnon said. His face showed the strain of his worries. It was lined and sad, and his gray hairs had multiplied.

Mrs. Moore resolved the tangle of MacKinnon's troubles by proposing to take Dunham to the pea-green mansion on the bank of the Arkansas, nurse and all. They brought the doctor into the friendly plot to help argue down Dunham's scruples, for he was against going. It would give them too much trouble, he said, although there was another and deeper reason that re-

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 strained him. After all he had plotted against Moore, he could not become a burden on his hospitality.

They did not mention the true reason for wanting to take him from MacKinnon's friendly care. He must get out of the hot confinement of that room, the doctor said; down by the river, where it was cooler, the prospect more cheering, and the water better than the hard, gypsum liquid they got out of the wells at Pawnee Bend. Nobody but the women and children and livestock drank it, the doctor said. It was the worst possible stuff a sick man could put down his throat.

But he wasn't a sick man, Dunham protested; at least not sick in a natural sense. He was only a shot-up man, who was getting better so fast he could feel himself grow. He didn't know anything about Moore's change of attitude toward him, or the peculiar pleasure the cattleman got out of the distinction of having been picked as a mark for Dunham's gun.

Zora's pleas were more effective in the end than all the arguments. Dunham yielded; they carried him down the back stairs and through the kitchen, put him in the spring wagon and rolled down the canvas to screen him from the dust and sun, they said.

It was a little while before noon, the best possible hour for anybody who didn't want his actions to become widely public to get out of Pawnee Bend. Nobody but those directly concerned, and MacKinnon's kitchen help, knew of Dunham's removal, and those not in the plan were ignorant of his destination.

The nurse refused to go to the fresh air of the range. She welcomed the excuse for breaking with her charge,

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 for she was longing for the refined atmosphere of Wichita, where there was a piano in every home.

Dunham's progress justified the change, his safety not considered. There was chicken broth and grape jelly, with more substantial fare as he got a little higher up the ladder. Better still, there was the service of friendship, if nothing more than friendship, which is better than any amount of paid nursing, skillful as it may be.

There was the presence of youth, and smiles, and the sound of singing in the house, and the activity of cowboys coming riding in from the range. Mrs. Brassfield could be heard at times singing that long ditty about the old man, which always made Dunham grab the edge of the bed or the arm of the chair and hold on as tight as if he feared he might take a tumble over the edge of something. It was the most risky song he ever had heard a lady lay her tongue to.

Moore often came in from the cow camps, boisterous as a March wind, curiously respectful of the young man who had used him as a pawn in the biggest single-handed game anybody ever had played on that range. He told Dunham how his defiance had worked around to the cattlemen's profit, and said the slate was clean. Nobody on the range had a grudge against him for bringing in the Texas herd.

Moore never attempted any apology for his conduct toward Dunham when he came down to the border under the belief that he had been hired to ride trail. He seemed to take it that Dunham had squared accounts for himself, and all was satisfactory. Time and

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 again Dunham saw Moore looking at him in a queer, puzzled way, as if there was something about the whole business that he could not understand.

Perhaps it was that Moore was trying to figure out how he had come to make the mistake of misjudging a man so wildly. It amounted to about the same thing as reading a brand wrong, and getting himself into a situation hard to explain.

Bill Dunham was a happy man the day he was able to go downstairs and sit under the cottonwood trees. He was as weak as that childhood concoction which he remembered as cambric tea, and just about as pale. The boys hung around him in worshipful awe, proud of the distinction of having a man who had shot so many worthless people, and had been shot all to pieces himself in a big fight, as a guest. The family had made a place for him which he fitted so naturally and comfortably that he wondered how he was to order his life without them when it came his day to leave.

Especially Zora. With the thought of an existence in which Zora did not figure, Bill was moved by a feeling of bleakness and desolation. When he confronted that situation, drawing nearer and nearer as his strength increased, it seemed to him as if the bottom had fallen out of the world, leaving him alone on the edge of an abyss which even his imagination could not bridge.

There was not anything original in his thoughts, speculations, longings, about Zora, to be sure. That is an unvarying tune on the lyre of youth, although every young man believes his own case unique and unparalleled in all the long history of human attachment. The

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 wooing male is the singer, the sigher, of all species. It is the female that is endowed with the wisdom of the ages. She has a demure presence, but a wise and calculative eye. Very likely Zora knew exactly how it would end from the day Bill Dunham's recovery was assured.

Bill began to grow restless as his strength increased. He was ashamed of burdening their hospitality, and said so with downcast look and humble voice. He wanted to go and find out what had become of his horse; he wanted to be stirring around looking for a job. He wanted anything, it seemed on the surface, but that luxurious inactivity which sure was going to ruin him, it would make him so lazy and trifling, he said.

To break these restless fits Zora would take him and the boys on short expeditions along the river to gather wild grapes, which were ripening, and search for blackberries, of which there never was one to be found. He could not go to Pawnee Bend yet, Zora said. And then Bill would begin to fret about his horse, and wonder who had it, and if he'd ever get it back. The bill for its keep would amount to its value if he didn't go out and find who had taken it up.

What was a horse more or less in a country full of horses? Zora wanted to be told. He could have the pick of the horses on their place, and he must be hard to please if he couldn't find one to suit him. Then she fanned him, and pushed his shaggy brown hair back from his forehead, treating him as if he was a very weak little boy.

No, he wasn't going to Pawnee Bend, and maybe

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 run into another fight, until he was good and able to hold his own, she said. He must get over that notion of going to town and cleaning up on that gang. Bill protested he wasn't thinking of it, but she knew he was. Wait a little while, she counseled. The day was coming when they'd get theirs, and get it good and plenty.

Zora always was hot and strong when she came to that assurance, which was more like a threat, indeed. She shut him off with that, invariably, and left him wondering what she meant. He wondered if he had blabbed in his delirium of the vengeance he had laid up against that gang? Or had she read his intention in his sober face, underlying, as it was, every thought of his future activities?

For the thought of a mighty cleaning-up in Pawnee Bend had been with him from his first conscious gleam. It was a deep and solemn determination, as somber over his young soul as the shadow of a rising storm.

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 copper is also converted into oxide of copper, so that the roasted ore consists actually of a mixture of oxide and sulphide of copper with oxide and sulphide of iron. During the roasting of the ore dense white fumes constantly escape from the furnace. The Japanese are rightly afraid of this poisonous ‘copper smoke,’ and very seldom resort to the place where the copper is burning, so long as they perceive it. It contains arsenionus acid, antimonious oxide, sulphurons acid, sulphuric acid &c., all more or less poisonous substances, which have an intensely destructive effect upon the vegetation of the neighbourhood. When the fire is extinguished and the furnace cooled, the coarse copper slag is taken away to be powdered and to undergo the second operation. In the powdered state it is called Kudzu. It will be remarked that the roasting process of the Japanese is very rough, and constitutes one of the reasons why they do not obtain as much metal out of their ore as would be possible with better system of furnaces.

2nd.—Fusion with silica of the hearth-ash to obtain coarse metal (Kawa-do).

The roasted slag is sometimes mixed with loam or silica containing stone, if the original ore does not already contain a sufficient quantity of quartz or silicial stone. The whole is exposed to a much stronger charcoal fire in order to get the slag fused. The small quantity of oxide of copper in the roasted slag acts upon the sulphide of iron still present in the ore, forming sulphide of copper and oxide of iron. The quantity of oxide of copper in the roast slag is, however, too small to decompose the whole of the sulphide of iron. This excess of the sulphide of iron now combines with the sulphide of copper to form a fusible compound which separates itself from the slag and runs to the bottom of the furnace. The oxide of iron combines with silicic acid and forms a slag.

The furnace for this operation in small and has a peculiar thick round bottom in which a round cavity is made. This cavity is surmounted by a square chimney of bamboo and loam. The chimney is open on two sides up to a

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were making preparations for a big celebration at Pawnee Bend to rejoice over the completion of the county's organization. This had been delayed somewhat on account of a question of the petition's validity when it was filed with the secretary of state. Several shady deals had been put through by dishonest promoters in the organization of counties in southern and southwestern Kansas, in which innocent people were left holding a large and entirely empty sack. It was time to begin a close scrutiny of petitions, and this one was put under the glass.

It stood the test at length, and the organization was sanctioned. The day was set for the new county officers to take over the local government; the judge of that circuit was coming to Pawnee Bend to swear them in. At the same time the site of the court house was to be dedicated in judicial oratory and baptized in congressional speech. The congressman of the district—it was bigger than three New England states—was going to be there with his fireworks, and there would be barbecued meat, roasted on the spot. Everything would be freer than salvation, for there would be no collection.

Dunham had been hearing a great deal about this big day. They were all worked up at Moore's place

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 over it, Mrs. Moore and Zora baking pies and cakes for two days before the event. They had put Bill off on the matter of his departure about his indefinite business until that day of days. It would be a double celebration for him then, they said, marking the restoration of his health and a new order of things in Pawnee Bend.

There was no question about his complete restoration. Dunham knew he had been well for at least two weeks, but he allowed himself to prance in the restraint of Zora and her mother, which was enforced now and then by Moore's heavy advice to take it easy and be careful he didn't bust something by striking out too soon.

He had known many a man, Moore said, who had undone himself by starting out too soon after being laid low with a bullet through his lights. That kind of a wound was treacherous; it left a tender spot that was liable to bust on the least exertion, especially under the stress of excitement. Keep still, and keep cool. They were all going to Pawnee Bend for the blowout; that would be time enough for Bill to make his-reappearance there.

It was while the ladies were engaged with the pies and cakes that Bill had his first opportunity to talk with Shad Brassfield. Shad had been here and there around the range, at home only for a brief look-in now and then, shy of Dunham on account of his questionable standing, but assured in some degree when he saw Bill going around without a gun.

Shad was mending harness that afternoon, it being

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 the day before the doings. He was surrounded by tugs and collars, sitting in the midst of the confusion on a low bench in the center of the kitchen floor. Mollie sat off to one side, smoking her pipe with the placid enjoyment of a hen in a dust bath beside the road. There was radiant kindness in her hollow, homely face; she nodded as Dunham darkened the door.

"Lord love you, Mr. Dunham, you ain't been around to see a body in a coon's age," she chided him. "Come in out of the hot sun and set down and rest your hands and face."

"Pickin' up, ain't you?" Shad remarked, putting out a feeler, not certain how he was going to square himself for his humorous break at the border camp that day.

"If I pick up any more I'll be so fat I'll waddle like a goose," Bill replied.

This eased the situation for Shad. He saw he wasn't going to be hauled over the coals for that mistaken piece of pleasantry. The cramped feeling went out of his legs; he breathed freely, and took a chew. He mumbled around the plug with a nosey sound, so full of gab he couldn't waste a second, trying to talk as he twisted off the big hunk of tobacco and worked it back against his jaw.

"Um-m-m-m, plenty goin' on while you've been laid up, Bill."

"Yes, I've got over the notion things'd stop if I was to die."

"Some folks thinks the grease'll burn offen the

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 griddle if they turn their backs," Mrs. Brassfield said.

She didn't look at Shad, but she aimed the observation at him as directly as if she drew a bead on a squirrel. Shad was preparing to rivet a broken tug, which he had stretched on the bench between his bony legs. Her irony passed over him without making him blink.

"I was over in Pawnee yisterday, first time in a month, I guess. Lot of changes goin' on over there. Munroe, he's gone."

"Munroe? Who in the dickens is Munroe?"

"The feller that had the livery."

"Munroe, was it? I didn't know his name."

"One of his names; he changed it every time he stole ahorse. Yes, Munroe he's gone. He sold out when he heard you was goin' to git well. He's the feller that shot you in the back—I reckon you know."

"No, I didn't know," Bill admitted. He looked at the floor in his deep-thinking way, as if the news had started a train of somber reflection.

"He made his blow around town he done it. He thought then you'd peg out. And Vic Gilroy, he's dusted it, too."

"I didn't know him," Dunham said, shaking his gloomy head.

"He's the feller that put up the brag he got you in the leg when you made that break out of the boxcar—the feller Zora pulled out and took a shot at. Yes, and she'd 'a' got him, too, if Randall hadn't 'a' jiggered her arm."

"Zora?" Bill looked up, such startled surprise in his

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 eyes that it was almost fright. "I didn't know she took a shot at anybody. She never said a word to me about it. Are you sure you've got it right?"

"Right? Hell! everybody knows it."

"Some folks that gabs without lief or license is apt to git their foot in it," Mrs. Brassfield said. "I reckon Zora she'd 'a' told Mr. Dunham herself if she'd wanted him to know."

"I ain't a carin' a damn," Shad said, recklessly. "Everybody knows she took a shot at him. I ain't a carin' a cuss what she wants to keep still."

"I didn't know," Bill said helplessly, sweat standing on his forehead at the thought of the danger Zora must have faced for him that day.

"Yes, and Randall he's gone, too. Well, xe lit out as soon as he got over the maulin' Moore give him—and he give him plenty, I'm here to say, men!"

"I never heard of Randall," Dunham said, his confusion growing at this repetition of an old story that was news to him.

"He was a blacksmith, he had a bunch of whiskers growin' on him up to his years. I never did see how in the hell a man with that many whiskers on him kep' 'em out of the fire when he was stirrin' it up around a horseshoe, no, nor kep' the sparks from touchin' 'em off when he hammered a redhot aarn. He was the feller that was draggin' Zora away from you when Moore and that Texas feller come a bustin' up. You heard about them two fellers comin' in the nick of time to save your neck, didn't you, Bill?"

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 "Yes, I heard about that, but that big stiff draggin' Zora—you say he's gone?"

"Yeah, Bill; he's gone. No need of gittin' your bris'les up over that feller. Moore give him all any one man wants to pack, I'm here to tell you, men!"

"I'm sure glad he piled it on!" said Bill, wiping sweat from his eyes.

"Funny the way Moore went after that feller," Shad chuckled. He was fitting copper rivets—he called them ribets—in the holes he had punched through the tug, taking his time about it, calculating to make it last a good while, that being the kind of a job he liked. "You know Randall he ducked, along with most of the gang, when Moore and Hughes come tearin' up the platform, but Moore he tore out after him as soon as they carried you over to the hotel and got the doctor."

"I'll bet you!" said Bill, all excitement, throwing it in as applause of that long-past reckoning.

"He went after him hot-heels and hell-bent. Randall he was in his shop, tinkerin' around actin' innercent as hell, and Moore he bust in on him and says, 'What in the hell do you mean layin' your thievin' claws on my gal?' he says. Randall backed off and said what in the hell did he mean, and begun clawin' for his gun. Moore he ain't no specially speedy hand at gittin' at his gun, but he beat Randall to it and throwed down on him."

"Sa-a-y!" said Bill.

"They said Moore stood there a little while borin' that feller in the guts with his gun, dressin' him down to a fare-you-well. But Moore, you know, he ain't no

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 gun man like me and you, Bill; that ain't his way of fightin'. The longer he cussed that feller the madder he got, till he got so damn mad he jammed that old gun in the scabber and lit into Randall with his fists."

Bill was on his feet, his own fists doubled hard, the two little white spots showing on the bridge of his long nose, breathing like a horse.

"Good boy!" he cheered. "Good boy!"

"Moore took that feller a clip under the chin that nearly lifted him through the roof, and he laid him out so cold he never got no more chance to use that gun 'n a angel. And he was holdin' it in his fist all the time! Well, sir, gentlemen, when Moore got done with that man they had to borrow Schubert's plank to carry him home on, and when he got able to sneak, he snunk. I guess you won't find nobody much to shoot up when you go back to Pawnee Bend tomorrow, Bill."

"Maybe it's just as well," Bill reflected, sitting down again soberly.

"It's better," Mrs. Brassfield said, decisively.

"Oh, I don't know about that," Shad argued. "A man's got a right to clean up on a gang that tries to murder him off. I know if it was me I'd foller 'em to the aidge of nowheres but I'd git 'em."

Mollie made no comment on this vengeful and relentless declaration, which appeared about as far from the nature of her lean old caterpillar husband as opposites could be extended. She tilted her chin and pulled down the corners of her flexible thin mouth, expressing disdain far more effectively by her silence than any words she could have commanded.

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 "I reckon you'll be pullin' out and leavin' this country, Mr. Dunham, "she said. They ain't treated you very nice, always pesterin' and pickin' on you and drivin' you to shootin'."

"He ain't got no kick comin' as I can see," Shad interposed before Dunham had time to reply. "He's give 'em as good as they passed out to him, and some over, the way it looks to me."

"I hate a fuss," Bill said, disparaging the past, in which he could not see the faintest gleam of glory.

"Roastin' years'll be ready back where they grow," Mollie said longingly. "I don't have hopes I'll ever wedge one between my jaws any more, let alone settin' down with my apurn full of shell beans to make a pot of suckertash."

"Some people wouldn't be sadisfied if they had a rope on the moon," Shad complained. "When we move you say you're tired of movin', and when we set still you beef around about goin' on. I've wore out six wagons tryin' to find a country that'd suit you."

"You was always mighty careful you didn't let me do the drivin'," she reminded him, looking so sad and road-weary that Dunham pitied her as never before.

"You got chickens and eggs," Shad reminded her, with upbraiding for her ingratitude.

"And canned beets, and canned corn, and canned termaters," she added to his list of luxuries. "I've et so much canned truck in the last five years, Mr. Dunham, I'm lined with tin. They never could open me without a ax. They call this the short-grass country, but I call it tin can land."

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Rh fearful to fight for themselves they had thought it no shame to sacrifice the two men who alone had stood between them and the impending doom.

I should like to have witnessed that last meeting of the council, at which the decision to blow up the bridge was taken. After the flight of my militia the whole city crowded the housetops to see this great sight—the conflict of two men with a thousand monsters. From their coigns of vantage they could see the shots fired, and engine after engine fall, but the main host still continuing its advance. Suddenly the rumour spread, whence none knew, that the bridge was to be blown up. It came to my daughter's ears, who at once rushed down into the street, and penetrated into the sanctuary of the council chamber, to find the fatal order already issued. It appears that my engineer, the man who had placed the mine at my orders, had made the base proposal to the council, which had grasped at it eagerly.

"Is it true," said Aurelia to the Mayor, "that you have decided to blow up the bridge?"

"Wall," said the Mayor, "I guess we thought it


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 "You wouldn't be sadisfied in heaven," said Shad.

"Maybe not," she sighed.

Mollie got up and began stirring the supper pots, for the sun was low. As she moved about her work she pitched her thin high voice in the song she favored most, and sung with a peculiar note of lamentation as unfitting to its frivolous theme as a glove to a foot:

Shad looked at Dunham, nodding with an air of finality, like a lawyer submitting his incontrovertible evidence.

"Yes, and if a feller was to fetch 'em to her," he complained, "she'd say she wanted a hummin' bird's wishbone."

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looked as if the short-grass country was emptying itself into Pawnee Bend for the celebration that day. Bill Dunham heard the beat of hoofs in the road before daylight as the first skirmishers, who must have left distant cow camps at midnight, passed. These were the cowboys who had leave for the day, determined to make it a long one, hastening in to prime their appetites and lay the foundation for a proper state of hilarity fitting to the big event.

By sunrise traffic began to thicken until there scarcely was a time when somebody was not in the road, a condition of marvelous activity in that vast lonely land. Later the spring wagons and buggies came rolling along, wheeling up such a dust as never was seen on that old trail except when a Texas herd went by on the end of its long slow march.

It was such an animating sight that the Moore family were constantly rushing out with things in their hands to see, and hail distant friends, and whoop farcarrying conversations, which the travelers never paused to engage in, with satisfaction and good cheer to all concerned.

Moore was at his best in those loud-shouted hails and questions after the welfare of families and general conditions on far corners of the range. He could

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 keep it up until the travelers were around the first bend, often shouting his last pleasantries in tremendous crescendo after they were clean out of sight over the hill. He was so red and happy in his boisterous loud style that one might have thought him the manager of the big show, his fortunes secured by the generous outpouring.

The Moore family fell in with the procession duly, Bill Dunham riding with Zora and the two older people in the spring wagon, the boys romping along on their horses. Brassfield and his wife had gone on ahead hours earlier, both in high hope of picking up with some old cronies of their past rambling life.

Bill Dunham had not known of any public square in Pawnee Bend, any more than a casual visitor from anywhere, let him be never so keen, would have been aware of its space or confines. It was an area surrounded by short-grass plains, lying entirely beyond the uttermost growth of the town. The promoters of Pawnee Bend, Bergen and Puckett, had planned grandly and the town had not overtaken their expectations, to say nothing of building around them to the formation of a hollow square.

But the square was there, duly set aside and designated, a distance of two good city blocks beyond the last business house at the end of the principal street. With the county organization now complete, the county seat assured to Pawnee Bend, there was good reason to believe the street would stretch in time until its buildings enveloped the square. There the court house would lift its cupola above brick walls, with cottonwood

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 trees around it in due course. There is a lot of compensation in a cottonwood tree for that arid short-grass land.

Exactly in the center of this square, where the very holy of holies of the court house would be, a plank platform had been built for the ceremonies of that historic day. There was a railing around it, where flags draped over, and a table with a pitcher of water cooled by a large lump of ice. Kansas orators are great fellows for drawing on the pitcher of water. Many a bright idea has been irrigated in the pause of pouring and drinking, to spring into flowery speech as marvelously as the juggler's rose in the pot of sand.

Here on this platform the judge of the circuit sat, with the congressman and other notables, among them the officers of the new county waiting for the oath that would harness them completely to their new dignities.

Bergen was there in his impressive coat, a white vest in place of the red one of ordinary wear. Red was a good color for a business vest, but in politics a man must show a symbol of virtue, let him live up to it as he would after getting the office.

Puckett was there, his slumping, useless shoulders drooping a little more than usual, it seemed, on account of his public exposure in an elevated place without a table to put his elbows on; and Major Simmons, hat tipped saucily over his left ear; and Ruddy, the mayorhardware man, looking as ill-favored as if he never had got over the loss of his window pane broken by the fittified man.

Schubert was on the platform, calculatively solemn,

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 perhaps thinking of boards of another kind than the fresh pine ones under his large, wedge-shaped feet.

Bill Dunham was bewildered by this gathering of people in a land that had the appearance of being so unproductive of the species, but cheered by the sight of so many children. He always had felt, since his very first hour in Pawnee Bend, that people came to the short-grass country full grown, served their time, died and passed out of review, to be replaced by mature ones from the reservoirs of that indefinite region spoken of as the East. It might be Dodge City, or Wichita, or Kansas City, or Illinois.

While he knew there were children somewhere in Pawnee City, having heard them at a distance when he stood on the station platform on his first arrival, the sight of them now in such hearty abundance made him glad. He felt patriarchal and benign. He could have blessed them all.

MacKinnon and Garland, with a number of cattlemen Dunham never had seen before, pressed around the wagon as Moore drove into the square. They were so friendly and eager to shake hands with him that Dunham's quickly raised apprehension of trouble cleared away at once. Major Simmons came down from the platform to add his hearty greetings and congratulations on Dunham's recovery.

Moore was one of the big lights of the occasion, due to his financial standing and general prominence in public affairs. He was to sit on the platform with the rest of the county's leading citizens.

"Gentlemen, we'd better take our places," Major

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 Simmons said. "The hour is at hand for the exercises to begin. As the county's six-hundredth citizen, Mr. Dunham, we have reserved a place of honor for you."

Bill was so taken back by this public distinction that he began to fumble around mentally and look for a hole. Major Simmons had hold of his arm; he couldn't get away without rudeness, which was not his nature.

"I don't exac'ly know that I ought to set up there with you gentlemen," he said, red and uncomfortable, his collar feeling suddenly very tight. He looked appealingly at Zora, who was sitting in the wagon radiant and sparkling with what Bill very well knew was mischievous delight.

Zora nodded vehemently, drawing her brows in a pretty frown of warning, as if cautioning him to walk straight and not break the conventions. Garland slapped his back and laughed, and several other big cowmen pelted him with friendly encouragement. They pushed him along, laughing as if they had the joke on him that day, and were going to play even with him for bringing in the Texas herd.

Seats for the people had been contrived out of lumber-yard planks in front of the stand, all lying out in the blazing sun perforce, for there was not a tree nearer than the river. These benches were filling, people of experience preferring sitting in the sun to standing and shifting from leg to leg. They knew when a congressman got loose there was no telling how far he would go.

Wagons and buggies were drawn up on the sides of this seating area, their occupants comfortably sheltered

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 from the sun. At the right of the speakers' platform there was a space which marshals of the day were keeping clear. As Dunham and the others took their seats, men on horseback began filling this reserved ground. They came riding up from town, evidently by prearrangement, ranging compactly in a certain rude order, the foremost of them with their horses' noses at the railing.

Dunham had a new qualm at this sight. It looked as if these men were there for some purpose aside from spectators. He wondered if they were expecting trouble to break about something, and he wondered if they had it in for him. They were cowboys and cattlemen, every one of them armed. More than that, the cattlemen were plainly in charge of that day's business. They had pushed the townspeople aside and were doing it their own way.

Bill began to sweat from another reason than the eleven-o'clock sun. He had a deep, troubled feeling that something was going to happen to him. There he was, surrounded by cattlemen, flanked by cattlemen, as helpless in their hands as a calf.

He looked around at Zora, caught her eye, and tried his hardest to ask her silently what it meant. She shook her head in that quick, warning way mothers do to stop a child about to tear the leaves out of the hymnal in church, drawing her nice eyebrows in admonitory frown. Bill read it as meaning: "Behave yourself, Bill Dunham! Sit still, and don't make any foolish breaks."

They let the congressman expand himself in oratory

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 first, and he spread out over considerable territory before he finally took wing back to Pawnee Bend and settled down on the roost. The judge then had his turnat them, which he made short, and gained friends by it. He then began swearing in the county officers, beginning with the three commissioners, who were MacKinnon, Major Simmons and Ruddy, of the lost window pane.

The judge took the others as he came to them, laying an especially heavy oath on Bergen, it seemed to those who heard it. Bergen was to handle the county funds. Puckett came under the judicial scrutiny next, and took the oath with downcast eyes and a slanting stoop to his sloping shoulders, as if he was determined to let as much of it as possible glance off.

With Puckett out of the way the judge looked around and called for the sheriff, at which Hal Garland stepped forward in a sudden hush of interest, everybody leaning in a new eagerness. Garland told the judge that the original selection for sheriff, whose name was on the petition filed with the secretary of state, had withdrawn and left the county. His place had been filled by a better man, no less notable citizen than he whose name had rounded out the required number of petitioners and made the county organization possible and complete.

With that announcement Garland clapped Bill Dunham on the shoulder in the greatest wind-storm of applause that ever had swept over the short-grass country.

Bill was so completely and supremely surprised he couldn't move. He felt the thrill of hot chasing the

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 ripple of cold up his backbone and out of his long nose, and a rising of high pride in him at this sudden realization that he had made his place in the short-grass country and stood among them a sufficient and acceptable man.

He was sensible of the honor the county was offering him, for there was an honor in the shrievalty in those immense new counties on the Kansas frontier—some of them have been split into four since then—that scarcely dignifies the office now. Much was expected of a sheriff there, and much was accomplished beyond the strict confines of his statute obligations. He was the biggest man in the community, overtopping lawyers and judges, among whom the notable sheriffs of those days stood like giants.

Still, Dunham didn't know what to do about it. He sat there feeling a tingling exaltation, the hot and cold running around and around his nervous system, up his backbone and out at the end of his nose. He didn't want to refuse, he didn't want to throw that honorable distinction slap in the faces of the hundreds of unknown friends who were conferring it, but he couldn't budge a muscle to draw himself up and take the oath.

Garland settled the matter for him by pulling him upright the way a sheriff ought to stand.

"We've drafted you because we need you, Bill. You can't go back on us now," Garland said.

Dunlam managed to lift his right hand and bow his head in solemn affirmation when the judge bound him to uphold the constitution of the United States and the state of Kansas. The judge shook hands with him

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