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GILLIAN.

“Of the house? Oh! yes, it was of stone; rough, heavy stone, with wings and a porch, over which some vine crept, and sent its branches down like a curtain. In front was a great tree, maple I should think—"

“No, walnut!"

“Oh! walnut, was it? Very well, I know that it seemed a tall tree, through which the sunset shimmered like gold. Beyond that, on the right, sloping down a hill, lay an orchard, from which I had stolen the green apples in my apron.”

“And this is all?”

“How can you think so, father? Would that make a complete picture? No! no! In the centre of the room stood a lady, a tall, beautiful lady, combing her hair. I think, papa, but am   not quite certain, that I had torn away her comb while she was striving to take the green apples from my apron; for I have a feeling that she was angry with me, and that I had conquered in something. Was I a very wilful, naughty child, papa?”

“I am afraid you were not the only wilful one in those days, Gillian,” said the father, sadly, “But go on; this is a new revelation to me; why, child, you were but little more than two years old then. But the—the lady?”

“She stood before the looking-glass, holding her hair up with one hand. It was bright and heavy, sweeping down over her arm in waves; the color—yes! father, the color was like mine; and I never thought of it till now. But the lady herself was tall and, and—indeed she was so like myself, when I dress my hair before the glass, that it must have been all a dream. Only, papa, did I ever wear a dress like that pink calico, with a white vine running over it? And, if you ever knew such a lady, did she wear a dress of very dark crimson, sprinkled with tiny leaves of a brighter red?”

“Yes! Gillian, yes! She wore a dress like that. An India silk, rare in those days.”

“And the lady herself? Was she a real, human being? Did I ever know her? Could this picture be in reality my old home?”

“You will know in a little time, Gillian.” “And the lady—shall I see her?”

A cloud came over Mr. Bentley’s face, and he turned away without answering. But the young lady was not one to be put readily from any purpose. She drew close to his side, and resting one hand on his arm, bent lovingly toward him. “Was this lady my mother?” she said, almost in a whisper.

He answered, in the same low voice, “Yes! Gillian. The lady was your mother.”

“My mother’s brother, papa? Her own brother, and my uncle? I never knew before that we had relatives in this country. What is he like? Is he married? Has he any children— daughters? Indeed I hope so How strange it will seem to have relatives!”

Mr. Bentley smiled gravely at this ardent outburst, and answered her questions one after another.

“Your uncle Hart, I have just said, is an honest, hardy, frank farmer, who has earned his own bread with toil and energy all his life. He has been married, and is a widower, with one child, who keeps the house. This is all I can tell you before you have an opportunity of judging for yourself.”

“And will that be soon, papa? I am getting very tired of this little vessel. It seemed picturesque enough at a distance, but really it is not particularly comfortable.”

“Well, have a little patience, and your pilgrimage is ended. You see where the hills overtop each other at our left. No, not there, but farther up stream. Well, between those hills is a valley, through which a road passes into the country. There our water travel ends, and tonight we shall sleep in the old homestead.”

“How mournfully you speak, papa! Thin visit home seems to give you no pleasure! And yet you were so determined on it!”

“I am far beyond the age of ardent feelings, Gillian. Few things excite me to pleasure now.”

“But pain! Oh! papa, if age takes away all capacities for pleasure, and leaves the powers of pain untouched, I pray God to take me early from the earth,” cried the young girl, with tears


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that railroad was put through the job was done hastily, the builders being in a hurry to get in on the business of handling the vast droves of livestock which cattlemen herded up from Texas and the Cherokee Nation, where they leased grazing land from the Indians. It was the second line to stretch across Kansas from east to west and, being from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles south of the original road, it offered a big saving to stockmen in the matter of wear and tear and incidental expenses. It reached into the cattle country with the inexorable arm of competition, cutting off at one stroke its rival's business in that field.

But it was a mushy, squashy railroad after a rain, or when the spring thaws came, the ties being laid on the earth roadbed just as the graders' slushers had left it; tamped with earth, the centers filled with earth, which is poor material to hold track in line when the frost breaks and the rains come, as any section boss will testify.

Now, after some years of this mud-spattering, the tarriers were on the job, resurfacing the track with rock ballast, straightening a curve here, reducing a grade there, replacing the light, clattering, strap-jointed iron with heavy steel, making a real railroad

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 of it, at once the pride of its builders and the state toward whose development it had contributed so much.

Texas cattle were still coming on the hoof in those days for Kansas railroads to carry the rest of the way to market, and there were Kansas cattle by hundreds of thousands, hundreds of thousands more in the Cherokee Nation, for which this road was the most convenient outlet.

For a long distance it ran parallel to the Cherokee Strip, as it was called, not a great way from it as distances were considered in those robust days of driven herds. Hundreds of men were employed along this railroad in big gangs; hundreds rode after cattle on the range. All these nomads—for they were transients, blowing like cottonwood seeds before the winds of chance—sought their highly seasoned diversions in the towns along the line.

Far-scattered towns these were, great stretches of bleak high prairie-lands lying between them. To these the rovers came, bringing their hard-come wages to blow in on one go-easy spree. There was plenty of business in these towns, set so far apart that competition was not felt in any cutting degree, and one of the liveliest, one of the most lurid, profane and altogether outside both statutory and moral law in its day, was Pawnee Bend, the place toward which we have been heading since the very first word.

Things had been put down hastily at Pawnee Bend, its merchants and others who profited on that unstable trade being in a manner camp-followers. They pushed along as the cattle frontier contracted into the dimin-

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 ishing west; as railroad activities centered here and there. The two sources of revenue combined by this natural process of retreat on one hand, development on the other, kept things in such towns as Pawnee Bend on the bound until the scene shifted and the rough customers took down their tents and traveled on.

While the day of this highly colored prosperity was brief, the marvel was that few towns vanished away and were forgotten. Agriculture, that foundation of all lasting prosperity, pushed close on the stride of railroad development, giving Pawnee Bend and similar places a solid reason for being. Some fell back into colorless wayside villages when the flare burned out; others rose to towns and cities of consequence. Perhaps Pawnee Bend was one of these. Who knows?

On that early June day, languid sunlight over the gray-green, melancholy hills, there was not much promise of future consequence in Pawnee Bend. It seemed thrown down there without a purpose in that huge rough plan of nature, as boxes which might have jolted out of a wagon, except for the geometrical exactness of the streets, such as there were houses enough along to trace. It had been done regularly, for townsite promoters always were first on the scene of these railroad towns of western Kansas. The town was bounded on the south by the railroad, unbounded on the north by prairie spaciousness that would have contained all the cities that ever came to be built in that marvelous great state. Between this limit on one side, this vastitude on the other, probably three hundred

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 people were housed, attendants in one capacity or another upon the prosperity of the place.

Pawnee Bend was built to the pattern of all those prairie towns: of more board and batten than plaster and stone. On the face of it the builders expressed their caution. Nobody wanted to be caught with a house on his hands that could not be disjointed readily and loaded on a flatcar when the day for moving came.

Along the broad principal street the blunt-nosed business houses stood shoulder to shoulder, some large, many of them small, all of design so exactly alike that the little ones might have been the brood of the big ones, to grow up presently all of a size, like a flock of ducks. There was a diversity of business along there, not of any wide range to be sure, for these merchants and panderers and parasites were serving men whose primitive desires could be fully expressed in three words.

Beer kegs impeded the narrow board sidewalks of this main thoroughfare; blue smoke of continual frying came out of the many restaurants, generally more stylishly designated cafés. There was so much grease afloat that regular inhabitants had no need of oil for their hair.

There never was a young man who felt so much like an opened oyster as Bill Dunham when he saw the train that had carried him to Pawnee Bend diminishing to a rapidly contracting point in the direction of Colorado. Pawnee Bend was surrounded by more country than he ever had taken in at a single gulp; such naked, raw, unfenced and useless-looking country

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 that the sight of it gave him a sinking feeling in that particular of his anatomy he always thought of as his craw.

He stood on the station platform, his matting suitcase with imitation leather corners between his feet, feeling as if the shell had been taken off and left him exposed, nothing to hide his greenness, his insufficiency, from the sneering scrutiny of that bold land. If there was a hand-hold for a man in that stripped-off, bald-headed country it would take shrewder eyes than his to find it, he was sadly and down-heartedly sure.

Bill had come out to that roof of his native state, the very apex of the earth, it seemed to him, following the beguiling lure of romance and the advice of Dutch Gus, who was not a Dutchman, but a Swede. While everybody knew that Dutch Gus was a Swede, nobody ever would take this country for a part of Kansas. It was a deceit that no amount of explanation could cover, it appeared to Bill. It certainly must have got on the map through misrepresentations.

Back in Johnson County, where Bill was born, it wasn't that kind of a country. A man could see a natural tree back there. Trees had been Bill's principal business in life for a good many years, accounting for his first thought in comparison of advantages between the place he had left and the land in which he had arrived.

For eight years Bill had been actively engaged with trees in Schoonover's nursery, enlarging his education, which could stand a good deal of it without trespassing on anybody, by putting in three months at a business

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 college at Lawrence for three winters, coming home to spend Saturdays and Sundays grafting and budding little seedling trees in Schoonover's sand-floored dugouts.

Bill had grafted trees enough to qualify him for a Bachelor of Grafters' degree; he had pulled trees enough out of the long rows, following the curved plow that ran under them and cut the deep roots, to plant a border around the state of Kansas.

His big hands were ridged with callouses from this uplifting work; the muscles of his long back were as hard as dried beef. Yet Bill was a timid man. He had clung to this job in the nursery so long that people who had looked upon him confidently when he began to attend business college shook their heads doubtfully and said Bill Dunham was a long time starting out; that they didn't reckon he ever would start out, just stick to that job till he took root in a row and one of the hands pulled him up and shipped him off for a tree.

It was a sort of traditional requirement of a young man in that part of Kansas, where people had a good many New England ideas about them still, that he must start out when he reached the age of twenty-one. Even if he didn't go very far he ought to start out. He ought to get married, rent a farm, begin to raise corn and hogs and voters to maintain the glorious traditions of the state. Bill Dunham had passed that broad chalk-mark in his years, long since, and he had not moved a foot on the prescribed career.

Bill was overeducated, they said; that was the

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 trouble with Bill. He knew too much about things of no use to any man. When you sifted him down, he was nothing but an educated fool. There were some who didn't even grace the designation with that qualifying word, using another, less charitable, more expressive of their indignation and contempt. For a man in his walk of life Bill Dunham was stuffed with too damn much trash.

This was a reputation undeserved by Bill, as the fame of community celebrities commonly is magnified either in derision or pride. Bill had the name of being a profoundly read man, although he owned but three books exclusive of those he had used in his preparation for a commercial career: a volume of Shakespeare's plays, which he had bought from the horse doctor for seventy-five cents, that worthy having acquired it on a debt; a copy of Tennyson's poems, won in a spelling match; a queer, fat, chunky little leather-bound Bible, left after her when his grandmother completed her earthly business and started out on the supreme adventure that lies at the end of every Kansan's career.

Now, this is the place where you grunt, and say: "Oh, hell! another one of those Shakespeare-Bible fellows. They belong in the class with the Alger boys; they simply were not there." But if you had lived back in those lean days of books in Kansas you would know better than to sniff at the Shakespeare-Bible boys. They were there; their name was legion. The reading of those two books by that generation resulted in a race of spellbinders, and orators, word-slingers

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 and verbal sign-painters that was the wonder of the world. Jerry Simpson was one of them, and perhaps John Brown before him. There is no doubt at all about Carry Nation—and her name was Carry, not Carrie—although her bones do not repose in Kansas soil.

So much for that. Bill Dunham had his three books, and read them well. He could have cited speech and passage, verse, chapter and line in any of them if anybody had asked him to do so, which nobody ever did. Nobody in that neighborhood ever had read Shakespeare's plays. Some declared it was a mark of Bill Dunham's natural perversion; others smiled at it as an unmanly weakness. Reading the Bible, outside of strictly theological purposes, was sternly reproved as a sacrilege. And it was well known that Bill Dunham was not theologically inclined. It was said that he prized the Song of Solomon above the Psalms of David.

In spite of Bill's training in the business school, which was believed by most people with whom he had contact to be almost as sinful as the state university, he might have married and rented a farm in due course if he hadn't subscribed for a Kansas City paper and taken to reading the news. That was about the windup of the gun-throwing days in Dodge City; there were tales, and true ones, to quicken the blood of the most unromantic of men—of whom Bill Dunham was not one, in spite of his size and strength—in the regular run of news in that Kansas City paper every day.

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 fronts which men basely swallowed in silence in Lawrence or Kansas City. Boot Hill was full of the graves of upstarts who had died for stepping on gentlemen's toes. Bill Dunham quickened and expanded when he read of those sanguinary doings out at Dodge, and romance blossomed in his heart.

For Bill was a sore man over impositions. His place had been rather a lowly one, socially, social position in that community, as in wider ones elsewhere, grading according to financial rating. Bill's family had been miserably poor; well-fed, better-clothed boys had rolled him and pummeled him and mocked his patches with derisive cruelty. A place where a man might yank out his gun and take blazing vengeance for such wrongs appealed to Bill.

Those who had stepped on him and slurred him when he was ten, had pretty much passed out of his life by the time he was twenty-four. They had gone off to Kansas City to run street cars and drive delivery wagons, or scattered on rented or inherited farms in the established routine of starting out and never getting anywhere. Bill carried the old hurts in his heart, for he was a slow man at forgetting, long after he knew that all hope of adjustment had been outlawed by time. Now, reading the paper about the men of Dodge and Hays City, and the places whose names were romance in themselves, the feeling grew on Bill that he wanted to enlarge out of Peter Schoonover's nursery, and go out in the world and fling his feet.

Dutch Gus said the best place for a man to throw his feet in of any place in the world was Pawnee Bend.

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 If he wasn't a married man and tied down by his wife and kids he'd hit the breeze for Pawnee Bend on the first freight he could find a side-door open. He knew a feller that went to Pawnee Bend and opened a joint—so they termed illicit saloons in prohibition Kansas in those days—and made money so fast he couldn't count it. Just had to let track of it go, it came in so fast. His name was Mooney; he used to run a section on the U.P.

So, together with the growing call of romance and the advice of Dutch Gus, Bill had cashed in at the nursery and taken a ticket straight to Pawnee Bend. He was not adventurer enough for an open side-door in a freight car. Now he was there, in Pawnee Bend, and romance seemed to have fled away out of it, leaving the town so small and bleak, the country so raw and rude, big and lonesome that it hurt the bare edges of a man just to stand there that way wondering where to go. But there was sure room for a feller to throw his feet! Dutch Gus was right about that part of it, and that was a cinch.

Bill felt pretty much as a man feels when he tries to swim a wide piece of water the first time: sorry he had attempted it, but his reputation being staked on the venture he will not turn and go back. He looked across the track at the flat, unadorned little town, knowing he had to make his beginning in it by finding a place to leave his suitcase and a bed to take his repose. The bare, heartless, unfriendly look of it depressed him more than the empty vastness of the land in which it lay. It looked like a lair of mystery; every

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 roof in it, he believed, concealed designing beings who were only waiting his coming to spraddle all over him and rob him of his wad. It looked as sinister as a cyclone cloud; it looked like knockout drops.

Bill had all the fear of knockout drops common to his kind. He had heard woeful tales of the potency of that insidious draught, and of the harpies who beguile a man to sip it, sitting on his knee with an arm around his neck. It made him sweat to realize his proximity to that pitiless peril. He felt for his wad—some three hundred dollars, the savings of his eight years—and breathed in relief to find it still there.

It was a quiet scene to rouse so much panic in a stout young man of Bill Dunham's build. There was little activity along the wide main street, only a few men moving lazily about or lounging along the hitching-rack where numerous saddled horses, a wagon or buggy here and there, stood waiting their owners' business. There were no boisterous noises; Bill had listened, but he had not heard a gun.

The sound of children calling shrilly as they raced at play reached Bill from a part of the town he could not see. It was assuring. Children made that noise only when they played at school; there was a sort of school refinement, school repression, in the sound that Bill knew very well. It gave him a pang for something that he had touched and passed on, but it put him a little more at ease. It couldn't be such a bad place if there were children and a school.

A long string of boarding cars stood on a sidetrack back of the depot. Bill looked that way, indecisive

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 of the next step. Everybody else who came on the train had gone his way; only he and a barrel of kerosene remained on the platform. Smoke was rising from a car in the boarding train, the cook car, Bill knew. An invisible woman in it began to sing, and this was her song:

Bill was further relieved by the song. He liked to think the singer was young and pretty, although he had his doubts.

For a town no bigger than Pawnee Bend there were a great many hotels, it appeared to Bill. True, some of them were not much bigger than tents, but all of them made free with the sign HOTEL & ROOMS. There was one near the track, only the broad dusty space representing the railroad right-of-way and the public road lying between, that appeared to be the biggest in town. It had a square front like a grocery, that much of it having been painted blue, the rest of its walls remaining as the planks had come from the mill.

While Bill's prejudice rose against this hotel on account of its painted face, which gave it the appearance of being a very Jezebel among hotels, he was assured in some measure by the sign FAMILY HOTEL which this false front presented. It was making a bid for respectable trade, although the sign might cover any amount of deceit. Bill had seen

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 FAMILY ENTRANCE painted on side doors of saloons in Kansas City, through which he was morally certain no families ever entered. But he was out in the world to throw his feet; he was going to meet it as it came at him, and learn as he went along. He picked up his rush matting suitcase and headed for the hotel, unnoticed and unknown.

But perhaps it is better to go away a hero than to arrive one. Incoming heroes, even the best of them, lose their luster after a while if they stay in one place too long.

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proprietor of the Family Hotel to whose shelter Bill Dunham was about to entrust his body and his belongings, was spreading his elbows on the showcase reading a Kansas City paper when the guest arranged himself before the register. MacKinnon relinquished his reading reluctantly, a finger on the print to mark the point of interruption, turning abstractedly to see who was bungling across his grazing. He had given up the thought of any business from the west-bound train, which was twenty miles along its way by that time, Bill had stood so long on the edge of the station platform trying to adjust himself to the stunning perspective of the town.

The host saw a tall, but not exceedingly broad, young man, neatly dressed in a well-fitting blue serge suit, squaring off with a sort of apologetic expectancy before the counter. MacKinnon quickened to his business, seeing that it was business, giving the stranger an affable greeting, hastening along the counter to the register on its merry-go-round arrangement bordered by advertising cards of local concerns. He had a quick eye for men, and the possibilities of them; he would not have been wanting the right word if an ambassador had appeared as unexpectedly as Bill Dunham had come, the glittering adornments

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 Mr. Bentley named a sum so liberal, that the man forgot even curiosity in his haste to secure it: In less time than that appointed, he came dashing down to the wharf in a stout wagon, with a couple of chairs rattling inside and a piece of rough board answering for his own seat, A pair of beautiful iron-grey horses, that might have befitted a queen’s carriage, gave promise of a quick if not comfortable journey.

Into this wagon the luggage which had been brought from the sloop was placed, and in a fit of extra politeness the countryman threw a buffalo robe over the two chairs, forming a  rather imposing seat, of which Mr. Bentley and his daughter took possession.

Away they drove over the hills, and along the beautiful lakes, that render the basin of Rockland county scarcely less than a wild paradise. Everything was strange and new to Gillian. The forest trees, grouped in masses of red, yellow, maroon, green, and brown, all relieving and brightening each other; the broken hollows choked up with hemlocks and pines; the ferns and mosses creeping down to the wayside! each sending out some new fragrance that soothed while it invigorated the beholder.

As they approached the western hills, that bound the county, Mr. Bentley grew silent and anxious, so silent and pale that Gillian ceased to  talk, and grew lonely, as checked spirits always must. The driver, who had amused her with his blunt questions and shrewd remarks, now i began to be a little curious about their destination. Hitherto Mr. Bentley had told him what road to take, and where to turn. But now the sun was on the verge of the horizon; the western outline was one glow of gold; and the gorgeous trees swayed to and fro in its light, blending sky and earth together in rioh harmony.

“Wall, now, if I maybe so bold, where on earth are we a driving to?” inquired the man, leaning back, with one hand on his seat, and checking his horses with the other.

Mr. Bentley, whose eyes had been fixed on one point, with a strained gaze, now directed the man’s attention to a distant dwelling, which stood upon the slope of the hills, and answered in a husky voice,

“To that house.”

There was something in his voice that impressed the man, who merely answered, “Jest  eyes so,” and prepared to drive on. But one of the horses had got a pebble in the hollow of his hoof, and he was obliged to dismount from his seat and remedy the accident. As he stood in the road, with the horse’s foot bent back between these two persons, after a mutual recognition, his knees, striving to beat the pebble out with a stone, a hearty voice came out of a side road, and directly a man appeared, riding on a heavy farm horse, and mounted on two plethoric ﬂour bags, which were ﬂung across the saddle. “Hello, there. What’s the difﬁculty? Lamed your hoss or broke a linch-pin?"

“Nothing to speak on,” answered the driver. “One of these varmints has got a stone in his huff, and limps a triﬂe. I’m obleeged to you all the same."

The farmer rode up to the wagon, looked down at the horse, who held his hoof daintily, with the edge to the ground, and then took a friendly survey of the travelers.

“Strangers, I reckon?” he muttered. Then turning to the driver he commenced an acquaintance in the usual way. “Any news stirrin’ from where you come from, neighbor?” “Nothing to speak on." “Just from the river?"

“Started from the point today.”

“Crops good in that vicinity?"

"From fair to middling.”

All this time, the farmer kept his eyes on Mr. Bentley, who ﬁxed uneasy glances on his face, while he was speaking, but turned away, perplexed and uncertain in the end. As the driver mounted to his seat again, the farmer prepared to ride on, but with evident hesitation, for he laid the bridle down on his horse‘s neck twice, as if about to address the travelers, but took it up again and urged his horse into a slow jog. But now Mr. Bentley seemed to shake off his uncertainty. He bent forward, in nervous haste, and bade the driver call that man back The sound of a voice made the farmer turn, and he come trotting up to the wagon, evidently glad to be recalled.

“Tell me," said Bentley, leaning toward him, “is your name Hart? And do you live in the stone house on the slope of the hill yonder?"

“My name is Hart, sir; and that stone house is my home, till the owner claims it," answered the farmer, proudly.

“Daniel," said Mr. Bentley, reaching forth his hand, “have you entirely forgotten me?”

The farmer took the slender hand in his hard palm, grasped it, and was silent for a moment. But his broad features worked; and, at last his eyes ﬁlled, and while shaking Mr. Bentley's hand, he turned his head aside, ashamed of his weakness.

It is strange how little people have to say, who meet for the ﬁrst time, after years of separation! The first words that passed between these two persons, after a mutual recognition, were simple enough:


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 of his high station on the breast of his padded coat.

This was no grandee that stood waiting before his desk, to be sure: only a lank-limbed young fellow with a round black hat sitting rather soberly on his closely cut brown hair, one big hand holding the pen with a ready facility that betrayed more than a passing acquaintance with its use. The hat was dented all around the top of its crown, in the decorative style approved for such hats in that day, which was longer ago than yesterday, indeed.

No grandee, but a bold sketch that needed only the proper shading in and filling to make an acceptable man. Which was more to the liking of Ross MacKinnon than any number of ambassadors the courts of the earth could produce.

Plainly an unsophisticated young man who would not ask for a bath; a young man who had broken from his anchorage only a little while ago to sail out on the untried waters. MacKinnon knew the type well, so many of them came in that same manner of half-questioning trepidation seeking the romance of life in the short-grass country. It broke the spirit of many, and sent them back whence they came cowed, and heartless to venture forth again; and some it drew into its insidious wiles and debauched them, giving them draggled eyes. Only a few held a straight way to the thing they had come seeking in that country.

This lad looked like he might turn out one of the straight-going ones, MacKinnon thought, taking stock of him with shrewdly appraising eye.

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 A narrow-faced young man, with long head and dark eyes; a big nose with a hard backbone, lean cheeks that needed a shave; a mouth that had not taken much sweet pudding out of little spoons, from the stretch of it and its look of having the latch down, the string pulled inside.

"Passing through?" MacKinnon inquired, Bill waiting with poised pen to spread his college hand on the register.

"Well, no; not exac'ly passin' through," Bill re plied, with a sort of horsetrader confidence that seemed to tell much 'while disclosing no fact upon which a future action might be based. "Not what you could exac'ly call passin' through."

"I inquired on a point of information," MacKinnon explained, "not from curiosity or any wish to pry into your business. When a man steps off of the train in this town his past goes on with it, as far as we know or give a damn. He starts here with nothing behind him but his conscience, if he ever had one, and nothing ahead of him but the future. If you're goin' to be one of us for a few days you're qualified to sign our petition. We count a man a citizen if he's here a day, and an old-timer if he stays a week."

"Yes, sir," said Bill, not seeing any wordhold for a more sensible comment on the host's statement of facts relating to citizenship in the town of Pawnee Bend.

"Right here," MacKinnon directed, flipping over a section of the register to a place marked by a blotter between the leaves. "Just your name, and not where you're from. We're gettin' up a petition to organize

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 our county and take it out of the jurisdiction of a set of robbers and thieves in the county north of us. Thanks. When we get the number of signers the law requires we'll send the petition to the secretary of state and have a little county all our own, Pawnee Bend the county seat."

"I ain't much of a citizen, but I guess there's no harm in it," said Bill, looking doubtfully at his name, written in good college Spencerian on the sheet of ruled foolscap inserted between the pages of a book.

"No, we're puttin' this thing through on the square, Mr. Dunham—night be of Scotch extraction, eh?"

"My double-great gran'dad was a Scotchman, they tell me. I didn't know him"—apologetically;—"that was before my time."

"He was a worthy man," MacKinnon declared, decisively as if they had come over on the same ship. "No, sir, no crooked work about this petition of ours. Every one of our signers is a bona fide citizen—you noticed I was particular on that before I had you sign? Look here: I have the floaters sign the register regular, as the law requires me to do, and the citizens sign the petition, in the way you've put your name to it, Mr. Dunham. Glad to welcome you, and hope you'll prosper as you deserve. MacKinnon is my name."

MacKinnon offered his hand, fraternity and equality in his ruddy face. There was even something friendly in the grinding sound of his voice to Bill. It reminded him of the cog-wheels in the cider-mill at home.

"How many names have you got on your petition?"

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 Bill inquired, desiring to show a citizenly interest, not altogether superficial, at that. He felt that putting his name on the paper to go to the secretary of state at Topeka had made him one of the brotherhood, in fact.

"I don't know how we stand to-day, but we're close, we're close. We've got sheets in some of the dumps that go by the name of hotels in this town, as well as some of the stores. We collect 'em when they're full, and paste them in a string. We've got a roll as thick as your wrist."

Bill Dunham made his reappearance in the hotel office, and on the stage of activities in Pawnee Bend, in about an hour, after putting the razor to his face and changing his shirt. It was one of Bill's leading principles to face a new situation with a clean chin and a clean shirt. If he hadn't learned much else of high value in business college, he had learned that.

Appearances Are Everything: that was his college motto. It was not done in Latin, old Roman lettering, over the door, but in the large, flourishing, long-tailed handwriting of the president of the institution as a copy for the business aspirants training under his régime. Appearances Are Everything. Bill Dunham had written it five thousand times.

Now he came down to the hotel office feeling pretty comfortable, like a fellow who has joined a lodge and taken the first degree. It wasn't as bad as he thought it was going to be; Pawnee Bend was not such a forbidding place as he had judged it from the station platform. Here they had the same homely human

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 aspirations as elsewhere in Kansas, the hearty ambition to get ahead for themselves and hoe their own row. It might be said of Pawnee Bend that it was just starting out on its own account, like himself.

This thought drew him closer to the brotherhood he had joined when he put his name on the petition. It made him feel so fine he came swinging down the stairs whistling a business-college tune.

Three men were lined up at the desk in close conference with MacKinnon, so engrossed in their business, which appeared to be some sort of accounting from the way they jumped their pencils along the paper as if adding figures, that they did not notice the town's newest citizen until he was about to pass them on his way to the door.

"Hey, Dunham!" MacKinnon hailed him.

The other three threw up their heads like startled horses at the sound of Dunham's name. Bill turned back at MacKinnon's excited signal, wondering if he was to be taken up for affixing his name to the petition under false pretense.

"This is the man, gentlemen!" MacKinnon said, speaking as if he had come to his climax. He seemed to offer Bill as an exhibit, with a wave of the hand.

Bill was assured at once, for there was satisfaction, even triumph and pride, in MacKinnon's way of presenting him. He felt that he had made a hit, in some way to be revealed, perhaps through his ability to write what the president of the school board back home used to call an ineligible hand.

One of the three men before the desk stepped for-

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 ward briskly, hand out like a candidate for office. He was a shrewd appearing little man, his dry narrow face full of humorous wrinkles as he came smiling to meet Bill. He wore a large, cream-colored, cattleman's hat, the crown of it jauntily creased, tilted cockily to one side, which gave him an adventurous, trouble-hunting appearance quite out of keeping with his mildness and his size.

"Simmons—Major Philo Simmons, president of the Capitol Bank of Pawnee Bend," he announced himself, disarming of questionable intent as any high-pressure go-fetcher of the present commercial age. "I greet you, Mr. Dunham, as the six-hundredth citizen of this county. Gentlemen, allow me to present the six-hundredth citizen."

Bill was beginning to get a bit suspicious of some sort of a come-on. He didn't get that talk about the six-hundredth citizen. It was beyond him to understand, as it might have been to a shrewder man in his place, why the six-hundredth citizen was of any more importance than the first, but he gave himself over to the trust of Major Simmons, whose position in the community should have been sufficient to quiet all suspicion, even if it did not do so entirely.

"Mr. Henry Bergen, Mr. Marsh Puckett, of Bergen and Puckett," Major Simmons presented his companions in turn. "Mr. Bergen is our county treasurer, Mr. Puckett our recorder and clerk, or at least they will be under our new county government."

Bill shook hands with them and said he was glad to meet them, although he was not, for he didn't like the

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 look of either Bergen or Puckett, reserving the thought to himself that he would think it over a good while before he would trust his money to the treasureship of the first or the accounting of the second.

"We owe the existence of Pawnee Bend to Bergen and Puckett," Major Simmons explained. "They are the original owners and platters of the townsite; their vision put this beautiful little city of ours on the map."

Bergen was a large bony man with a beard. He was arrayed in judicial-looking garments, his long black coat striking to his knees, the one sporty splash in his dignified appearance being his vest, which seemed to proclaim the rest of his somber garb a pretense and fraud. This vest was of red plush with white dots, a garment fit for a beau of the range. He was a voluble, ingratiating man, past fifty, one would judge, his black-gray beard, nicely trimmed to the contour of his jaw, giving a stern aspect to his face, which was extraordinarily broad between the high, round cheekbones.

Puckett was more self-contained than his partner. He had a fleshy figure, a smooth, impassible face, a foreshortened lump of nose, a little fold of double chin. His round-cornered shoulders, which never had hardened under any burden, were slightly stooped, as if he had spent much time slouching over gambling tables. He was a type of that atmosphere; one could visualize him cutting and shuffling a little stack of chips in the gambler's one-handed trick, his faculties concentrated on the turn of the card, the fall of the marble in the wheel.

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 One sees the traits of men as flashes of interiors are seen through revolving doors. It would have taken Bill Dunham an hour to put his impressions of Bergen and Puckett down with a pen, but his shrewd eye sized them up for an opinion in two seconds. That opinion was one that impelled Bill's hand to his hip pocket to feel for his wallet.

"Gentlemen," Bergen proposed after the formalities of introduction, "what do you say to a little drink?"

MacKinnon came from behind the counter with alacrity, his ready disposition apparently an expression of the inclination of all to the proposal. Major Simmons and Puckett led the way, Bill following between MacKinnon and Bergen, who kept his hand on the six-hundredth citizen's shoulder as if he meant to take no chance on his getting away and leaving the big thing—what it was Bill had no more notion than a rabbit—flat and a fizzle on their hands.

"You can mark this day with red ink in your book of life, Mr. Dunham," Bergen said, stepping high as they bore along the plank sidewalk toward the sign THE CASINO that projected toward the street from the front of a large, loose-jointed, barn-looking building a little way ahead.

"I don't git you," Bill confessed. "What in the dickens are you makin' all this fuss about?"

"My dear sir," with a slap, slap, on Bill's back, "you are our six-hundredth citizen!"

"I heard you say so before, but you can search me," Bill said.

"Under the state law, Mr. Dunham, a county is re-

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 quired to have six hundred legal residents before it can be organized. You were the last signer on our petition, and yours was the six-hundredth name. You see the honor of your position and fully understand your importance in our community."

"I git you now," said Bill.

"Here we are"—Bergen swept his arm around the wide horizon—"the only city or settlement in a territory of twenty-four hundred square miles! Consider the possibilities of our situation, sir; think of what this city will be as the county seat of this fertile domain, no competition within our boundaries. We are, Mr. Dunham, what might be called the fathers of our county. Every man whose name appears on that petition is, in a sense, a father of his county. You are not insensible of the honor, I know."

"I should hope not!" Bill replied, touched up a little by a genuine warmth of pride.

It was something to be the daddy of four square miles of territory, which would be his proportionate share of parental responsibility, figuring that there were six hundred legal residents in the county, which he doubted mightily.

They headed in at the Casino, Mel Poteet, proprietor, as the window sign further announced, lining up in good order at the bar. There were several customers in the place, although it was the slack hour of the day. But there had been a railroad payday a little while before, the proceeds of which were not yet quite spent; and there was a big herd of cattle from the Nation being loaded at the pens, several more waiting

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 their turn out on the range close by with only men enough in attendance to keep them in hand, the rest being free to taste the delights of town.

Several of these cow guardians were in Poteet's place, and half a dozen or so railroaders, putting dimes in the Swiss music-box, and quarters in the device that sometimes gave up quarters in exchange, running them down to a little pan through a troubled row of brass pegs. Uniformly they were putting strong liquor inside themselves, all quite orderly, and grouped according to their calling, there being no common ground between railroaders and men of the range.

Major Simmons tilted his hat a little more toward his left ear as the bartender came down the long bar to the end they occupied.

"Charley," he said, "I want you to meet our six-hundredth citizen. Mr. Dunham, shake hands with Mr. Mallon. This is a great day for Pawnee Bend!"

"Pleased to know you," Charley Mallon recited perfunctorily, his eye up and down the bar to see that nobody sneaked a drink. "What's yours, Mr. Dunham?"

"Lemon pop," said Bill.

Charley Mallon was about as cheerful-looking as a totem pole, and almost as tall. He was so thin his flesh was blue, so morose and downcast of countenance that he might have been assigned to barkeeping as a penance for his sins in some happier and more honorable station. Not that he had been, for he was a bartender by choice, a drinking bartender of the old frontier school. The look he gave Bill when he placed that

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 innocuous order would have curdled sour wine in a jug.

"I guess you're in the wrong joint, pardner," he said, turning away in injured dignity.

Bill's hearty companions looked hard at their glasses, fixing them with such intent eyes, indeed, as if they watched for some transformation in their contents which must be seized at the right moment or its good effects lost.

There was a sort of startled look among the cowboys ranged at the bar a little distance along. They turned to each other with incredulous faces, drinks poised, as if they had heard something they must verify by appealing one to the other. But there was a good deal of acting in it; under the play of astonishment there was a repressed uprising of hilarity that waited only a word to touch it off. Bill Dunham, in the simplicity of his green soul, supplied it.

"Make it sassaferiller," he said.

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was more indignant than confused, although he was as red as Henry Bergen's vest. The cowboys slapped themselves on the thighs with their big hats, driving out the dust like somebody beating a carpet; they looked across at Charley Mallon, upon whom they appeared to think the joke centered, and whooped in shrill derision. Bill's companions tilted their heads in unison and put their liquor where it would do nobody any harm but themselves, still keeping their eyes on the bar when they put their glasses down.

Bill was ashamed for the embarrassment he had brought them, but not ashamed for himself. It was not through any moral objection that he had not taken whisky along with the rest of them. If he'd liked it he would have taken his shot as big as the biggest. He had tried it out a good many times when the boys brought bottles out from Kansas City, but never had come to the belief that it was made to drink. He was turning to Major Simmons to explain that it was not a moral question with him, but purely gustatory, when one of the cowboys detached himself from his group of laughing comrades and approached Bill with insolent simulation of curiosity.

He was a rather smart-appearing young man,

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 dressed in tight-fitting trousers and fancy boots which must have cost him a month's wages at the least. He wore a red-and-black plaid shirt, loose-fitting in body and sleeves, with a blue silk kerchief around his neck. His hat was bigger by broad odds than any other in the house, a new one of the standard cream-white so much in vogue on the range from Texas to Montana in that day.

Bill's companions were filling their glasses again. Major Simmons turned a quick eye to him, in as plain an appeal as Bill ever read, to uphold the honor of the county of which he was a father. Bill was wondering if he could do it without making his case worse than it stood at present, when the cowboy laid hold of him and whirled him around from the bar.

"Look a-here, Buttermilk!" he said, "if you can't stand up and take a man's drink when you're out among men, I'll make you roll your hoop to hell out o' here. Put 'er down your neck, Buttermilk!"

The rest of them, railroaders and all, came crowding near to see the fun.

"Make it sassaferiller!" said a cowboy in high, piping voice meant to mimic innocence and simplicity, which all right-minded cow-chasers were supposed to despise.

"Now, boys, now, boys," Major Simmons said in a manner of go-easy and let—him-alone.

If Bill had made any progress toward a decision in the matter of taking a drink, the cowboy's order set him back at once to a firm determination that he wouldn't. He flung the fellow's hand from his shoul-

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 der, opened a way through those who pressed up to see the show like a breast-stroke swimmer making a mighty pull for the finish, and started for the door.

The cowboy wasn't going to have it that way. He hopped nimbly in front of Bill, slung out his gun and ordered him to go back and throw it down his neck.

Bill stopped at sight of the bare gun, the heat that had been over him so intense that it made his vision watery giving away to a sudden coldness, out of which everything stood as sharply and separately as if light had been brought to him in a dark place. He hadn't come to Pawnee Bend to submit to insult and public scorn; the days of his oppression were gone with the days of his poverty; gone with his sense of cowed inferiority among the boys from whose fathers his dad used to buy corn-meal and bacon on credit to carry them through the winter, the family to work the debt out next summer like horses. He hadn't come to Pawnee Bend to let anybody straddle his chest and wallow his hair in the mud.

"This ain't my day to drink, pardner," he said, his voice calm and steady, even though it was a little way down in his throat. "I guess you've heard of the horse any fool can lead to water. I'm not that kind of a horse."

"I don't like your shoes!" the cowboy said, with such expression of loathing his soul seemed to be in revolt at the sight.

"I reckon I could change 'em if it would save your feelin's," Bill said good-naturedly.

"I don't like your damn face!" the cowboy sneered,

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 scowling as he pushed his own forward to grit his teeth not so very far from Bill's ear.

"I don't see how I can help you on that," Bill told him, watching him as closely as he would have watched a rattlesnake coiled in the road.

"You got to rag, you one-eared granger!" the cowboy announced, suddenly as if the thought had just taken him. "Rag, you one-eared granger, rag!"

Bill had heard stories, a good while back, from men who had been in Santa Fé and Raton, of greenhorns getting their toes shot off for refusing to dance before a crowd. But that was a number belonging so far back on the program Bill had concluded it was not being done any longer. At least he had not read about it being pulled on anybody in Dodge in the past four or five years.

There the fool fellow stood, gun lifted, wrist limbered, ready to pull off the time-worn trick; and there stood Bill facing him, feet too close together for comfort, hoping the bartender would interfere to save his floor. But Mallon made no move; nobody raised a hand.

The cowboy waited a few seconds, as long as his dignity would permit, Bill feeling a sensation creeping down him from neck to legs as if he had melted and was turning cold, but determined to die before he'd crack a heel for the edification of that crowd. His prompter jerked his gun on the hinge of his limber wrist, in a movement like a player makes when throwing a knife in a game of mumble peg.

The bullet came very close to Bill's left toe, and

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 Bill gave a leap as if it had nipped him, to the great edification of all concerned. The whoop they raised at sight of this antic chopped off short, just as if somebody had opened the door on revelry and slammed it instantly, when Bill's big foot swung high in the most prodigious kick they ever had seen measured by a human leg, made contact somewhere above the band of those tight-legged trousers and queered the show a whole lot quicker than it takes to tell how it was done.

There was confusion and flying legs for an instant, Bill Dunham rising out of it with the gun in his own proper hand. The cowboy was throwing his legs in his effort to retrieve a dignified position, like one of the trained steers they use in the Hollywood rodeos, a good deal of feet in the air. Bill pegged a shot with a sort of nonchalant hand, taking one of the fellow's high heels off as slick as it could have been done with a hatchet.

As if to prove this wasn't a greenhorn's luck, Bill threw another shot with a funny little jerk of the wrist, just as the cowboy was scrambling up, cutting the other heel from under him as if it were made of sand.

There was no need for Bill to request them to give him room. He had more of it than any one man could use inside of three seconds. The dehorned cowboy, feeling himself flat on the floor that way, no doubt believing he had lost part of his legs, lurched for the door in ludicrous gait. He made a plunge at the swinging leaves as if to take a dive, hitting the sidewalk as the people of Pawnee Bend were accustomed

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 to seeing men emerge from Poteet's Casino when the night bouncer was on the job.

The impetus of his rush against the swinging half-doors carried the cowboy into the dusty street. Bill Dunham was right there on the edge of the planks, with a little fatherly advice, given in a low but portentous tone. By the time the rest of them, including Charley Mallon, had taken in breath enough to carry them to the door, the cowboy was astraddle of his horse, heading for parts known only to himself. Bill Dunham turned a couple of shots loose after him to give him the key, and let him go.

When Mallon divided the latticed doors cautiously and thrust out a questioning phiz, he saw a streak of dust with a humped-over cowboy at the farther end of it, and the heads of a few citizens sticking out of doors and windows to see what it was about.

Mallon was back in his place behind the bar by the time Bill got inside, mashing half a lemon with his wooden pestle in a tall glass. The range-riders went out to think things over and get their bearings, not knowing just where the rest of them were going to get off. The few railroaders had come back to the bar, laughing and well pleased with the quick overturn the granger had made among the fresh young fellows who were not always careful where they stood their hot jokes around.

Major Simmons was nearest Bill on his progress to the bar, the captured gun in his big fist.

"Mr. Dunham," Major Simmons flung out a congratulatory hand, his dry face crinkled in humorous

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 appreciation of the event, "that was done like a gentleman and a scholar!"

"I always did hate a fuss," said Bill, beginning to feel as if he had made a show of himself, and maybe gone a little too far.

MacKinnon was standing off a little way, looking at Bill with a gleeful grin on his broad red face. Bergen slapped Bill's back in his paternal fashion, and got hold of his hand, talking between pumps and thumps.

"Worthy six-hundredth citizen!" he said, heartily enough, although Bill felt there was something of patronage, even mockery, in his leering hard eyes and whiskery grin.

Charley Mallon was shaking his mixture with a two-arm movement, this side and that, a long loop down the center, jiggle by the right ear, jiggle by the left; his eye on Bill as if he worked to propitiate him and feared his efforts might fail. He took the copper shaker off the glass, spooned out a cherry to brighten it, and set it before Bill with a friendly nod.

"Try that, Mr. Dunham," he requested respectfully. "It's on the house. An-ny time you want a limonade, step in."

"The six-hundredth man," said Puckett, offering his hand with a sinuous, slip-along movement as if sneaking a card, his gambler's face unchanged by any gleam of friendship or sincerity. "It looks like it's going to be a lucky number for you, Dunham."

"I hope so," said Bill. "Mr. Mallon, will you hand this gun to that feller if he comes back?"

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 Mallon was willing, although he said the man was a stranger to him.

"Maybe some of them punchers knows him," he said. "They come and go, here today, gone tomorrow. It ain't likely he'll ever come back, losin' his heels that way. You'd as well stick it in your scabbard and keep it, Mr. Dunham."

"I've got a gun," said Bill.

"You're not railroadin'?" Mallon leaned confidentially, ingratiatingly friendly, keen as an old woman talking across the fence.

"Well, no; not exac'ly what you could call railroadin'," Bill replied.

"You don't look like one of them light-headed cowboys," Mallon speculated, feeling around in his mind for some place to put this surprising fellow. "Are you out of the army, Mr. Dunham?"

"N-o-o, not exac'ly what you could call the army," Bill replied, with that horsetrader way of his that was neither yes nor no, yet so friendly and apparently confidential that Mallon felt he was learning a great deal, and coming down to the bottom of it right along.

The four citizens were laying their heads together while Mallon and Bill carried on this little aside. Bill gathered from their talk they were discussing who should carry the petition to Topeka and present it to the secretary of state, and the advisability of a public collection to defray the delegate's expense. Major Simmons waved that detail aside from consideration. He had an annual pass on the railroad, and he was patriot enough, he hoped, to pay his own expenses in

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 such an important civic matter. So he was spotted to go.

Bill Dunham, as the six-hundredth citizen, didn't appear to count for much any longer. He chatted along in a friendly way with Mallon, disclosing nothing at all of his past, cautious of any claim of intention on the future. He was so taken with what Mallon had to tell him about the country, on which the bartender was well and widely informed, that he switched his attention from the fathers of the county to this lanky son of it, who had come there railroading with the first string of steel that was laid.

Some of the cowboys returned, bringing two or three recruits with them to take a squint from a respectful distance at the man who talked like a greenhorn but acted like something else. They ranged along to the farther end of the bar, which was an ample one, fully forty feet long, where Mallon shifted himself to attend them.

The banker and his two adjutants, as Bergen and Puckett appeared to be, shook hands with Bill again. MacKinnon suggested a cigar, which Bill agreed to without moral or physical qualm. As they puffed along back toward the hotel, MacKinnon made inquiry on Bill's future designs.

"Thinkin' of goin' railroadin', Mr. Dunham?"

"Well, not exac'ly what you could call railroadin'," Bill replied.

"If you were, I could put you next to Jim Cunningham, boss of the surfacin' gang, that works around two hundred Eyetalian dago fellers. You might land as

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 timekeeper to Jim; he's lettin' out the man he's got, I hear. That lad's learnt their lingo enough to do a little graftin' off of 'em, but he made the mistake of forgettin' to whack up with Jim. He's been chargin' the simple ignorant dagoes a dollar a head by the month for holdin' their jobs for 'em, he made 'em believe."

"Purty slick business," Bill said.

"Yes, and he could 'a' carried it on to no end if he'd been honest and square and split with Jim like a gentleman. Jim'll take the graft over to himself now; you couldn't hope to get a whack out of that. But a handy man could think up something else to turn an honest dollar on the side."

"He might," Bill allowed, "but I've been thinkin' of hittin' the range."

"Railroadin' pays better, and it's easier, take it all weather through," MacKinnon advised. "But of course, if a young feller went to the range and rode straight, lettin' the red booze alone like you do, puttin' his money in yearlin's and pickin' up calves here and there the way they do, there's no end of opportunity for him to make big in ten years, or maybe less if he's got a speculatin' eye. It's a gamble, though, the biggest gamblin' game, spread on the widest table, men ever set in and bucked."

"That's what makes it appeal to me," Bill confessed. "I'm out here to take a chance."

"It's a game without a limit," MacKinnon sighed, as if he had learned something by experience with it. "You can go sky high if luck's with you, but you can

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 hit the rocks quicker than you can in any other business on earth. I've followed the range as cattlemen pushed it out here, from the time Custer cleared the Indians off of it and the Union Pacific was put through.

"Yes, I've seen fortunes made at the cattle business, and I've seen 'em lost. Men that could 'a' bought me up with their vest-pocket change one day were hittin' me for money to buy a cowpuncher's outfit the next. Market slumps and Texas fever, and winter storms and summer drouths. Yes, and the heat of gamin' that gets in a cattleman's blood, buckin' the big chance year in and year out. I've known 'em to be cleaned out in a poker game in a night, stakin' and losin' everything, down to the last horse.

"It's a great business, but I'll stick to my hotel. A man can dwindle down gradual at my business, die slow and easy. So, you're thinkin' of the range?"

"I've been thinkin' of it a good while," Bill owned, with more directness than he had answered a question since coming to Pawnee Bend.

"You could hold your own with them," MacKinnon nodded; "your own, and something more. "Well,more. Well [sic] Will-ium—" turning a shrewd eye to see how the familiarity was received, assured by Bill's slow friendly grin—"Will-ium—"

"They pronounce it Bill where they know me."

"Bill, if you take up that life let the red booze alone, and always leave it to the other man to make the break for his gun, the way you left that poor simpleton to make his play a while ago."

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 "I'd ruther eat than fight, any time," Bill said. "I always did hate a fuss."

Bill inquired about a likely ranch to get a job. MacKinnon named many cattlemen, but advised against striking out to ride into a job, as that might turn out a very wasteful adventure of time. The cowboy method, he said, was to hang around town and interview the cattlemen, range bosses and cowboys who came in on business or pleasure. A man could pick up a job that way almost any day.

MacKinnon had some further information to give about the requirements of horses and equipment, of which he found Bill almost entirely ignorant. They furnished a man nothing but his chuck on the range, Bill learned; every cowboy must supply his own horses, of which three was about the minimum with which a man could get along. But they were cheap. Good horses could be bought for thirty dollars. A cowboy frequently paid more for a pair of boots or a hat than he paid for a horse.

"But I'd advise railroadin'," MacKinnon said. "It's more a man's work, and it's here to stay. Range cattle will pass away in a few years, the cowboys will go with them, their occupation cut from under their feet like you cut the heels from under that lad in the saloon. There'll be nothing for them but railroadin' or farmin' then, and the old cow hands are good for neither—no, nor nothing else on earth but handlin' cattle on the range. It's a good thing to stay out of while you're young."

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 "I expect you're right, but I think I'll take a crack at it for a while if I can land a job."

"The best of them that come here do," MacKinnon said, shaking his head as for the things he had seen happen to them. "The life has a strong call to a young man; it lures the best of them away. Well, if I was makin' my start maybe I'd ride away with you, Bill. I expect it's altogether likely I'd take my blanket-roll and go."

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way of Bill Dunham's facility with a gun was this: When he had begun to get romance in the grooves of his commonplace life through reading of the doings in Dodge City and other towns of its notorious class, he had bought a twenty-two caliber pistol, intent on being ready for the company he would be called on to keep when the day came for him to face toward the short-grass country. While the current of time and circumstance was not to carry him to Dodge, or into the short-grass country until the lights of Dodge were dim and low, indeed, it had drifted him to a place where a handy man with a gun was just as highly esteemed.

Bill came of a pioneer stock. His forefathers had come foraging from Connecticut into Pennsylvania; from there down the Ohio as generations increased them; on to break the dark forests of Indiana and fight battles with the Indians there, and on again when things became too cramped, always keeping to the edge as long as there was an edge. In Bill's father the pioneering spirit had flickered down to a very weak urge, indeed, but he was the best squirrel hunter the Kaw valley ever had known.

So Bill had the eye and the hand for work with a gun of any kind whatever. He began his practice

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According to the Japanese naturalist Ono Ranzan, copper was melted in Japan for the first time in the year 698 A.D. at Inaba in the province Suwo, whilst ten years

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 with the little twenty-two by making a target of a cornstalk stripped down to the white, brittle core. That is a narrow streak when it comes to shooting at it with a pistol, great or small. Bill's way of doing it was to start rather close, backing off as he fired, cutting the crisp pulp as true as it could have been done with a knife.

Over and over he practiced this marksmanship in the frosty fields, backing off and shooting, running forward and shooting, hopping and wheeling and shooting, lying down and springing up as from sleep and shooting, becoming so apt at the business in time that the ordinary tricks of the gunman offered him no difficulty at all.

Birds on the wing, rabbits on the run, Bill pegged with the easy confidence of his inherited deftness which incessant practice had perfected into an art. After a due time Bill bought another gun, a whopping big one, as it had looked to him at that time, a very moderately sized one as compared to that he had wrenched from the foolish cowboy in Poteet's saloon. The new one was a thirty-eight, a handsome blued-steel weapon with long barrel, self-everything but self-loading. Bill always felt he'd have time to attend to that as needed, anyhow.

It was this gun Bill had brought with him to Pawnee Bend. It was safe in his suitcase at the hotel when he encountered the cowboy who had made the mistake that better and worse men before his day had made—of judging a man by his drinks. Bill never had carried a gun around with him; he never had figured on doing so until it should become necessary to the busi-

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 ness of his life. It appeared to him now that this time had come; that he'd better get himself a set of harness and strap the thirty-eight around his tank.

Still, he felt that he might be crowding matters a little when he came down to supper with the gun on, the new leather of his belt and holster stiff and creaking. He hid the gun as well as he could by keeping his coat buttoned, but the coat was short and the gun was long. It would assert its presence by a bulge, and a protrusion below the skirt of his coat.

He didn't want anybody to think he was out to pick a fuss, but he believed the time had come to wear a gun. That cowboy might come back looking for him, with a bunch of friends. The wise thing was to have a gun handy, even if he didn't use it. Appearances Are Everything.

With this thought standing out in his mind to excuse the unfamiliar weight of cartridge belt and gun, Dunham went out to look the town over after dark. It was a question to him where the business to maintain the place came from, situated as it was in the midst of a land believed to be far beyond the limit of agricultural possibility. Dunham had seen a few weak attempts at farming in the river valley as he approached Pawnee Bend, wide-scattered poor homesteads, looking more like temporary camps than homes.

In fact there was not much to give business stability in Pawnee Bend at that time. The custom that came to its doors was of the sort, mainly, that gets its money today, spends it tonight, and tomorrow goes off in considerable dejection to gather up another wad.

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 There were flush times and slack times in Pawnee Bend, as in towns where the current of business ran a bit more honestly on the whole than it rippled there.

The railroaders did not count for a great deal among the parasites who spread their snares in that town, for the italians were not spenders, and the old-time tarriers turned everything loose in one grand burn-up right after payday, leaving nothing to dribble along until the next. It was from the men spread wide over the range in charge of its countless cattle, and those who rode in daily with herds to load, that the profit came.

If they couldn't get a man's money one way in Pawnee Bend they got it another. Knockout drops were no rural fiction in that town, and a knockout without drops by some limber-wristed bartender was one established method of hastening the parting of a fool and his money.

Pawnee Bend was an incorporated town of the most inconsequential class provided for under the laws of that state. It had its mayor and town council, and a marshal to represent the law. This marshal was a notable man, whose name was known from the Arkansas to the Pecos.

Ford Kellogg had progressed westward from Abilene, where he made his start, marking his way with slain men. He was a professional city marshal, a calling which, in the days of these frontier Kansas towns, was widely different from the somnolent occupation it came to be long afterwards, when the butt of a billiard cue would do instead of two guns. Kellogg killed with

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 justification, mainly, shadowy justification at times, but he invariably killed. There were no cripples along his sanguinary road.

Kellogg was a man of no great stature, a compact, muscular man, who appeared rather compact and bunchy around the shoulders, probably from his habit of wearing a coat in all weather, let it blow as hot as Tophet in the summer days. He dressed invariably in dark blue, police-looking cloth, which he had tailored to him nicely, making by far the trimmest appearance to be encountered in town. He was a dark man, with a hint of Mexican about him, his small mustache a reddish brown, his eyes light and mottled in that peculiar breaking up of color common to people who stand on the line between a white race and a dark.

Marshal Kellogg usually woke to activity with the town after dark, his days being dedicated to sleep in the back room of the calaboose, which seldom contained a prisoner. Kellogg had the old-time officer's prejudice against prisoners; they were such troublesome people to have around. A coroner's inquest was soon over and out of the way, but a prisoner had to be fed and watered like a horse.

Kellogg was strolling past the Family Hotel, prying beeksteak out of his teeth with a goose-quill in the most genteel fashion, when Dunham started out to take his first look at Pawnee Bend by what the pioneers used to call arly candlelight. He gave Dunham a curious look, seeing him with his coat all buttoned around a gun that way, and passed on. He looked back every few steps as he sauntered in the luxurious

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 gait of a man full of beefsteak, as if not quite decided whether he ought to allow such an unusual-looking chap to roam around unquestioned.

Bill went on about his business, which was the business of seeing all that was to be seen without spending any money, marveling at the number of people, mainly men, abroad on the street. These men had an indoors softness about them, like worms out of nuts. Bill knew them well enough for what they were, having seen many like them along gamblers' row on West Ninth Street, Kansas City, where the gambling houses were palaces, indeed, compared to the open-jointed shacks of Pawnee Bend.

Many range men had come in and hitched their horses along the racks which lined the street, many were arriving momentarily, their increasing numbers promising a lively night. A crowd of these cow hands, heading for the Casino, which Marshal Kellogg had entered for his after-supper nip, encountered Bill Dunham.

These young men had taken a few jiggers of booze and were feeling quick and devilish, as their kind generally felt at the beginning of proceedings in that town. Next day was reserved for gloom, and the evil of each each day was plenty sufficient in itself, according to their philosophy.

One of them pretended to shy at the sight of Bill's gun, dodging behind his comrades in comical simulation of alarm. They all stopped, closing in around Bill with peering curiosity, taking him for something a little bit greener, maybe, than he was.

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 "Well, look at this granger with a gun hangin' on him!" said one. "Where do you think"—kindly patronizing—"you're goin' to, son?"

"Just amblin' around," Bill replied.

"Where's your ma?" the humorist of the bunch inquired, keeping up his pretense of benevolent interest.

Nobody laughed, every buck of them holding a face as sober and kindly concerned as he could pull, just as if they had found some little four-year-old wandering around on the prairie miles from anywhere. Bill's appearance, in comparison with their own, was fair warrant for their comical pretense, and without doubt as ridiculous as any get-up they were able to conceive.

Dunham's blue serge suit was neat, well-made and well-fitted; his round black hat of a pattern not unknown to Pawnee Bend, or even in legislative halls, a sort of senatorial, narrow-brimmed soft felt with a narrow tape around the crown where a ribbon usually is worn. But there was something unmistakably pertaining to business with the soil about him which appeared to make the gun under his coat a rare piece of burlesque.

Bill had seen hundreds—it might be said thousands, and still be well within the facts—of cow valets such as these pass the nursery on top of cattle trains in the many years he had labored beside the railroad there. Their wide-brimmed hats with high crowns, blue woolen, gray woolen, gay plaid woolen and dirty drab woolen shirts were as familiar to his eyes as print. He knew their accouterments from spur to wrist-strap; he could have outfitted himself to fit the new scene with

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 perfect harmony, and might have done so if he had been a little more foolish than he looked. Other young men from the farm country had made that mistake when they invaded the range. They never deceived anybody, and sometimes experienced a good deal of grief for their pretense.

Bill stood among them, half a dozen or more in the crowd, uncomfortable and somewhat uneasy, trying to grin and pass it off for the joke the best natured among them intended it to be. But there always is a more or less well developed bully among half a dozen boys who gang together, and these prairie rangers were not much above the average twelve-year-old lad in mental development. There was a bully among them; he came to the front now, a tall, shanky fellow with calves so long his boots reached only half-way to his knees. He had been shaved and clipped but a few minutes before, the scraped portion of his face clean in contrast to the rest of his unwashed surface apparent to the eye, and he smelled violently of barbarous perfume. This fellow now asserted himself as director of the entertainment.

There were no street lights in Pawnee Bend in those days, the sidewalks being illuminated by the lights of store fronts, the general custom being to place a lamp with tin reflector in the window, on the principle, perhaps, that light attracted night-roaming creatures, rather than through any design of making passage through the streets more comfortable.

Everything kept open late at night in that town, with the possible exception of the lumber yard. Bill

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 Dunham, and the committee of humorists who had blocked his tour of exploration, stood in front of the hardware store, where a special effort was made to light up the display of arms and ammunition in the window. Bill felt himself as prominent as a lightningbug under a glass.

The long-legged cowboy, who was somewhat mature for that designation, being nearer forty than twenty, by long odds, took a judicial stand before Dunham, hat pulled down to his eyebrows to make himself look meaner than nature had designed him, although it had done a job that should have satisfied any reasonable man.

"Have you got a license to pack a gun, little feller?" he inquired, leering at Bill sharply out of the shadow of his hat.

"You fellers go on where you're headin' for, and I'll do the same," Bill returned, well enough humored in tone and appearance, but a little vexed under the skin. He resented the disposition of everybody to pick on him the minute he showed his head outside the door in that town.

"No, you're not goin' on till you perduce your license," this rough joker declared. "I'm takin' up all guns that ain't licensted. Show me your paper, or hand over that little lady gun you've got under your coat."

"Oh, quit your coddin'," said Bill.

"He ain't got no license!" somebody declared in voice of shocked conviction.

"They hang 'em down at Dodge for packin' guns without papers, but I expect they'll let you off with a

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 spankin' here in Pawnee Bend, you're so innercent and cute. Hand me over that gun!"

Lanky made the demand sternly, reaching out his hand to receive the gun. Bill didn't know what to do, or how far they would go with it, that being a situation entirely new to him. He knew it was a joke, but he wasn't able to figure a way to get out of it and keep in their good graces. As he had told MacKinnon, he hated a fuss.

Bill stood with downcast eyes, his upward limit of vision being the cowboy's extended arm and the lowswinging holster on his thigh. Bill's resentment was rising, not alone against these foolish men and their stupid joke, but against what seemed to be a foreordained conspiracy against him among all men.

Why was he always picked as the victim? What was there about him that gave people the deceptive belief that here comes a soft-shelled weakling whom we can have our fun with, expend our combative desires upon, rob and roll and mistreat generally, with perfect safety to ourselves? Why was it so? Why was he to be called on always to defend his person from indignities, when so many despicable people walked through life in serenity?

It seemed to Bill Dunham, standing there those few seconds reviewing the past humiliations and impositions of his life, in those moments of pause before his decision, that his prearranged program had him cast for a fighting man, when there was nothing in the world so precious to him as peace.

Many a good man has been turned into a bad one

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 by this general misreading of outward signs, by taxing a truly generous soul with impositions, by mistaking for cowardice a man's respect for order and his love for peace. This cool, deep current, once lashed to fury by cumulative wrongs, sweeps everything aside in striking for the justice which the mean oppression of cowards has denied.

That pause was the turning point in Bill Dunham's life. There sternness replaced ingenuous simplicity, and righteous resentment rose in him like a flood. He swung a jolt to the pestering cowboy's jaw that piled him off the narrow sidewalk, down among the horses lined up at the hitching-rack.

There was a commotion among the horses, a rising of dust from their trampling. The lean cowboy came scrambling out of it, clawing for his gun. His friends scattered to give him room, leaving Bill Dunham in the bright light of the window lamp alone.

Dunham ripped the row of coat buttons open with one quick pass of the left hand, baring the butt of his gun to the right. He stood with his knees crooked a little, like a man waiting an explosion, or a brakeman on top of a car, making no defensive move until the cowboy had snaked his gun from the scabbard. The fellow was throwing it down on him when Dunham slung his gun and snapped a single shot.

The cowboy's bullet struck the store window, some little distance to Dunham's left, his intention unaltered but his aim ruined by the surprising celerity of the fellow he had taken for an innocent who had been permitted to live only to make laughter for the elect.

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in Pawnee Bend were discreet: when they heard shooting, they went the other way. Innocent bystanders were unknown among the sophisticated inhabitants of Pawnee Bend. Dunham had the scene to himself, with that sprawled figure lying face downward in the dust at the sidewalk edge.

Dunham felt as if the world had receded far away from him, leaving him desolate among strange things. He felt suddenly very old, and very lonely. What he had come there to do seemed to have been placed beyond the possibility of accomplishment by this tragedy that had descended upon him; the thread of his guidance seemed to be broken, leaving him groping. Everything was changed with the crack of a gun; everything was undone.

He did not feel any compassion for the fallen man nor any regret for the deed which necessity of his own defense had forced upon him. But that strange sense of loneliness pressed down so poignantly he felt himself as one bereaved.

Marshal Kellogg came hurrying from the Casino, and in his wake others trailed, making a clatter on the sidewalk planks. As quickly as Dunham had felt the recession of the world, he found himself surrounded

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 by a pressing crowd. He put up his gun, expecting the marshal to arrest him.

The marshal walked over to the place where the victim of that lame-going joke lay, his badge flashing in the lamplight as he stooped. He seemed to be satisfied that it was a complete job, such as turned out by his own workmanly hand. He turned to Dunham.

"Are you the feller that done this shootin'?" he asked, his voice singularly small and nasal, an indescribable sneer in it that seemed to challenge Dunham's manhood as it belittled the deed.

"I'm sorry to say I am," Dunham replied, his voice husky, and strange in his own ears.

"There's no case against that man, Kellogg," somebody spoke from the door of the hardware store. "We saw the whole business, from start to finish."

"Who started it?" the marshal demanded, so ungraciously it amounted to a challenge of the speaker's veracity.

"They did. There was a whole bunch of them pickin' on him," a different voice replied, a girlish voice that vibrated with excitement. She was so near him Dunham fancied he could hear her breathe.

Dunham turned to see who his defenders were, providentially raised up, it seemed to him, out of his naked world. One was the proprietor of the store, evidently, an elderly short man in shirt sleeves, wearing a canvas apron such as carpenters use for carrying nails. The other was a girl in a riding habit of brown cloth edged with red. She wore leather cuffs and a sombrero; there was a gun swinging at her waist, a stubby quirt looped

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 around her wrist. Her face was in shadow; Dunham could see her features only sketchily, but she was young, and his gratitude for her defense was guaranty to him that she was lovely.

"Look at my winder!" the merchant appealed. "Who in the hell's goin' to pay for that?"

"Well, I ain't, if you mean me," the city marshal replied.

This rejoinder won a laugh, more the tribute of sycophants than the expression of mirth, for Kellogg was a mighty man in his place.

"Who in the hell was hintin' at you?" the irascible hardware man wanted to know. "But if you'd 'a' been attendin' to your duty instead of guzzlin' booze it wouldn't 'a' happened."

It was nothing to the hardware man that a human life had been cut off before his door, at least very little in comparison with the value of his window pane.

"It was only a joke," one of the unfortunate man's companions said, in tone of complaining injury. "That ain't no way to rair up and shoot a man over a joke."

"That man had his gun out before this gentleman ever made a move to pull his," the girl said indignantly.

Dunham was certain she was beautiful, indeed, above all her kind.

"He ort to swing for it!" the cowboy insisted.

"There's no case against him, I tell you, Kellogg," the merchant said with authoritative emphasis, seeing the marshal indecisive in his course. "Let this man go."

"You don't need to git up on your high horse about

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 it, even if you are the mare," Kellogg replied, drawing another laugh.

Bill Dunham thought it was questionable humor in the presence of a lady, that rustic play on the chief officer of an incorporated town, a position mainly without dignity and with precious little power. Here was an exception; here spoke a mayor who had force behind his orders. It was lucky for him, Bill thought gloomily, they had picked the front of the hardware store to play their joke.

"This is the second break you've made with a gun today," the marshal said, snarling around at Dunham. "One more will be your last. You've got one hour to show your heels to this town. If you're here after that, you and I'll mix."

"He'll clear out," the mayor said, giving it as a positive guaranty, as if to remove the impression that he was perversely opposing the marshal's authority. "We've got gun-slingers enough around here without callin' in any outsiders."

"He ort to swing!" the complaining cowboy insisted. "Shootin' up a feller's pardner over a innercent little joke that a-way."

"They ain't doin' that any more in this man's town, kid," the marshal corrected him, a sneer in his nosey voice that was plainly a challenge to all assembled to try to revive that once popular Kansas outdoor sport and see how far they'd get along with it.

There was no undertaker in Pawnee Bend in those early days, the clearing off of human wreckage falling to the hands of the furniture dealer, a German named

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 Schubert, who made coffins according to specifications as occasion called. Marshal Kellogg sauntered off to summon Schubert to this little job, and the main portion of the crowd dispersed to the business or pleasure of the night, a few of the unlucky cowboy's companions remaining, a silent and melancholy guard.

These men appeared stunned by the unexpected turn of their rough-handed pleasantry. It was against all range precedent for a joke, no matter how cruel or humiliating to the victim, to end that way. They looked at Dunham with accusing reproach, unable to understand why he couldn't have stood like a good little granger and let them take his gun. But they respected him as a mystery beyond them.

Dunham stood near the mayor, into whose protection he had unconsciously edged, his faculties clouded by a numb oppression. He was in that foolish state that a man sometimes experiences when in strange surroundings, a participant in something so foreign to his inclination that he cannot believe it true. He feels that it is a dream, or a waking fancy, that reason will soon dispel. Dunham could not believe anything like the reality had happened: that a man lay dead at the edge of the footworn plank sidewalk, killed by a bullet from the friendly pistol that was as companionable to him as a dog.

The mayor jerked his head to signal him inside, and Dunham moved his feet to comply, expecting every moment to walk over the edge and wake out of it with a comfortable sigh. The girl had returned to the store ahead of them; she was busy with some small pur-

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 chases, stowing them away in a leather pouch slung across her shoulder.

To the mayor's direct and apparently unfriendly questioning, Dunham laid bare his plain and simple tale: how he had come to Pawnee Bend, his design in making the venture, and the facts leading up to the tragedy before the merchant's door. The mayor-storekeeper already had heard of Dunham's affair in Poteet's saloon.

"It looks like they picked you for the goat," he said.

"Yes, sir," said Bill, waking up completely to himself with a sigh, but far from a comfortable sigh, facing the past and present all bunched together in the mayor's brief summing up of his case. "Yes, sir, they always do; I guess they always will."

The girl turned from the counter, looking around with a quick movement of the shoulders, a sort of flinging motion of alert interest. Her hair was dark-red; that sort of hat was not becoming, and she rode astride, Bill knew from the cut of her skirt. But she had a friendly chin, a nice chin, that would feel soft and velvety in a man's hand, like a horse's chin.

That was his thought, a foolish one, he knew, but there it was, like some inexcusable blunder that no contrition would undo.

The mayor looked at his watch.

"You'll have to hit the road out of here before nine o'clock," he said, gruff in his way, but under it roughly kind. "Kellogg will shoot you on sight if you stay around here a second after the hour. You're quick

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 with a gun, I know, but he's a professional, and he's jealous of his reputation. It's been six weeks or two months since Ford killed a man. He begins to get mean when it runs that long between killin's."

Dunham was not moved by this simple description of the city marshal's fretful state that called for a human sacrifice to quiet. He knew the mayor was not trying to frighten him. Kellogg's cold eyes, the sneering insult of his voice, his sauntering slow gait, the expressive cruelty of his very outlines, all proclaimed his nature. He was repellent as a snake. But Dunham was not afraid of him.

He stood considering his situation. Not the Bill Dunham of a few minutes ago, but a Bill Dunham suddenly become grimly decisive, gravely mature.

"There's no train through till nine-twenty," the mayor said, looking at his watch again, according to the habit of railroad men, and railroad village dwellers when speaking of a train. "That would be too late for you. There might be a stock train through, but they don't stop, unless to take water. You could swing onto one of them about a mile east of town; the grade slows 'em down there—the boys hop 'em right along."

"Thanks," said Dunham, speaking out of his abstraction, not even lifting his head, the word perfunctory on his tongue.

"Kellogg's a man of his word, he'll not crowd you before your hour's up," the mayor said. "Have you got money enough to buy a horse?"

"I guess I could make it."

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 "Zora," the mayor turned to the girl, who stood with back to the counter, leaning a little in a lounging, interested pose, "couldn't you folks take him on over at the ranch?"

"I don't know," she replied, in a cautious, noncommittal way, as if she did know very well, but didn't want to bind herself. "The association is taking on some men for the quarantine guard—pa's coming in on the nine-twenty from Kansas City; he'll know."

"Yes, and a hell of a lot of good it'll do this man if he's comin' at two minutes past nine! He can't hang around here and wait for that train."

"He might walk on down the road toward our place and we could pick him up," the girl suggested.

"There was a cowboy in here this afternoon lookin' for a buyer for his horse and saddle," the mayor said, thoughtfully, as if contriving a way to piece out the problem of getting Bill Dunham out of town before nine o'clock. "I think he left the horse with the liveryman to sell—you might go over and find out. He was askin' forty-five dollars for the outfit. I expect the saddle cost him more than that."

"Thanks. It sounds cheap enough," Bill said.

"If you can't ride a horse you didn't have any business comin' to this country," the mayor said sharply, regarding Dunham with disfavoring eyes. "Don't hang around expectin' me to step in and save your skin this time. If you do you'll be layin' on a board by the side of that feller they're pickin' up out there."

Dunham made no reply. The girl had turned her

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 later—in 708—the first Japanese copper-money “Wa-do-kai zeni” was cast in the province of Musashi.

The different ores of copper in Japan which have come to our knowledge, are:

First.—, the most important of all Japanese copper-ores. It varies greatly (2-14 per cent) in the quantity of copper which it contains. Several samples, which we collected in different parts of Japan, contain much less copper than the good copper-pyrites from Devonshire. With few exceptions, the quality of the Japanese copper-pyrites cannot be said to be excellent; the enormous quantity, however, in which this ore is found in nearly every province of this country, makes a worthy compensation. We rarely saw bright brass yellow ore, but often yellow-grey amorphous masses, containing a considerable amount of iron—and arsenical pyrites. The Japanese names for this ore are: or, Syn. Akagane-no-arakane. It forms with the three following minerals the source of all Japanese copper. Besides these there are also several other copper-minerals in Japan, but these are not, or very seldom, used in copper smelting.

The Japanese Copper pyrites of some provinces (Sado, Dewa; Iwami, Tazima, &c.,) contains a little gold or silver or both metals, which the Japanese know very well to separate by a liquation-process [see later under silver.]

Second.— occurs in many places with copper pyrites, and is used with the latter ore in the copper-metallurgy. The specimens which we have received constitute amorphous masses of a dark grey colour and are of good quality. The Japanese know very well that copper glance gives a much richer copper-slag than copper pyrites. They melt it often with the latter ore together, because it promotes the fusibility of pyrites and gives a better kind of copper. The scientific Japanese name (Sinico-Japanese) for this ore, we have not been able to find out, it is ordinarily called “kuro-do-seki” (black

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 back to the activities over which Schubert was presiding in the street. The wagon drew away in a moment, and the mayor began to talk again.

"Don't make the mistake of thinkin' you can hide out somewhere in town and dodge Kellogg, or stand around and bluff it through. If you can't ride, walk—I'm not goin' to interfere. It's not more than nine or ten miles out to your place, is it, Zora?"

"Between eight and nine," the girl replied indifferently, Dunham thought.

"Thanks," said Dunham.

The word appeared to nettle the mayor. He turned on Dunham savagely, his brows gathered in threatening scowl.

"You'll have to make up your mind purty damn sudden what you're goin' to do, young feller!"

"Thanks," said Dunham, in that same perfunctory, exasperating way. "I made it up some time ago."

"Well, git to hell out o' here, then!" the mayor said, at the end of his forbearance with such a dumb clod of a man.

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