green short grass, growing in little bunches, the unkind gray soil showing bare between, was uncropped and plentiful. Dunham put down his heavy suitcase in a little swale where a different grass grew thick and promising, nurtured by the down-wash of the richest soil. Here were some rose-brambles, matted in impenetrable clumps, and stunted bushes, of which the higher ground was uniformly bare.
As Dunham sat there in a mood of dejection, the feeling of being an outcast heavy upon him, the sun growing warm on his shoulders, it occurred to him that Appearances Are Everything. It illuminated his gloomy mind, it lifted his spirit with new hope. Foolish of him to have lost sight of that business-college maxim, which was not nearly so platitudinous to him as it doubtless seems to you. There was where he had bungled it, thought Bill. Appearances Are Everything, and he had put in the wrong kind of appearance at Pawnee Bend.
A gun, for example, didn't go along with that kind of clothes, at least a gun dangling in leather undisguised to the eyes of men. It was a combination so incongruous as to amount to a flaunting of custom; it had made him conspicuous and rushed him into the very thing he had hoped to avoid. Now, if he should go back to Pawnee Bend in overalls and boots, a woolen shirt and wide-brimmed hat, as most of the cowboys were dressed, he'd seem out of place without a gun.
The best thing to do, Bill concluded at last, was to go on west to the next town, get the proper outfit and make the proper appearance. To avoid making it look as if
