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.
Out at Dodge they would shoot a man for the af-
