left a taste like the nausea of a debauch in his mouth.
While his resentment had not been without justification, he admitted now that it had not been sufficient to warrant him in setting out maliciously to ruin Moore by a means which might break a hundred men whom he never had met. He might as well have gone on and forgotten it, as he had gone on and forgotten many a threat to knock his head off before. Moore had been testy that day. He was a man full of troubles, and it no doubt seemed to him that Dunham was a sort of pestiferous insect that couldn't be fanned away.
Bill saw it all in a wiser and cooler mind as he lay gazing wide-eyed at the stars, for that is a very good situation for a man to get hold of himself, measuring his stature against the universe that way, and finding out how very little he actually weighs.
A worse feature of the business was the certain alienation of Zora Moore. She would pass him as a stranger from that day; she would scorn him as a traitor to the interests of his native state, by which a man was required to stand and put up a good fight, after the heroic traditions of Old John Brown. And he had been thinking of arriving at that happy pass with her when he might hold her soft white chin in the cup of his hand, as he used to hold the chins of little girls—cold little chins, and wind-rough—when they fell and bumped them on the ice, long, long ago.
Bill had parted company with Hughes after the cattle were bedded down for the night, pickets thrown around them to guard against dispersion by panic or wanton design. Dunham had gone on north ten or
