Zora was right about it: Bill Dunham was an outlaw under the moral code of the range, which moral code was purely a business one, to be sure, a code of mine and thine, with far the greater stress on mine. They'd get him, MacKinnon said. He advised Bill to hit the road at once, not waiting to sell his horse. Ride it, MacKinnon said; go on to the Panhandle or somewhere, and get a job. Go anywhere, but get out of southwestern Kansas as fast as he could hop.
No, said Bill. He was beginning to like that country; he'd continue to stick around awhile. He changed his thirty-eight gun for one that would make more noise, as well as a bigger hole in the anatomy of the species, opened a dicker for a rifle and scabbard that some Texas cowboy up with a trail herd had left with MacKinnon on an unpaid bill. Dunham got this for twelve dollars in the end, and hung it on his saddle, his horse hitched in front of the hotel as if he intended to go somewhere in a hurry, when there was nothing farther from his mind.
MacKinnon said a man might think Dunham had discovered a gold mine from the way he was determined to stay there. Bill pulled one of his rare, slow-coming, hard-going grins, and replied that a gold mine was cheap stuff compared to what he had discovered.
