During the night Dunham's attitude toward his situation changed. Perhaps it was a subconscious adjustment, at work within him while he slept, or it may have been only the assertion of his common sense over the stubborn spirit of defiance. He woke in the conviction that he had made a mistake by remaining in Pawnee Bend, and that he would complicate it if he stopped there to tempt the rope some solid citizen might be knotting for his neck even then.
There was no chance of getting anything under his feet in that town but air, a foundation altogether too uncertain for a young man of ambitions and matrimonial designs. Nobody would give him a job; by staying there he would only be inviting disaster. They were accustomed to handling wilder men than he in that country, and it was as true that morning as when John Moore had put it bluntly some days back in Bill's adventurous career, that he could not fight them all.
It was unpleasant to think of a mob composed of the solid business interests of Pawnee Bend—of Puckett, Bergen, and the grumpy hardware man who had cursed because there was nobody to pay for the window broken by the fittified man. It would be better to slip away quietly, cowardly as it would seem to go,
