Dunham with his infallible pistol hanging on his hip. Some of the men trailed along with him, eager to do a service to such a notable character; women lingered in doors to look after him, dumbly awed by the passing of a man whose name was so terrible, as they simply and confidently believed, in the ears of cattlemen that he could walk through a hundred of them without ever throwing hand to his gun.
Dunham must have put in nearly an hour tearing around looking for that blamed horse. The fool thing had disappeared as completely as if a seam had split in the prairie and enveloped it. Bill came poling out on the railroad fully convinced that the horse had not accomplished such a complete disappearance unaided.
Somebody had grabbed that horse when it left the corral, and either ridden it off or hidden it in some shed. But that belief hardly would warrant him in going around demanding stable owners to show him what horses they were harboring that morning. Trouble would attend such a proceeding, and he was a man who had trouble enough on his hands for one day.
He headed back to the livery barn to see if the owner had returned, thinking he'd be in a hell of a fix if he couldn't find that horse. His new slicker, his coat, his blankets, grub, rifle and ammunition were on the horse, which was at once his ticket and his conveyance to a point far distant from the troubled atmosphere of Pawnee Bend.
Bill stood on the station platform, almost where he had stood on the day of his first arrival in Pawnee Bend, looking up the street, thirtking resentfully of the
