such a base design before them, for she had won their respect, if not much sympathy, by her intervention in Dunham's behalf when they were shooting at him from the door.
They picked Dunham up roughly and slung him like a sack to the platform. With the sudden change in position, the rough breaking of his blissful half-conscious dream of floating at ease without a care, the pain stabbed him in the chest with such excruciating dart his awakening senses fled. He fell insensible to the boards, his head striking cruelly. This lapse of sense concerned the liveryman. There was no fun in hanging an unconscious man. They'd might as well hang a sack of bran.
He told his fellow-lynchers as much, with ironical stress and obscene profanity. He sent somebody after a bucket of water. When it came he stood sloshing dipperfuls of it over Dunham's face and chest, watching closely for symptoms of revival.
While this was going on Zora was fighting like a wildcat to break away from her rough captors, who hustled her along the platform to the corner of the telegraph office and headed her toward the street. Get to hell out of there, little hellion that she was! they said. Few of them knew who she was, fewer cared a curse. All women looked alike to them.
John Moore had left camp forty miles from Pawnee Bend that morning to send some telegrams to his agents in Kansas City. On his way he had fallen in with Hughes, the Texas cattleman, whose herd was then two days' drive from the loading pens. They had ridden
