The Kansas legislature enacted a quarantine law that was as good as a barbed wire fence along the border, and the railroads got the Texas business after that.
The Kansas cattlemen were indignant in their denial of complicity in the attempt on Dunham's life. It was the general opinion that the two strangers who had started the trouble had been moved by a desire to add to their own fame by laying out a man so notable as Bill Dunham. Frontier gunmen always were under that shadow of peril at the hands of obscure and sneaking creatures who hoped to grow big by putting an end to somebody greater and more courageous than themselves. They were moved by the desire that actuates a savage to waylay and slay a valorous enemy, cut out and eat his heart.
The two sconudrels who had laid claim to Dunham's horse were unknown to everybody in Pawnee Bend but the liveryman, who harbored the wounded one until he was able to go his way, which was long before Dunham was on his feet again.
When it became known that Dunham would recover, and be ready in a month or so to square accounts, there were some uneasy heads in Pawnee Bend. The solid business interests, of which MacKinnon had spoken so impressively, were represented in the gang that tried to mob Dunham by the liveryman and one blacksmith, the rest of them being low ruffians and light-headed gentry of the kind always eager to run in and take a kick at a man when he is down. They are found in all layers of society, little less vicious in the grain pit of Chicago than in the dusty, sun-stricken street of Pawnee Bend.
