from the sun. At the right of the speakers' platform there was a space which marshals of the day were keeping clear. As Dunham and the others took their seats, men on horseback began filling this reserved ground. They came riding up from town, evidently by prearrangement, ranging compactly in a certain rude order, the foremost of them with their horses' noses at the railing.
Dunham had a new qualm at this sight. It looked as if these men were there for some purpose aside from spectators. He wondered if they were expecting trouble to break about something, and he wondered if they had it in for him. They were cowboys and cattlemen, every one of them armed. More than that, the cattlemen were plainly in charge of that day's business. They had pushed the townspeople aside and were doing it their own way.
Bill began to sweat from another reason than the eleven-o'clock sun. He had a deep, troubled feeling that something was going to happen to him. There he was, surrounded by cattlemen, flanked by cattlemen, as helpless in their hands as a calf.
He looked around at Zora, caught her eye, and tried his hardest to ask her silently what it meant. She shook her head in that quick, warning way mothers do to stop a child about to tear the leaves out of the hymnal in church, drawing her nice eyebrows in admonitory frown. Bill read it as meaning: "Behave yourself, Bill Dunham! Sit still, and don't make any foolish breaks."
They let the congressman expand himself in oratory
