Short Grass/Chapter 5
People in Pawnee Bend were discreet: when they heard shooting, they went the other way. Innocent bystanders were unknown among the sophisticated inhabitants of Pawnee Bend. Dunham had the scene to himself, with that sprawled figure lying face downward in the dust at the sidewalk edge.
Dunham felt as if the world had receded far away from him, leaving him desolate among strange things. He felt suddenly very old, and very lonely. What he had come there to do seemed to have been placed beyond the possibility of accomplishment by this tragedy that had descended upon him; the thread of his guidance seemed to be broken, leaving him groping. Everything was changed with the crack of a gun; everything was undone.
He did not feel any compassion for the fallen man nor any regret for the deed which necessity of his own defense had forced upon him. But that strange sense of loneliness pressed down so poignantly he felt himself as one bereaved.
Marshal Kellogg came hurrying from the Casino, and in his wake others trailed, making a clatter on the sidewalk planks. As quickly as Dunham had felt the recession of the world, he found himself surrounded by a pressing crowd. He put up his gun, expecting the marshal to arrest him.
The marshal walked over to the place where the victim of that lame-going joke lay, his badge flashing in the lamplight as he stooped. He seemed to be satisfied that it was a complete job, such as turned out by his own workmanly hand. He turned to Dunham.
"Are you the feller that done this shootin'?" he asked, his voice singularly small and nasal, an indescribable sneer in it that seemed to challenge Dunham's manhood as it belittled the deed.
"I'm sorry to say I am," Dunham replied, his voice husky, and strange in his own ears.
"There's no case against that man, Kellogg," somebody spoke from the door of the hardware store. "We saw the whole business, from start to finish."
"Who started it?" the marshal demanded, so ungraciously it amounted to a challenge of the speaker's veracity.
"They did. There was a whole bunch of them pickin' on him," a different voice replied, a girlish voice that vibrated with excitement. She was so near him Dunham fancied he could hear her breathe.
Dunham turned to see who his defenders were, providentially raised up, it seemed to him, out of his naked world. One was the proprietor of the store, evidently, an elderly short man in shirt sleeves, wearing a canvas apron such as carpenters use for carrying nails. The other was a girl in a riding habit of brown cloth edged with red. She wore leather cuffs and a sombrero; there was a gun swinging at her waist, a stubby quirt looped around her wrist. Her face was in shadow; Dunham could see her features only sketchily, but she was young, and his gratitude for her defense was guaranty to him that she was lovely.
"Look at my winder!" the merchant appealed. "Who in the hell's goin' to pay for that?"
"Well, I ain't, if you mean me," the city marshal replied.
This rejoinder won a laugh, more the tribute of sycophants than the expression of mirth, for Kellogg was a mighty man in his place.
"Who in the hell was hintin' at you?" the irascible hardware man wanted to know. "But if you'd 'a' been attendin' to your duty instead of guzzlin' booze it wouldn't 'a' happened."
It was nothing to the hardware man that a human life had been cut off before his door, at least very little in comparison with the value of his window pane.
"It was only a joke," one of the unfortunate man's companions said, in tone of complaining injury. "That ain't no way to rair up and shoot a man over a joke."
"That man had his gun out before this gentleman ever made a move to pull his," the girl said indignantly.
Dunham was certain she was beautiful, indeed, above all her kind.
"He ort to swing for it!" the cowboy insisted.
"There's no case against him, I tell you, Kellogg," the merchant said with authoritative emphasis, seeing the marshal indecisive in his course. "Let this man go."
"You don't need to git up on your high horse about it, even if you are the mare," Kellogg replied, drawing another laugh.
Bill Dunham thought it was questionable humor in the presence of a lady, that rustic play on the chief officer of an incorporated town, a position mainly without dignity and with precious little power. Here was an exception; here spoke a mayor who had force behind his orders. It was lucky for him, Bill thought gloomily, they had picked the front of the hardware store to play their joke.
"This is the second break you've made with a gun today," the marshal said, snarling around at Dunham. "One more will be your last. You've got one hour to show your heels to this town. If you're here after that, you and I'll mix."
"He'll clear out," the mayor said, giving it as a positive guaranty, as if to remove the impression that he was perversely opposing the marshal's authority. "We've got gun-slingers enough around here without callin' in any outsiders."
"He ort to swing!" the complaining cowboy insisted. "Shootin' up a feller's pardner over a innercent little joke that a-way."
"They ain't doin' that any more in this man's town, kid," the marshal corrected him, a sneer in his nosey voice that was plainly a challenge to all assembled to try to revive that once popular Kansas outdoor sport and see how far they'd get along with it.
There was no undertaker in Pawnee Bend in those early days, the clearing off of human wreckage falling to the hands of the furniture dealer, a German named Schubert, who made coffins according to specifications as occasion called. Marshal Kellogg sauntered off to summon Schubert to this little job, and the main portion of the crowd dispersed to the business or pleasure of the night, a few of the unlucky cowboy's companions remaining, a silent and melancholy guard.
These men appeared stunned by the unexpected turn of their rough-handed pleasantry. It was against all range precedent for a joke, no matter how cruel or humiliating to the victim, to end that way. They looked at Dunham with accusing reproach, unable to understand why he couldn't have stood like a good little granger and let them take his gun. But they respected him as a mystery beyond them.
Dunham stood near the mayor, into whose protection he had unconsciously edged, his faculties clouded by a numb oppression. He was in that foolish state that a man sometimes experiences when in strange surroundings, a participant in something so foreign to his inclination that he cannot believe it true. He feels that it is a dream, or a waking fancy, that reason will soon dispel. Dunham could not believe anything like the reality had happened: that a man lay dead at the edge of the footworn plank sidewalk, killed by a bullet from the friendly pistol that was as companionable to him as a dog.
The mayor jerked his head to signal him inside, and Dunham moved his feet to comply, expecting every moment to walk over the edge and wake out of it with a comfortable sigh. The girl had returned to the store ahead of them; she was busy with some small purchases, stowing them away in a leather pouch slung across her shoulder.
To the mayor's direct and apparently unfriendly questioning, Dunham laid bare his plain and simple tale: how he had come to Pawnee Bend, his design in making the venture, and the facts leading up to the tragedy before the merchant's door. The mayor-storekeeper already had heard of Dunham's affair in Poteet's saloon.
"It looks like they picked you for the goat," he said.
"Yes, sir," said Bill, waking up completely to himself with a sigh, but far from a comfortable sigh, facing the past and present all bunched together in the mayor's brief summing up of his case. "Yes, sir, they always do; I guess they always will."
The girl turned from the counter, looking around with a quick movement of the shoulders, a sort of flinging motion of alert interest. Her hair was dark-red; that sort of hat was not becoming, and she rode astride, Bill knew from the cut of her skirt. But she had a friendly chin, a nice chin, that would feel soft and velvety in a man's hand, like a horse's chin.
That was his thought, a foolish one, he knew, but there it was, like some inexcusable blunder that no contrition would undo.
The mayor looked at his watch.
"You'll have to hit the road out of here before nine o'clock," he said, gruff in his way, but under it roughly kind. "Kellogg will shoot you on sight if you stay around here a second after the hour. You're quick with a gun, I know, but he's a professional, and he's jealous of his reputation. It's been six weeks or two months since Ford killed a man. He begins to get mean when it runs that long between killin's."
Dunham was not moved by this simple description of the city marshal's fretful state that called for a human sacrifice to quiet. He knew the mayor was not trying to frighten him. Kellogg's cold eyes, the sneering insult of his voice, his sauntering slow gait, the expressive cruelty of his very outlines, all proclaimed his nature. He was repellent as a snake. But Dunham was not afraid of him.
He stood considering his situation. Not the Bill Dunham of a few minutes ago, but a Bill Dunham suddenly become grimly decisive, gravely mature.
"There's no train through till nine-twenty," the mayor said, looking at his watch again, according to the habit of railroad men, and railroad village dwellers when speaking of a train. "That would be too late for you. There might be a stock train through, but they don't stop, unless to take water. You could swing onto one of them about a mile east of town; the grade slows 'em down there—the boys hop 'em right along."
"Thanks," said Dunham, speaking out of his abstraction, not even lifting his head, the word perfunctory on his tongue.
"Kellogg's a man of his word, he'll not crowd you before your hour's up," the mayor said. "Have you got money enough to buy a horse?"
"I guess I could make it."
"Zora," the mayor turned to the girl, who stood with back to the counter, leaning a little in a lounging, interested pose, "couldn't you folks take him on over at the ranch?"
"I don't know," she replied, in a cautious, noncommittal way, as if she did know very well, but didn't want to bind herself. "The association is taking on some men for the quarantine guard—pa's coming in on the nine-twenty from Kansas City; he'll know."
"Yes, and a hell of a lot of good it'll do this man if he's comin' at two minutes past nine! He can't hang around here and wait for that train."
"He might walk on down the road toward our place and we could pick him up," the girl suggested.
"There was a cowboy in here this afternoon lookin' for a buyer for his horse and saddle," the mayor said, thoughtfully, as if contriving a way to piece out the problem of getting Bill Dunham out of town before nine o'clock. "I think he left the horse with the liveryman to sell—you might go over and find out. He was askin' forty-five dollars for the outfit. I expect the saddle cost him more than that."
"Thanks. It sounds cheap enough," Bill said.
"If you can't ride a horse you didn't have any business comin' to this country," the mayor said sharply, regarding Dunham with disfavoring eyes. "Don't hang around expectin' me to step in and save your skin this time. If you do you'll be layin' on a board by the side of that feller they're pickin' up out there."
Dunham made no reply. The girl had turned her back to the activities over which Schubert was presiding in the street. The wagon drew away in a moment, and the mayor began to talk again.
"Don't make the mistake of thinkin' you can hide out somewhere in town and dodge Kellogg, or stand around and bluff it through. If you can't ride, walk—I'm not goin' to interfere. It's not more than nine or ten miles out to your place, is it, Zora?"
"Between eight and nine," the girl replied indifferently, Dunham thought.
"Thanks," said Dunham.
The word appeared to nettle the mayor. He turned on Dunham savagely, his brows gathered in threatening scowl.
"You'll have to make up your mind purty damn sudden what you're goin' to do, young feller!"
"Thanks," said Dunham, in that same perfunctory, exasperating way. "I made it up some time ago."
"Well, git to hell out o' here, then!" the mayor said, at the end of his forbearance with such a dumb clod of a man.