Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/128

 There was one thing certain now: he had broken into that country, or at least he had one foot inside the door. Should he go ahead on that ground, take the nine-twenty westward as he had intended, or leave it all and return to less romantic and more peaceful fields?

As for this romance that beckoned with such seductive smile from afar, there wasn't so much to it when a man got up so close he had to use his gun. Maybe there was a gentler brand of romance in the short-grass country—his heart quickened at the thought of Zora Moore—that would compensate a man for the brutal things he had to do to hold his own.

But there was no use standing around on one leg thinking about Zora Moore. Because of one wild shot, for which Dunham now was doubly glad, she had turned on him with the rest of them. He knew as well as he knew rain on a roof without seeing it that she was in the kitchen that morning when he left the ranch, pointing him out to that beaver-toothed cowboy as the granger who had illusions about a gun.

She had been taking a large wreath of credit for saving his life about that time, he was sure. Let her have it; maybe it was coming to her. If he had met Kellogg in the night it might have had a different ending. Let her have credit, with gratitude added to it, for what she had done. She was a smart girl to think of working him that way, and she had a lovely chin. But she was out of it as far as he was concerned.

Schubert arrived with his board under his arm—it was said in Pawnee Bend that he grabbed it every time he heard a shot—and the unimpressive remains of Ford