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 tained a ghost of a hope that Bill would survive that meeting, but he had laid the groundwork in case it might flip around the other way.

Men would walk easy when they went by him now; he would be considered by not a few, MacKinnon himself among the number, a public benefactor, for, to tell the truth about it, Kellogg had been more feared than respected in that town. They were becoming weary of his killings, his growing disposition to take the whole works into his own hands.

It always was that way with one of those killing city marshals, MacKinnon said. They got so vicious and snarly the men who hired them were often afraid to fire them. He had seen it happen before: in MacPherson, and Dodge City, and other places where he had conducted family hotels.

And so on, to a great length, MacKinnon doing all the talking, for which he was very well qualified, without a doubt. Bill didn't want to go to the expense of hiring a room for his meditations, and there was no place in MacKinnon's little lobby that was out of the eyes of men. So he stood there and took it, when his soul ached for silence, with that curious crowd outside the door, not one of them with the courage to come in and speak to him man to man.

Into this phase of Bill Dunham's perplexity, not half an hour after his bullet had cut the thread of Ford Kellogg's altogether vile and worthless life, there walked Mayor Ruddy, the hardware merchant, and Henry Bergen, townsite promoter, with his long coat, red vest, big lodge emblem and all the outward embellishments