Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/173

 situated that placid evening on the south shore of the Cimarron.

"You've changed your appearance since I saw you in Pawnee Bend yesterday evenin'," young Hughes remarked, quite affably, offering Dunham his tobacco as he spoke.

"Yes, I got this set of harness to suit a job I thought I had," Dunham explained, easy of conscience and free of embarrassment, quite an illumination falling upon his affairs.

"I couldn't see,why you didn't grab that job they offered you in town," young Hughes, whom the others addressed as Bob, seemed to wonder. "Nothin' to do but loaf around, with free drinks as long as a man could stand up under 'em, I guess, and everything his own way. City marshal is another name for king in a little town like Pawnee Bend."

"I guess I was born common," Dunham laughed, but with indifferent success, trying to appear easy when he was beginning to squirm in the discomfort that is the plague of true modesty. "Well, I wasn't cut out for a lazy man's job, anyhow."

"You didn't say anything to me about killin' Ford Kellogg up in Pawnee Bend yesterday," Hughes said. "Maybe that was such a triflin' occurrence in your daily life you forgot it."

Hughes was a little sarcastic about it. At the mention of Ford Kellogg, and the part Dunham had borne in bringing his notorious career to a close, the cowboys rolled over to lean on their elbows and stare, some of them sitting up with startled suddenness to look at