Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/19

 fronts which men basely swallowed in silence in Lawrence or Kansas City. Boot Hill was full of the graves of upstarts who had died for stepping on gentlemen's toes. Bill Dunham quickened and expanded when he read of those sanguinary doings out at Dodge, and romance blossomed in his heart.

For Bill was a sore man over impositions. His place had been rather a lowly one, socially, social position in that community, as in wider ones elsewhere, grading according to financial rating. Bill's family had been miserably poor; well-fed, better-clothed boys had rolled him and pummeled him and mocked his patches with derisive cruelty. A place where a man might yank out his gun and take blazing vengeance for such wrongs appealed to Bill.

Those who had stepped on him and slurred him when he was ten, had pretty much passed out of his life by the time he was twenty-four. They had gone off to Kansas City to run street cars and drive delivery wagons, or scattered on rented or inherited farms in the established routine of starting out and never getting anywhere. Bill carried the old hurts in his heart, for he was a slow man at forgetting, long after he knew that all hope of adjustment had been outlawed by time. Now, reading the paper about the men of Dodge and Hays City, and the places whose names were romance in themselves, the feeling grew on Bill that he wanted to enlarge out of Peter Schoonover's nursery, and go out in the world and fling his feet.

Dutch Gus said the best place for a man to throw his feet in of any place in the world was Pawnee Bend.