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 "Why," said Dunham, bending his head as if a hard question had been propounded and he must go into it carefully, "I can't exac'ly say anything's wrong."

"I'm damned sorry for the reception you got down here yesterday, Dunham," Garland said with frank sincerity.

"Oh, he knows how to take a joke," Moore said, with ingratiating assurance.

"I'm learnin' right along," Dunham agreed, looking at Moore so coldly the cowman's gizzard sagged, "but it's a hard matter for a green man like me to know where the joke stops and the insult begins."

"Them damn-fool boys ain't accountable, Bill," Moore said, apparently full of regret for the incident. "A man like you can afford to pass a little thing like that by."

"I don't hold the boys accountable, but I took you for a full-grown man," Bill told him, with more indifference than censure. "But that don't matter; I didn't come over here to take that up with you."

"You came over to ask me what in the hell I mean when I tell a man he's hired, I guess," Garland said. "I mean what I say, when I say it that way. If you want to go to work, you're still hired."

"No, I didn't exac'ly come to take that up with you, either, Mr. Garland. Mr. Moore shot off a lot of talk yesterday about the kind of men he needed down here to keep Texas cattle out of Kansas. I'm here to show him what kind of a man it takes to bring them in."

"What do you mean, Dunham?"

Garland was all on edge in a moment, and if the