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 couldn't pull a knot. Two young cowpunchers lolling under the trees near their horses, swapping boastful yarns of their latest conquests among the dance-hall ladies of Pawnee Bend, stopped breathing a moment to look a startled question into each other's eyes. It took them only about three seconds to reach an undivided opinion that their urgent business was not on the shore of the Cimarron that day, but at some undetermined point toward the north.

"Hughes didn't tell us he'd turned things over to you," Garland said. "If this is a joke, kid, it looks to me like you're showin' kind of poor judgment in pickin' your day to put it over."

"I leave jokin' to you people; it's more in your line than mine. Hughes didn't say anything about me because I hadn't taken the job then."

"Do you expect us to stand here hands-down and let you pass?" an elderly, bearded, Scottish-looking man inquired, bending over his saddle-horn to glare at Dunham wrathfully.

"This is a public road," Dunham replied. "You gentlemen have taken one end of the law in your own hands; I'll take the other in mine. I'm as good a Jayhawker as any of you—better, I expect, for I was born in this state—and I know the laws of my state as well as any of you do. There's no law that gives you authority to close the public roads against the peaceable citizens of another state. What I'm here for is to tell you to either step out of the way when you see that herd comin', or be treated the same as any other band of outlaws if you try to stop us."