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 would allow this invasion to proceed without some attempt to do damage. He had sensed the sullen temper of the crowd in passing as plainly as he ever felt the heat of a brushwood fire beside the road. What the final outcome of it was to be, he could not guess.

He did not care particularly, now he had brought the herd into Kansas against this strong force. He had proved to Moore and the rest of them, but especially to Moore, that a man need not be raised on the range, nurtured on rawhide and schooled in the commonplace tricks of that simple trade, to be able to confound them at their own devices and defeat them at their own game.

Bill had no notion of how fast beef cattle ought to travel, or how far in a day; he had no thought of wearing off the profit by keeping up that scrambling, pushing, crowding start for Pawnee Bend, more than fifty miles away. He did have some recollection of Hughes saying it would take at least four days to drive that last stage of his long journey, but his main thought was to get the cattle as far as possible up the trail before trouble broke. Every mile along would add to the wariness of the Kansas cowmen, and the herd's security.

Dunham jogged on ahead of the nervous herd, wondering just where he was going to get off. Hughes had not hired him; he had refused indignantly the proffer of reward for his services, and he was still a man out of a job. How far should he go with his self-appointed guardianship of Hughes' cattle?

It looked to him as if he had fulfilled his obligation,