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 both to himself and Hughes. It would be time for him to ride aside after escorting the herd a few miles, and turn his talents to finding a job that would hold still long enough for him to get a rope on its nose.

Curiously enough, he began to have a qualm of conscience over the trick he had turned against his fellow citizens. Loyalty was expected of a man in Kansas. It began to look like a kind of mean trick for no larger or nobler reason than the gratification of personal revenge.

How could he go riding by Moore's pea-green house with its turned columns and fancy gables, and tower where Zora might be watching like another Elaine for a Lancelot to come riding out of the south? Not that he could be the knight in her romance. She hadn't as much as a collar button of his to sit by the window and polish, or a slight thought of him that would draw her gaze down the road she had ridden with him when he went away to do this treason against her kin and kind.

It made Bill sweat to think of it as a treasonable act. Zora had expected something better of him than that. And she had trusted him to deliver that telegram, until this moment forgotten in the heat of his anger and the hungry gnawing of his vengeful passion. There it was in his shirt pocket, all crumpled from sleeping on it, and no telling now when he'd have a chance of handing it to Moore.

From the look of things at that moment, Dunham concluded he'd better turn Hughes loose to make his own way to Pawnee Bend and pull his freight out of