Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/21

 roof in it, he believed, concealed designing beings who were only waiting his coming to spraddle all over him and rob him of his wad. It looked as sinister as a cyclone cloud; it looked like knockout drops.

Bill had all the fear of knockout drops common to his kind. He had heard woeful tales of the potency of that insidious draught, and of the harpies who beguile a man to sip it, sitting on his knee with an arm around his neck. It made him sweat to realize his proximity to that pitiless peril. He felt for his wad—some three hundred dollars, the savings of his eight years—and breathed in relief to find it still there.

It was a quiet scene to rouse so much panic in a stout young man of Bill Dunham's build. There was little activity along the wide main street, only a few men moving lazily about or lounging along the hitching-rack where numerous saddled horses, a wagon or buggy here and there, stood waiting their owners' business. There were no boisterous noises; Bill had listened, but he had not heard a gun.

The sound of children calling shrilly as they raced at play reached Bill from a part of the town he could not see. It was assuring. Children made that noise only when they played at school; there was a sort of school refinement, school repression, in the sound that Bill knew very well. It gave him a pang for something that he had touched and passed on, but it put him a little more at ease. It couldn't be such a bad place if there were children and a school.

A long string of boarding cars stood on a sidetrack back of the depot. Bill looked that way, indecisive