Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/261

 a hand. There is no sport so exciting as hunting down a man, no entertainment quite as thrilling as a hanging. Men go mob-drunk when one of their kind is being worried down to death. The fact that he is a fugitive condemns him, without any other evidence in the case.

So there were not wanting fathers of families and men with beards on their faces in the mob that sought Bill Dunham's life that day. The hardware merchant was not among them, nor Bergen, nor the dough-shouldered Puckett, but the liveryman was there, a sharp-faced, pale stooping lank scoundrel who had stolen enough horses in his time to remount the Seventh Cavalry. He was the cavalier who fired the shot from the hayloft when Dunham turned his back.

The solid interests of the town could not be said to be present and bearing a hand, but they were keeping circumspectly within their own doors, making no effort to stem or turn the tide of disfavor against Bill Dunham and save his life.

Fifty or sixty men, with the half-grown boys of the town pushing and nosing on the edge of the crowd like excited pups, quickly gathered on the lee side of the depot, eager to drag Bill Dunham from the freight car and hang him to the railroad bridge half a mile east of town.

Some of them never had seen Dunham; some of them had talked with him in staring awe only a little while before, when he had passed their sod hovels and plank shanties looking for his horse. The more notable the man in the case, the more glory in being able to say they bore a hand in hanging him.