Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/271

 desire to save a brave man's life, ran out of the office and stood in front of the freight-room door, stretching out her arms as if to gather the shots to her own breast. The scoundrels stopped shooting, but one of them slipped by, threw down his gun and let Dunham have it as he was trying weakly to heave himself to the platform by his knee.

It was a frustered quick shot, and wild, but it got Dunham in the thigh and tumbled him between the rails of the sidetrack which ran along the rear of the station. He fell so close to the platform, which was about three feet high, that he was sheltered from the storm of bullets that broke over him. They had him, they yelled exultingly across the street and from their scattered places of hiding, and they came pelting to put a curtain to the long-drawn tragedy.

It was then about noon. Dunham had been in the car four hours. A long time until night, indeed, but it looked as if it had come Bill Dunham's time to say good-by to daylight for the last time in his life.

The mob was in a more vicious mood than it had been at the beginning, due to there being two pieces of human wreckage lying on the station platform for Schubert to carry away. And a third man was running wildly, holding his hand to the side of his head, where Dunham's last shot had nipped his ear off as clean as shears. For a man in a tipping, rocking, film-obscured world, Bill Dunham had done some pretty fair shooting, indeed.