Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/285

 Zora came to see Dunham every day, even when he lay fevered and delirious, unable to recognize friend from foe, under the impression, indeed, that all the world was his enemy. She never came alone. Either her mother or one of the boys, or Shad Brassfield's wife, accompanied her and went with her to the room where Dunham lay. Pawnee Bend was censorious in matters of feminine decorum; it set straight lines, and its expressions were as obscene as its thoughts. Zora would have borne all the agonies of suspense rather than defy the conventions of the peculiar social code she had grown up to respect as the Covenanter his gloomy theology.

It was on one of these visits, after Dunham had begun to crawl like a sea-bruised wrecked mariner back to the solid shore of life, that MacKinnon took Zora and Mrs. Moore into his troubled confidence. The news that Dunham would recover had gone around town. There was a murmuring among the heads that were marked for vengeance in the day when Dunham should walk abroad with his gun. There was dark talk, and darker plotting, MacKinnon said.

He was afraid it would go beyond that some night; he shook in his boots with the fear that they would rush him and murder Dunham while he lay helpless in his bed. Such a fear was not groundless, the women knew. Not a year before that a wounded gambler had been taken from his room at night and hung to an upended wagon tongue in the middle of the street. The safer it was to undertake a vengeance so base made its probability the greater.