Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/289

 again Dunham saw Moore looking at him in a queer, puzzled way, as if there was something about the whole business that he could not understand.

Perhaps it was that Moore was trying to figure out how he had come to make the mistake of misjudging a man so wildly. It amounted to about the same thing as reading a brand wrong, and getting himself into a situation hard to explain.

Bill Dunham was a happy man the day he was able to go downstairs and sit under the cottonwood trees. He was as weak as that childhood concoction which he remembered as cambric tea, and just about as pale. The boys hung around him in worshipful awe, proud of the distinction of having a man who had shot so many worthless people, and had been shot all to pieces himself in a big fight, as a guest. The family had made a place for him which he fitted so naturally and comfortably that he wondered how he was to order his life without them when it came his day to leave.

Especially Zora. With the thought of an existence in which Zora did not figure, Bill was moved by a feeling of bleakness and desolation. When he confronted that situation, drawing nearer and nearer as his strength increased, it seemed to him as if the bottom had fallen out of the world, leaving him alone on the edge of an abyss which even his imagination could not bridge.

There was not anything original in his thoughts, speculations, longings, about Zora, to be sure. That is an unvarying tune on the lyre of youth, although every young man believes his own case unique and unparalleled in all the long history of human attachment. The