Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/302

 keep it up until the travelers were around the first bend, often shouting his last pleasantries in tremendous crescendo after they were clean out of sight over the hill. He was so red and happy in his boisterous loud style that one might have thought him the manager of the big show, his fortunes secured by the generous outpouring.

The Moore family fell in with the procession duly, Bill Dunham riding with Zora and the two older people in the spring wagon, the boys romping along on their horses. Brassfield and his wife had gone on ahead hours earlier, both in high hope of picking up with some old cronies of their past rambling life.

Bill Dunham had not known of any public square in Pawnee Bend, any more than a casual visitor from anywhere, let him be never so keen, would have been aware of its space or confines. It was an area surrounded by short-grass plains, lying entirely beyond the uttermost growth of the town. The promoters of Pawnee Bend, Bergen and Puckett, had planned grandly and the town had not overtaken their expectations, to say nothing of building around them to the formation of a hollow square.

But the square was there, duly set aside and designated, a distance of two good city blocks beyond the last business house at the end of the principal street. With the county organization now complete, the county seat assured to Pawnee Bend, there was good reason to believe the street would stretch in time until its buildings enveloped the square. There the court house would lift its cupola above brick walls, with cottonwood