Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/312

 crowded centers; it stood out there like a white picket in a brown fence.

Bill Dunham considered all that, and put the thought of books out of his mind. He looked up with his slowstretching, whimsical grin, put his hat on the chair he had occupied before his exaltation, and began to talk in a way that was as easy and natural as water running over a rock.

He didn't attempt anything sentimental; he didn't say a word about being grateful for his unexpected elevation to that position of power and trust. He just told them about his feelings that day of his arrival in Pawnee Bend, and how he had thought the country the barest, bleakest, lonesomest spot a mistaken wayfarer ever wandered into. He said he felt that day as if he had climbed to the very top of Kansas and found it bald-headed, and that he was the doctor who had been called in to make its hair grow. It was such a hopeless undertaking it had made him weak in the knees.

They rocked in their saddles and bounced up and down on the springy planks when Bill told them that part of his story, to grow grave as he turned it deftly to give them a picture of the same place transformed into a fruitful land of promise by the thousand blooms of friendship that had sprung along his way.

Those who knew him best were the greatest surprised and delighted by the revelation of a quality quite unsuspected in such a modest, quiet-tongued young man. It was as if an unpromising guest had taken up the fiddle and played them an entrancing tune.