Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/314

 It was dusk that evening when the new sheriff hired a horse at the livery barn and set off in the direction of John Moore's ranch. There had been a good deal to do in the way of consultations and establishing the county officers in temporary quarters pending the building of the court house. Zora had only slipped Bill a little handshake along with several hundred other handshakes, and gone her way without giving him a chance for a word. Now Dunham was riding in such desperation toward the pea-green mansion that people who met him on the road thought he must have got word of the man who stole his horse.

"I don't suppose it'll do a dang bit of good," said he, with a hopeless sinking inside him, but an unshaken determination that urged him on.

He stopped at the top of the hill from which he first had seen the lights of the Moore homestead. It was dark now, and the lights were twinkling through the cottonwood leaves. He thought of Zora, the kind stranger of that night, and of Zora, the kinder friend. In past days he had built up his hopes of a dearer relationship, but they had been so utterly without a foundation of such substance a man must have to come wooing a cattle baron's daughter that his mouth turned dry and his tongue got thick. He never could say the words.

Why, in those days he didn't even have a job. Things were different now. He had come into his own.

"But I don't think it'll do a darn bit of good," he sighed, sitting there looking down at the lights.

He rode on, holding his horse down to a walk, his