Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/43

 Mallon was willing, although he said the man was a stranger to him.

"Maybe some of them punchers knows him," he said. "They come and go, here today, gone tomorrow. It ain't likely he'll ever come back, losin' his heels that way. You'd as well stick it in your scabbard and keep it, Mr. Dunham."

"I've got a gun," said Bill.

"You're not railroadin'?" Mallon leaned confidentially, ingratiatingly friendly, keen as an old woman talking across the fence.

"Well, no; not exac'ly what you could call railroadin'," Bill replied.

"You don't look like one of them light-headed cowboys," Mallon speculated, feeling around in his mind for some place to put this surprising fellow. "Are you out of the army, Mr. Dunham?"

"N-o-o, not exac'ly what you could call the army," Bill replied, with that horsetrader way of his that was neither yes nor no, yet so friendly and apparently confidential that Mallon felt he was learning a great deal, and coming down to the bottom of it right along.

The four citizens were laying their heads together while Mallon and Bill carried on this little aside. Bill gathered from their talk they were discussing who should carry the petition to Topeka and present it to the secretary of state, and the advisability of a public collection to defray the delegate's expense. Major Simmons waved that detail aside from consideration. He had an annual pass on the railroad, and he was patriot enough, he hoped, to pay his own expenses in