Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/49



way of Bill Dunham's facility with a gun was this: When he had begun to get romance in the grooves of his commonplace life through reading of the doings in Dodge City and other towns of its notorious class, he had bought a twenty-two caliber pistol, intent on being ready for the company he would be called on to keep when the day came for him to face toward the short-grass country. While the current of time and circumstance was not to carry him to Dodge, or into the short-grass country until the lights of Dodge were dim and low, indeed, it had drifted him to a place where a handy man with a gun was just as highly esteemed.

Bill came of a pioneer stock. His forefathers had come foraging from Connecticut into Pennsylvania; from there down the Ohio as generations increased them; on to break the dark forests of Indiana and fight battles with the Indians there, and on again when things became too cramped, always keeping to the edge as long as there was an edge. In Bill's father the pioneering spirit had flickered down to a very weak urge, indeed, but he was the best squirrel hunter the Kaw valley ever had known.

So Bill had the eye and the hand for work with a gun of any kind whatever. He began his practice