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 chases, stowing them away in a leather pouch slung across her shoulder.

To the mayor's direct and apparently unfriendly questioning, Dunham laid bare his plain and simple tale: how he had come to Pawnee Bend, his design in making the venture, and the facts leading up to the tragedy before the merchant's door. The mayor-storekeeper already had heard of Dunham's affair in Poteet's saloon.

"It looks like they picked you for the goat," he said.

"Yes, sir," said Bill, waking up completely to himself with a sigh, but far from a comfortable sigh, facing the past and present all bunched together in the mayor's brief summing up of his case. "Yes, sir, they always do; I guess they always will."

The girl turned from the counter, looking around with a quick movement of the shoulders, a sort of flinging motion of alert interest. Her hair was dark-red; that sort of hat was not becoming, and she rode astride, Bill knew from the cut of her skirt. But she had a friendly chin, a nice chin, that would feel soft and velvety in a man's hand, like a horse's chin.

That was his thought, a foolish one, he knew, but there it was, like some inexcusable blunder that no contrition would undo.

The mayor looked at his watch.

"You'll have to hit the road out of here before nine o'clock," he said, gruff in his way, but under it roughly kind. "Kellogg will shoot you on sight if you stay around here a second after the hour. You're quick