Page:Short Grass (1926).pdf/74

 that door? Dunham looked at his watch. He still had twenty minutes.

"If anybody comes here lookin' for me"—turning to MacKinnon, watch in his hand—"I'll be out there in the middle of the road between here and the depot."

"I'll tell him," MacKinnon promised, throwing that suspicious, scared look around again. Then cautiously: "When you see him step out of here and start over that way, plug him while you've got him in the light!"

"I'll meet him on the square, man to man," Dunham replied, fixing MacKinnon with a reproving stern look. "Tell him that when he comes."

It was not as dark out in the road as MacKinnon had thought it would be. The moon was in the waxing half, paring the clouds like a scimiter as they slid before it, showing in bright transitory gleams as it seemed to gain little victories over the racing hosts of fleecy vapors; now smothered completely and obscured, now dim and befogged. It was an uncertain light at the brightest for seeing a man's movements with a gun, and shaping one's own actions by them to keep within self-justification and, as Dunham thought, the law.

Dunham stationed himself in the middle of the town's business street, at the point where the road which came in from places unknown to him joined it and merged dust with dust like the sandy rivers of that land in summer-time. The railroad was a little way behind him, and across that, the station, its long plank platform, step-high to passenger coaches, lying dark before it.