Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/277

 cloth and color, and hat instead of cap, declared Tom would have to do no more than show the superintendent his bill of sale to satisfy him of ownership. Then he'd get his cars without any more talk.

Meantime, somebody suggested, what if Withers came back with a gang and drove the cattle to the range? There had been something threatening in the old rascal's defiant way of going, with his curse flung at the law and the representatives of it.

The railroad men wanted to stand guard over the cattle with Tom, a hardship that he would not on any account put them to, he said. If they should hear a disturbance in that quarter during the night, they might come and give him a hand, which would be gladly ac'cepted. They arranged it with Baldy Evans, night watchman at the shops, whose main job was keeping steam up in the boilers, to blow the whistle if he heard shooting break out at the cattle pens.

Windy Moore had his bulldog in his pocket that minute, ready for any trouble that might come along, and keen to meet it. There always was a great feeling of security in the pressure of the bulldog against his ham. It seemed to Windy that he was enforced by that stubby weapon to the equal of any man that carried one more conspicuously. It made him so brave he would have stood up befote seven cowboys, confident that he was impervious as well as invincible with the bulldog in his hand.

A gun in the pocket gives a certain stripe of man that confident security and foolish self deceit that he