# Short Grass/Chapter 22

It was Dunham's conclusion that he had made a mistake in taking refuge in that car. They knew he was wounded, for they had seen him stagger when the shot from that high-powered rifle got him. Any desperate chance that he might have taken looks better than his choice to a man when he realizes its worthlessness. Dunham now thought he should have gone to the barn and had it out with them, win or lose.
A number of possibilities which seemed shut off to him now, presented in that lost chance. He might have found his horse, he might have been able to get to the doctor, who would have stood them off if he was half the man he looked. Anything would have been better than the course he had taken. They had him now; all they had to do was wait. Unless he could open the opposite door and slip out on the other side of the car.
The thought revived him with hope. He began to move the hay to come at the door. About one load had been taken out of the car, he calculated as he worked; just about one load. He cleared the closed door presently and tried to push it back. The pin was in the hasp outside; it wouldn't move.
It was a question on both sides of what to do next. Dunham had little choice of any course except to lie there and wait in the hope that MacKinnon and some ​of the better citizens would come to his assistance. He could not believe that the solid interests of the town, as MacKinnon had described them, were in the crowd; it was impossible to conceive such a quick shift of public sentiment against him. Only three days ago they had asked him to take the office of city marshal, grateful to him then, it seemed, for ridding them of a man-destroying oppressor whom they feared.
Kellogg had not been a friendless man, however. There were certain shady characters who found a safe harbor in Pawnee Bend under his protection, who had followed him in his shifting from town to town. Some of these were thieves and sharpers of the vilest type, who now found themselves standing out naked, as it might be said, before an unfriendly world.
These men could not entrench behind the law any longer; there was no other frontier open to their trade. Horse-thieves and bank-robbers, these men were, cattlerustlers and the gentry who plied blackjacks on the heads of drunken cowboys at night.
There were a few crooked gamblers and pimps among them, outlawed and despised even in that free-going society. Wolfish people, who clung together in a slinking pack, an under-current of the town of which Dunham knew nothing. These were vicious in their desire to avenge the death of their protector and friend, and Bill Dunham was the last man they wanted to see in his place.
It does not matter what the beginning of such a crowd may be, there always are plenty of men, respectable enough in their ordinary lives, ready to rush in and take ​a hand. There is no sport so exciting as hunting down a man, no entertainment quite as thrilling as a hanging. Men go mob-drunk when one of their kind is being worried down to death. The fact that he is a fugitive condemns him, without any other evidence in the case.
So there were not wanting fathers of families and men with beards on their faces in the mob that sought Bill Dunham's life that day. The hardware merchant was not among them, nor Bergen, nor the dough-shouldered Puckett, but the liveryman was there, a sharp-faced, pale stooping lank scoundrel who had stolen enough horses in his time to remount the Seventh Cavalry. He was the cavalier who fired the shot from the hayloft when Dunham turned his back.
The solid interests of the town could not be said to be present and bearing a hand, but they were keeping circumspectly within their own doors, making no effort to stem or turn the tide of disfavor against Bill Dunham and save his life.
Fifty or sixty men, with the half-grown boys of the town pushing and nosing on the edge of the crowd like excited pups, quickly gathered on the lee side of the depot, eager to drag Bill Dunham from the freight car and hang him to the railroad bridge half a mile east of town.
Some of them never had seen Dunham; some of them had talked with him in staring awe only a little while before, when he had passed their sod hovels and plank shanties looking for his horse. The more notable the man in the case, the more glory in being able to say they bore a hand in hanging him.
​Bill Dunham, lying bleeding in the freight car, his hasty bulwarks of hay protecting him front and flank, a solid pile of it roof-high behind him, felt himself in a pretty tight hole. It was so tight, and apparently so hopeless, that he believed his time had come to say good-by to daylight. Romance had led him into this pass, and there was no romance in such an end.
His wound was a streak of fire; the torture of sudden thirst that flares up from the drain of such a hurt was in his throat. Such a torment, growing as he knew his would increase as the sun mounted and beat down on the thin roof, might drive a man to face even the rope. He knew nothing, could know nothing, of the character of the mob, except there was no valor in it.
And a man could not make a compromise with cowards who held the advantage. He knew of old from the maulings, taunts and humiliations he had suffered at bullying hands, that no compromise could be made with cowards. He must lie there and suffer, and save his precious ammunition, wait for night and the chance it might bring him to escape or fight it out.
He could feel the crowd growing, even though he could not see it, for they were keeping carefully behind the depot, although he knew he was watched closely. He had only the ammunition in his belt and gun. He ran his thumb around the belt, thinking how few cartridges there were for so many scoundrels in that town who ought to be shot, wondering what the end would be.
His honest soul protested against the unfair deal they were giving him in that town, rising up that way against him because he had defended his rights. The cattlemen ​might have sent the two ruffians who had provoked a quarrel to plead an excuse for killing him, but the cattlemen were not in on this. There was not even a cowboy in town, except those who might be lying in the stupor of whisky in some brothel, or stretched on the floor of a saloon.
They began shooting into the car again, probably to find out if he was still alive, or to provoke him to useless waste of his ammunition. He did not reply, lying still behind the bales of hay, eye to the crack he had made commanding the depot.
Presently he heard them at the end of the car, behind him, talking about smoking him out. There was stiff objection to this procedure in the voice of the liveryman, to whom the hay belonged. Then a sly movement along the side, somebody sneaking up with what design he did not know.
The door moved, grating noisily on its rusty bearings. They were planning to shut him in, the purpose of the maneuver not plain to Dunham, as he could not understand how they expected to get him any sooner by that. He threw a shot through the door as it slid forward, to let them know he was still up and coming, then tumbled a bale of hay in position to block the closing of his precious airhole. The activity outside stopped suddenly, and the genius of that enterprise made a hurried retreat.
Dunham's throat was as dry as if he had been eating the rough brittle forage that formed his defense. If they shut him in, the torture of his situation would soon become past human fortitude to endure. Perhaps ​that had been their thought. The door was still about half open; he was determined to keep it that way, ready to drop out of when his time came to leave.
He believed they might cool off a little if he could hold them on the watch until evening. At least some of them would get tired of the game and leave, and the more sensible ones might see the unfairness of their enterprise and quit even before then. He wasn't going to keep their anger hot by provoking them. He wouldn't take a crack at anybody unless he had to do it to drive them out of the car. They couldn't rush him without somebody getting hurt, and they were not out for that. There was no fun in hanging a man if somebody had to be killed to do it.
It was something past eight o'clock when Dunham settled down, back to a bale of hay, to fight his fierce thirst and wear out the long day in defiance of the mob. Night was his only chance now, he knew. There would be a moon, but luck might cloud it up. Shooting even at close range was uncertain in the night; there would be as many chances for as against him then.
Wait until dark, which would not be until nearly nine o'clock in those lengthening days, twelve hours, and more than twelve hours, to stick it out. He did not believe he would bleed to death, for no artery appeared to be cut, although he might be weakened by the drain. He began to rehearse how he would do it when night came.
It was always darker in railroad yards than anywhere else, happily for his chance. He would slip noiselessly out of the door, let them have it good and ​strong if they were hanging around, throw himself under the car and scramble through to the other side.
From where his car stood it was only a little way to the kitchen of the boarding-train. He would make a dash for that, fight his way in if he had to, and get a drink of water. Already the anticipation of that drink, twelve hours away, intensified the fire of his thirst. Then he would drop out on the other side of the boarding-train, where the world lay open to his feet. Getting away in the dark would not be hard; they would be careful how they crowded him in the dark.
Once clear of them, he would lay a line for Moore's ranch and ask Zora to help him. It would be a cheap thing to do, a despicable resort to the charity of a man whom he had tried to ruin, but it would be his one chance to come out of that scrape alive.
That was the program; he sat there rehearsing it over and over, the presence of the mob a shadow in the background of his thoughts. It was as if he had withdrawn from them a long distance, or to some inaccessible altitude, but that the way of escape would bring him back in peril of them again. Just now he was safe, but there was no way around; to escape he must pass again dangerously near. Down to the last detail of every conceivable exigency he rehearsed that plan. Over and over, with Zora and refuge at the far-away end of it, so far and so uncertain as to seem the fortune for which a man strives under long and cruel stress to see only in a dream.
Outside the sun blazed and the hot wind blew. Dunham's eyes were fevered and blood-lined; his head ​throbbed with a quickening beat like the desire that increased in him to perfect that plan for night. His wound was painful; his tongue felt like dry sand.
Strange how that little wound in his shoulder kept on bleeding. Time and again he shifted when he found himself sitting in a puddle of blood. It kept running down, and running down, in a way to provoke a stout fellow like Bill Dunham. That burning in his pleural cavity was still there, evidence of a slow leak internally. It was a pain so hot and terrific as to seem the pure flame of pain. Alcohol poured into his chest could not have set up a torture more acute, he thought, wondering how a man's blood out of its proper place could bring him so much agony.
When he looked out, peering cautiously around the corner of his barrier, things wavered as if the heat glimmered between him and what he could see, twisting them out of shape. They seemed to be keeping pretty quiet out there; he wondered if they had given it up and gone away. He moved a bale of hay; it toppled and fell, tumbling through the door to the ground. They began to shoot, thinking he was coming out.
No, they had not given it up. They were there, viciously and persistently there, dogging him without a quarrel to back them, laying for him in pure meanness without an excuse that would turn an ant. If he ever got clear of there and out where he could throw his feet, there would be a reckoning with that gang, especially the man that shot him in the back, shot him in the back—the back—shot him in the back.
He shook his head, trying to clear it, vexed at that ​repetition which went on like a mechanical thing without a voice in the back of his head. He had a feeling of dizzy sickness, as he had felt once when a little boy in a swing. What was the sense of a man feeling that way over a little hole through his shoulder? There wasn't a damn bit of sense!
He leaned on his hands against a bale of hay, and shook his head, and shook it, like one in a horrible nausea of useless retching. It would not clear. It whirled, and seemed to sink and rise, sink and rise, like something on water, something detached from him, not belonging to him at all. A troublesome head, a foolish, pain-shot head, with that hammer-beat in the temples, that dancing glare, as if he looked at things beyond a fire, in his eyes.
Bill sat down again, his back against the wall of hay, feeling weak and miserable. The pain he could bear, and that floating detached feeling of his head he could endure, but thirst was growing into a hideous torment that he could not bear much longer. He tried to get away from the longing for water, running over his hundred-times repeated plan for getting out of there after dark.
He would go cautiously to the door, lying flat, and look out and listen. If they moved a foot he would hear them, if they breathed within a rod of him he would know. Then out, a quick stoop, a silent dive under the car, taking care of the rods, which came low in the center across the beam, and out on the other side, making a dash for the boarding-car and water.
At each rehearsal of it now he hurried over the pre​liminaries, making the cut shorter to the boarding-car and a drink of water. After a little he could see nothing but himself before the water pail, the dipper in his hand, pouring the delightful draught down his burning throat. He could hear the click of his palate as the big cool swigs went down, feel the blissful satisfaction of a torment assuaged. There the scheme began, do what he might to make it begin where it should; there it ended; at the bucket in the boarding-car.
A train came in, a passenger train, Bill knew by the way the bell was ringing, something gallant and dashing about it that did not sound in a freight engine bell. The brazen clangor of it, the palpitating, imperious, impatient clamor, seemed to come to him in rings of sound; spreading, expanding, wide-circling rings of hard, bright sound. There was a clanking of metal spout, chains and weights at the water-tank, then a gushing burst of downpouring water, a cool plashing overflow of water, a liquid, gurgling, rushing of cool water, that tried the strength of a man to hear.
Dunham started up, urged by desire to tempt destruction if he might die with water on his tongue. He was in the door, his blood-veined hot eyes on the wavering water-tank; his foot was feeling for the edge of the door, his eyes on that gushing, wasteful, white-rushing torrent down into the black tank of the panting engine. A shot splintered the timber not a foot from his head; he dropped back behind the bales of hay.
He heard the clank of the pipe as the fireman shut off the water and released it for the weights to lift, and the last dribbling of that wasted stream. He could not go; ​it was not time to go. They were still there, hatefully, maliciously alert, waiting for thirst to strangle him, or that draining ebb of blood to weaken him until he could no longer hold his gun. Then they'd come. They'd come when he fell insensible, and shoot his old hide full of holes.
More than half delirious from the pain of that pleural effusion, Dunham had no thought of how long he had been in the car. Only that it was not night, it wasn't time to go. He began rehearsing the plan for getting out of there again, which took him with impetuous rush to the boarding-car and the bucket.
He got to thinking of Charley Mallon after that, how he shook the lemonade with the chipped ice in it, and put it down heaped with creamy foam, rich and cool with the soothing mucilage of raw egg. And then he thought of water in the springs he knew back home, and of water in creeks and the swift clear river, and water over ice at the time of spring thaws, when the smell of sap was in the maple trees. Water, any kind of water: water in the ruts of the road, water in horse tracks in the road, water in scum-green ponds, fetid water where vile creatures tracked the slime, but all of it blessed water that he would have flung himself down and drunk until he had drowned the fearful fire of his thirst.
And then of Charley Mallon again, his hot eyes bulging from his head, it seemed, with the pressure of pain behind them that crowded his brain so full of agony it was puffing in horrible enlargement, like a kernel of corn in the fire. Charley Mallon and the copper ​shaker, and the half of lemon in the tall flaring glass.
He thought of it with such intense longing, such fiery, tortured longing, that Charley Mallon and the cool barroom seemed only a step away. What kind of a man was he to lie there and suffer when Charley Mallon was only a step away, waiting to shake him a lemonade?
What did it matter who was out there, or what they wanted, or how many stood in the way? What a fool he had been not to think of old Charley Mallon before! He scrambled up dizzily, the floor of the car rocking under him as if somebody had hitched it to a train.
A frenzy of insane rage was on him. He jerked out his gun, kicked the bale of hay out of the door, and slid out after it, staggering weakly as he struck the ground. But he struck shooting, and the mob that had swarmed around the depot at the report that he was breaking away scattered like leaves in the wind.
Look at them go! Look at them go! They were flickering and flitting like butterflies in his sick fevered vision, dim and wavering, dancing and floating and waving their long skinny arms, like nothing in the world but butterflies over cabbage plants on a hot, white day.
Dunham went on toward the depot platform, walking slowly, shooting as he advanced, heedless of any danger, unconscious of any peril, driven by the rage of thirst and the delirium of pain. Five or six men made a dash for the door of the freight-room, and from that shelter they began to shoot.
Dunham's gun was empty, but he went on, ploddingly, heavily, sickly on. The agent's wife, with heroic ​desire to save a brave man's life, ran out of the office and stood in front of the freight-room door, stretching out her arms as if to gather the shots to her own breast. The scoundrels stopped shooting, but one of them slipped by, threw down his gun and let Dunham have it as he was trying weakly to heave himself to the platform by his knee.
It was a frustered quick shot, and wild, but it got Dunham in the thigh and tumbled him between the rails of the sidetrack which ran along the rear of the station. He fell so close to the platform, which was about three feet high, that he was sheltered from the storm of bullets that broke over him. They had him, they yelled exultingly across the street and from their scattered places of hiding, and they came pelting to put a curtain to the long-drawn tragedy.
It was then about noon. Dunham had been in the car four hours. A long time until night, indeed, but it looked as if it had come Bill Dunham's time to say good-by to daylight for the last time in his life.
The mob was in a more vicious mood than it had been at the beginning, due to there being two pieces of human wreckage lying on the station platform for Schubert to carry away. And a third man was running wildly, holding his hand to the side of his head, where Dunham's last shot had nipped his ear off as clean as shears. For a man in a tipping, rocking, film-obscured world, Bill Dunham had done some pretty fair shooting, indeed.