“There’s something I want you to do, Cimarron,” said Mr. Masterson, easily. The other brightened. “No, not that!” continued Mr. Masterson, intercepting a savage look which Cimarron bestowed upon Mr. Allison, “not Clay.”
“Who then?” demanded Cimarron, greatly disappointed.
“The other one,” responded Mr. Masterson. “Still I don’t want you to overplay. You must use judgment, and while careful not to do too little, be equally careful not to do too much. This is the proposition: You are to go romancing ’round until you locate that miscreant Ground Owl. Once located, you are to softly, yet sufficiently, bend a gun over his head.”
“Leave the Ground Owl to me,” said Cimarron Bill, his buoyant nature beginning to collect itself. As he went forth upon his mission, he tossed this assurance over his shoulder: “You gents’ll hear a dog howl poco tempo, an’ when you do you can gamble me an’ that Ground Owl clerk has crossed up with one another.”
“That,” observed Mr. Short, who arrived in time to hear the commission given Cimarron Bill, “that’s what I call gettin’ action both ways from the jack. You split out Cimarron from Clay here; an’ at the same time arrange to stampede that malignant Ground Owl out o’ camp. Which I always allowed you had a head for business, Bat.”
Cimarron Bill was wrong. He did not cut the trail of the vermin Ground Owl—lying close beneath the alfalfa of Mr. Trask! Neither did any dog howl that day. But Dodge was victorious without. It was rid of the offensive Ground Owl; when the sun went down that craven one crept forth, and fled by cloak of night.
“Which it goes to show,” explained Cimarron Bill, judgmatically, when a week later he was recovered from the gloom into which Mr. Allison’s escape had plunged him, “which it goes to show that every cloud has a silver linin’. Clay saves himse’f; but that Ground Owl has to go. It’s a stand-off. We lose on Clay; but we shore win on that Ground Owl man.”
[CHAPTER XI—HOW TRUE LOVE RAN IN DODGE]
In the old golden days, gunshot wounds were never over-soberly regarded by Dodge. Mr. Kelly, being creased by Rattlesnake Sanders and discovering that the bullet had done no more than just bore its sullen way through the muscular portion of his shoulder, came to look upon the incident as trivial, and nothing beyond a technical violation of his rights. He gave his word to that effect; and when Rattlesnake—in seclusion on Bear Creek—was made aware of that word, he returned to the ranges along the White Woman, and re-began a cowboy existence where his flight had broken it off. Mr. Kelly’s forbearance was approved by the public, the more readily since Dodge in the catholicity of its justice believed in punishing folk, not for what they did but for what they were, and Rattlesnake was an estimable youth.
This tolerant breadth was wholly of the olden day, and has not come down to modern men. Dodge now lies writhing beneath the wheel of Eastern convention. Starched shirts have crept in, derby hats have done their worst, and that frank fraternalism, so brightly a virtue of the heretofore, has disappeared. To-day the sound of a six-shooter in the timid streets of Dodge would produce a shock, and whatever gentleman was behind that alarming artillery meet the fate which would encounter him under similar explosive conditions in Philadelphia.