Sawdy rose and stretched himself from the waist down to make sure his legs touched the floor: "I've got to have a good cigar on that," he declared. "Take away, Mabel." He nodded courteously to the waitress. "Harry, we had the dustiest trip I ever seen in my life," he added, as with his companions he left the table. "The old Ogallala trail wasn't a marker to it. Why, the dust was a mile deep. My tonsils are plumb full of it yet." Not everyone in Sleepy Cat was so quick to credit the news that Kate Doubleday was going to marry Jim Laramie. The cattlemen sympathizers looked grumpy, when approached on the subject. They preferred not to talk, but if taunted would retort with an intimating oath: "That show ain't over yet." "Jim Laramie acts as if it was, anyway," grumbled Belle, when the butcher told her what they were saying. In fact, all of Laramie's intimates were out of patience with him when he announced he was going to rebuild the cabin on his Falling Wall ranch and live there. "Wait till this cattle fight is over," they would urge. "It is over," he would retort. And heedless of their protests, he spent his time getting his building materials together. "What do you want me to do?" he demanded, stirred at length by Belle's remonstrances against going back to the Falling Wall. "I've got to live somewhere. Danger? Why, yes--maybe. But I can't keep dying every day on that account. Here in town a man was run over just the other day by a railroad train." Kate said little either way. She heard all that Belle could urge and held in her heart all the men said. But when Jim asked her what _she_ wanted to do she told him, simply, whatever _he_ wanted to do. Then Belle would call her a ninny, and Laramie would kiss her, and Belle in disgust would disappear. There came one morning the crowning sensation in the suspense of the situation. Barb Doubleday drove into town in the buckboard, headed his team into Kitchen's barn to put up and gave McAlpin a cigar. An earthquake, where one had never been known, could not have stirred the town more. When McAlpin ran up street to the Mountain House to be first with his news, he was reviled as a vender of stories calculated to start a shooting. But McAlpin, with a cigar in his mouth--where no cigar, except a free cigar, was ever seen--his face bursting red with import, stuck to his guns. He walked straight to the billiard room bar, and attracted attention by brusquely ordering his own drink. This, it was known, always meant something serious. When Sawdy saw the commotion about the barn boss, he walked in and after listening began a stern cross-examination.