CHAPTER 17DODGE CITY was quieter than Bruce Powell had expected. He remembered the town from other years, when it had been the center of the cattle trade, when a thousand cowboys had walked its littered streets and turned the night into a chaos of noise which made sleep impossible.
Those days were gone, and would never return. The railroad had moved westward, the great blizzard of two years before had ruined the local cattle business and the quarantine law had turned the trail herds toward the west.
But there was still life in the town, and there were still men who made their living by their guns although the Earps had moved south, Ed Masterson was dead and Bill Brooks had fled from Jordan’s huge buffalo gun.
The train carrying Bruce Powell and Deacon Sandson steamed into the station at
