The Project Gutenberg eBook, Trail's End, by George W. Ogden, Illustrated
by P. V. E. Ivory
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Title: Trail's End
Author: George W. Ogden
Release Date: February 28, 2007 [eBook #20712]
Language: English
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TRAIL'S END
by
G. W. OGDEN
Author of
The Duke of Chimney Butte,
The Flockmaster of Poison Creek,
The Land of Last Chance, Etc.
Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory
[Illustration: Morgan, grim as judgment, stood among the crowd of
wastrels and women of poisoned lips (Page 229)]
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright
A. C. McClurg & Co.
1921
Published September, 1921
Copyrighted in Great Britain
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Unconquered Land 1
II The Meat Hunter 11
III First Blood 23
IV The Optimist Explains 36
V Ascalon Awake 54
VI Riders of the Chisholm Trail 65
VII A Gentle Cowboy Joke 77
VIII The Atavism of a Man 87
IX News from Ascalon 101
X The Hour of Vengeance 111
XI The Penalty 124
XII In Place of a Regiment 141
XIII The Hand of the Law 157
XIV Some Fool With a Gun 165
XV Will His Luck Hold? 176
XVI The Meat Hunter Comes 187
XVII With Clean Hands 199
XVIII A Bondsman Breathes Easier 216
XIX The Curse of Blood 223
XX Unclean 234
XXI As One That Is Dead 241
XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245
XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259
XXIV Madness of the Winds 277
XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290
XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299
XXVII Absolution 315
XXVIII Sunset 325
TRAIL'S END
CHAPTER I
THE UNCONQUERED LAND
Bones.
Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The
tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a
sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its
treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile
wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in
the dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.
A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as he
followed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable West
once was borne. Although that highway had belonged to another
generation, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on its
creeping journey toward distant Santa Fé, the ruts of old wheels were
deep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamed
like scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broad
highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new
ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.
Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; it
wound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairie
grass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler who
bent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot on
a road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, was
a man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took the
road in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains had
traveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leather
bag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository,
upon which the dust of the road lay spread.
Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparently
fresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him since
morning, not a lift had been given him for a single mile. Now, mounting
a ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, which
had appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattened
out to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag,
flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with a
large turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.
His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West,
lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soul
above corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently,
of an anger slow to move. There were bright hues as of glistening metal
in his close-cut light hair as he stood bareheaded in the sun.
Sheep sorrel was blooming by the wheel tracks of the road, purple and
yellow; daisy-like flowers, with pale yellow petals and great wondering
hearts like frightened eyes, grew low among the short grass; countless
strange blooms spread on the prairie green, cheering for their brief day
the stern face of a land that had broken the hearts of men in its
unkindness and driven them away from its fair promises. The traveler
sighed, unable to understand it quite.
All day he had been passing little sod houses whose walls were
crumbling, whose roofs had fallen in, whose doors beckoned in the wind a
sad invitation to come in and behold the desolation that lay within.
Even here, close by the road, ran the grass-grown furrows of an
abandoned field, the settler's dwelling-place unmarked by sod or stone.
What tragedy was written in those wavering lines; what heartbreak of
going away from some dear hope and broken dream! Here a teamster was
cutting across the prairie to strike the road a little below the point
where the traveler stood. Extra side boards were on his wagon-box, as
they used to put them on in corn-gathering time back in the traveler's
boyhood home in Indiana. The wagon was heaped high with white, dry
bones.
Bones. Nothing left to haul out of that land but bones. The young man
took up his valise and hat and struck off down the road to intercept the
freighter of this prairie product, hoping for an invitation to ride,
better pleased by the prospect of resting living bones on dead dry ones
than racking them in that strain to reach the town on the railroad, his
journey's end, on foot before nightfall.
The driver's hat was white, like his bones; it drooped in weather-beaten
limpness about his ears, hiding his face, but he appeared to have an
hospitable heart in spite of the cheerlessness of his pursuit. Coming to
the road a little before the traveler reached the point of conjunction,
he drew the team to a stand, waiting his approach.
"Have a ride?" the freighter invited, edging over on the backless spring
seat as he spoke, making room.
The bone-wagon driver was a hollow-framed man, who looked as if he had
starved with the country but endured past all bounds of hardship and
discouragement. He looked hungry--hungry for food, hungry for change,
hungry for the words of men. His long gray mustache hung far below his
stubble-covered chin; there was a pallor of a lingering sickness in his
skin, which the hot sun could not sere out of it. He sat dispiritedly on
his broken seat, sagging forward with forearms across his thighs.
"Footin' it over to Ascalon?" he asked, as the traveler mounted beside
him.
"Yes sir, I'm headin' that way."
"Come fur?"
"Well, yes," thoughtfully, as if he considered what might be counted far
in that land of unobstructed horizons, "I have come a considerable
little stretch."
"I thought maybe you was one of them new settlers in here, goin' over to
Ascalon to ketch the train," the bone man ventured, putting his inquiry
for further particulars as politely as he knew how.
"I'm not a settler yet, but I expect to try it here."
"You don't tell me?"
"Yes sir; that's my intention."
"Where you from?"
"Iowa."
The bone man looked his passenger over with interest, from his feet in
their serviceable shoes, to his head under his round-crowned,
wide-brimmed black hat.
"A good many of 'em used to come in here from Ioway and Newbrasky in the
early days," he said. "You never walked plumb from there, did you?"
"I thought of stopping at Buffalo Creek, back fifteen or twenty miles,
but I didn't like the country around there. They told me it was better
at Ascalon, so I just struck out to walk across the loop of the railroad
and take a close look at the land as I went along."
"You must be something of a walker," the bone man marveled.
"I used to follow a walking cultivator across an eighty-acre cornfield,"
the traveler replied.
"Yes, that'll stretch a feller's legs," the bone man admitted,
reminiscently. "Nothing like follerin' a plow to give a man legs and
wind. But they don't mostly walk around in this country; they kind of
suspicion a man when they see him hoofin' it."
"There doesn't seem to be many of them to either walk or ride," the
traveler commented, sweeping a look around the empty land.
"It used to be full of homesteaders all through this country--I seen 'em
come and I seen 'em go."
"I've seen traces of them all along the railroad for the last hundred
miles or more. It must have been a mighty exodus, a sad thing to see."
"Accordin' to the way you look at it, I reckon," the bone man reflected.
"They're comin' to this country ag'in, flocks of 'em. This makes the
third time they've tried to break this part of Kansas to ride, and I
don't know, on my soul, whether they'll ever do it or not. Maybe I'll
have more bones to pick up in a year or two."
"It seems to be one big boneyard; I saw cars of bones on every sidetrack
as I came through."
"Yes, I tell folks that come here and try to farm that bones was the
best crop this country ever raised, and it'll be about the only one. I
come in here with the railroad, I used to drive a team pickin' up the
buffaloes the contractors' meat hunter killed."
"You know the history of its ups and downs, then," the young man said,
with every evidence of deep interest.
"I guess I do, as well as any man. Bones was the first freight the
railroad hauled out of here, and bones'll be the last. I follered the
railroad camps after they built out of the buffalo country and didn't
need me any more, pickin' up the bones. Then the settlers begun to come
in, drawed on by the stuff them railroad colonization agents used to put
in the papers back East. The country broke their backs and drove 'em out
after four or five years. Then I follered around after _them_ and picked
up the bones.
"Yes, there used to be some familiar lookin' bones among 'em once in a
while in them times. I used to bury that kind. A few of them settlers
stuck, the ones that had money to put in cattle and let 'em increase on
the range. They've done well--you'll see their ranches all along the
Arkansaw when you travel down that way. This is a cattle country, son;
that's what the Almighty made it for. It never can be anything else."
"And there was another wave of immigration, you say, after that?" the
passenger asked, after sitting a while in silence turning over what the
old pioneer had said.
"Yes, wave is about right. They come in by freight trainload, cars of
horses and cattle, and machinery for farmin', from back there in Ohio
and Indiany and Ellinoi--all over that country where things a man plants
in the ground grows up and comes to something. They went into this
pe-rairie and started a bustin' it up like the ones ahead of 'em did.
Shucks! you can turn a ribbon of this blame sod a hundred miles long and
never break it. What can a farmer do with land that holds together that
way? Nothin'. But them fellers planted corn in them strips of sod,
raised a few nubbins, some of 'em, some didn't raise even fodder. It run
along that way a few years, hot winds cookin' their crops when they did
git the ground softened up so stuff would begin to make roots and grow,
cattle and horses dyin' off in the winter and burnin' up in the fires
them fool fellers didn't know how to stop when they got started in this
grass. They thinned out year after year, and I drove around over the
country and picked up their bones.
"That crowd of settlers is about all gone now, only one here and there
along some crick. Bones is gittin' scarce, too. I used to make more
when I got four dollars a ton for 'em than I do now when they pay me
ten. Grind 'em up to put on them farms back in the East, they tell me.
Takin' the bones of famine from one place to put on fat in another.
Funny, ain't it?"
The traveler said it was strange, indeed, but that it was the way of
nature for the upstanding to flourish on the remains of the fallen. The
bone man nodded, and allowed that it was so, world without end,
according to his own observations in the scale of living things from
grass blade to mankind.
"How are they coming in now--by the trainload?" the traveler asked,
reverting to the influx of settlers.
"These seem to be a different class of men," the bone man replied, his
perplexity plain in his face. "I don't make 'em out as easy as I did the
ones ahead of 'em. These fellers generally come alone, scoutin' around
to see the lay of the country--I run into 'em right along drivin' livery
rigs, see 'em around for a couple or three weeks sometimes. Then they go
away, and the first thing I know they're back with their immigrant car
full of stuff, haulin' out to some place somebody went broke on back in
the early days. They seem to be a calculatin' kind, but no man ain't
deep anough to slip up on the blind side of this country and grab it by
the mane like them fellers seems to think they're doin'. It'll throw
'em, and it'll throw 'em hard."
"It looks to me like it would be a good country for wheat," the traveler
said.
"Wheat!"
The bone man pulled up on his horses, checking them as if he would stop
and let this dangerous fellow off. He looked at the traveler with
incredulous stare, into which a shading of pity came, drawing his
naturally long face longer. "I'd just as well stop and let you start
back right now, mister." He tightened up a little more on the lines.
There was merriment in the stranger's gray eyes, a smile on his homely
face that softened its harsh lines.
"Has nobody ever tried it?" he inquired.
"There's been plenty of fools here, but none that wild that I ever heard
of," the bone man said. "You're a hundred miles and more past the
deadline for wheat--you'd just as well try to raise bananers here.
Wheat! it'd freeze out in the winter and blow out by the roots in the
spring if any of it got through."
The traveler swept a long look around the country, illusive, it seemed,
according to its past treatment of men, in its restful beauty and secure
feeling of peace. He was silent so long that the bone man looked at him
again keenly, measuring him up and down as he would some monstrosity
seen for the first time.
"Maybe you're right," the young man said at last.
The bone man grunted, with an inflection of superiority, and drove on,
meditating the mental perversions of his kind.
"Over in Ascalon," he said, breaking silence by and by, "there's a
feller by the name of Thayer--Judge Thayer, they call him, but he ain't
never been a judge of nothin' since I've knowed him--lawyer and land
agent for the railroad. He brings a lot of people in here and sells 'em
railroad land. He says wheat'll grow in this country, tells them
settlers that to fetch 'em here. You two ought to git together--you'd
sure make a pair to draw to."
"Wouldn't we?" said the stranger, in hearty humor.
"What business did you foller back there in Ioway?" inquired the bone
man, not much respect in him now for the man he had lifted out of the
road.
"I was a professional optimist," the traveler replied, grave enough for
all save his eyes.
The bone man thought it over a spell. "Well, I don't think you'll do
much in Ascalon," he said. "People don't wear specs out here in this
country much. Anybody that wants 'em goes to the feller that runs the
jewelry store."
The stranger attempted no correction, but sat whistling a merry tune as
he looked over the country. The bone man drove in silence until they
rose a swell that brought the town of Ascalon into view, a passenger
train just pulling into the station.
"Octomist! Wheat!" said the bone man, with discount on the words that
left them so poor and worthless they would not have passed in the
meanest exchange in the world.
CHAPTER II
THE MEAT HUNTER
There was one tree in the city of Ascalon, the catalpa in front of Judge
Thayer's office. This blazing noonday it threw a shadow as big as an
umbrella, or big enough that the judge, standing close by the trunk and
holding himself up soldierly, was all in the shade but the gentle swell
of his abdomen, over which his unbuttoned vest gaped to invite the
breeze.
Judge Thayer was far too big for the tree, as he was too big for
Ascalon, but, scholar and gentleman that he was, he made the most of
both of them and accepted what they had to offer with grateful heart.
Now he stood, his bearded face streaming sweat, his alpaca coat across
his arm, his straw hat in his hand, his bald head red from the
parboiling of that intense summer day, watching a band of Texas drovers
who had just arrived with three or four thousand cattle over the long
trail from the south.
These lank, wide-horned creatures were crowding and lowing around the
water troughs in the loading pens, the herdsmen shouting their
monotonous, melancholy urgings as they crowded more famished beasts into
the enclosures. Judge Thayer regarded the dusty scene with troubled
face.
"And so pitch hot!" said he, shaking his head in the manner of a man who
sees complications ahead of him. He stood fanning himself with his hat,
his brows drawn in concentration. "Twenty wild devils from the Nueces,
four months on the trail, and this little patch of Hades at the end!"
The judge entered his office with that uneasy reflection, leaving the
door standing open behind him, ran up his window shades, for the sun had
turned from the front of his building, took off his collar, and settled
down to work. One could see him from the station platform, substantial,
rather aristocratic, sitting at his desk, his gray beard trimmed to a
nicety, one polished shoe visible in line with the door.
Judge Thayer's office was a bit removed from the activities of Ascalon,
which were mainly profane activities, to be sure, and not fit company
for a gentleman even in the daylight hours. It was a snubby little
building with square front like a store, "Real Estate" painted its width
above the door. On one window, in crude black lettering:
WILLIAM THAYER
ATTORNEY
NOTARY
On the other:
MAYOR'S OFFICE
The office stood not above two hundred feet from the railroad station,
at the end of Main Street, where the buildings blended out into the
prairie, unfenced, unprofaned by spade or plow. Beyond Judge Thayer's
office were a coal yard and a livery barn; behind him the lots which he
had charted off for sale, their bounds marked by white stakes.
Ascalon, in those early days of its history, was not very large in
either the territory covered or the inhabitants numbered, but it was a
town of national notoriety in spite of its size. People who did not live
there believed it to be an exceedingly wicked place, and the farther one
traveled from Ascalon, in any direction whatever, the faster this ill
fame increased. It was said, no farther off than Kansas City, that
Ascalon was the wickedest place in the United States. So, one can image
what character the town had in St. Louis, and guess at the extent of its
notoriety in Pittsburg and Buffalo.
Porters on trains had a holy fear of Ascalon. They announced the train's
approach to it with suppressed breath, with eyes rolling white in fear
that some citizen of the proscribed town might overhear and defend the
reputation of his abiding-place in the one swift and incontrovertible
argument then in vogue in that part of the earth. Passengers of
adventurous nature flocked to the station platform during the brief
pause the train made at Ascalon, prickling with admiration of their own
temerity, so they might return home and tell of having set foot in the
wickedest town in the world.
And that was the fame of Ascalon, new and raw, for the greater part of
it, as it lay beside the railroad on that hot afternoon when Judge
Thayer stood in the shade of his little catalpa tree watching the Texans
drive their cattle into the loading pens.
Before the railroad reached out across the Great Plains, Ascalon was
there as a fort, under another name. The railroad brought new
consequence, new activities, and made it the most important loading
place for Texas cattle, driven over the long route on their slow way to
market.
It was a cattle town, living and fattening on the herds which grazed the
vast prairie lands surrounding it, and on the countless thousands which
came northward to its portal over the Chisholm Trail. As will have been
gathered from the scene already passed, agriculture had tried and failed
in that land. Ascalon was believed to be, in truth, far beyond the limit
of that gentle art, which was despised and contemned by the men who
roamed their herds over the free grass lands, and the gamesters who
flourished at their expense.
Not that all in Ascalon were vicious and beyond the statutory and moral
laws. There was a submerged desire for respectability in the grain of
even the worst of them which came to the front at times, as in defense
of the town's reputation, and on election day, when they put in such a
man as Judge Thayer for mayor. With a man like Judge Thayer at the head
of affairs, all charges of the town's utter abandonment to the powers of
evil seemed to fall and fade. But the judge, in reality, was only a
pillar set up for dignity and show. They elected him mayor, and went on
running the town to suit themselves, for the city marshal was also an
elective officer, and in his hands the scroll of the law reposed.
Now, in these summer days, there was a vacancy in this most important
office, three months, only, after election. The term had almost two
years to run, the appointment of a man to the vacancy being in the
mayor's hands. As a consequence there was being exerted a great deal of
secret and open pressure on the mayor in favor of certain favorites. It
was from a conference with several of the town's financial powers that
the mayor had returned to his office when you first beheld him under his
catalpa tree. The sweat on his face was due as much to internal
perplexity as outward heat, for Judge Thayer was a man who wanted to
please his friends, and everybody that counted in Ascalon was his
friend, although they were not all friends among themselves.
No later than the night before the vacancy in the marshalship had
fallen; it would not do to allow the town to go unbridled for even
another night. A strong man must be appointed to the place, and no fewer
than three candidates were being urged by as many factions, each of
which wanted its peculiar interests especially favored and protected. So
Judge Thayer was in a sweat with good reason. He wished in his honest
soul that he could reach out and pick up a disinterested man somewhere,
set him into the office without the strings of fear or favor on him, and
tell him to keep everybody within the deadline, regardless of whose
business prospered most.
But there were not men raining down every day around Ascalon competent
to fill the office of city marshal. Out of the material offered there
was not the making of one side of a man. Two of them were creatures of
the opposing gambling factions, the other a weak-kneed fellow with the
pale eyes of a coward, put forward by the conservative business men who
deplored much shooting in the name of the law.
How they were to get on without much shooting, Judge Thayer did not
understand. Not a bit of it. What he wanted was a man who would do more
shooting than ever had been done before, a man who would clean the place
of the too-ready gun-slingers who had gathered there, making the town's
notoriety their capital, invading even the respectable districts in
their nightly debaucheries to such insolent boldness that a man's wife
or daughter dared not show her ear on the street after nightfall.
Judge Thayer put the town's troubles from him with a sigh and leaned to
his work. He was preparing a defense for a cattle thief whom he knew to
be guilty, but whose case he had undertaken on account of his wife and
several small children living in a tent behind the principal
gambling-house. Because it seemed a hopeless case from the jump, Judge
Thayer had set his beard firmer in the direction of the fight. Hopeless
cases were the kind that had come most frequently his way all the days
of his life. He had been fronting for the under pup so long that his own
chances had dwindled down to a distant point in his gray-headed years.
But there was lots of satisfaction behind him to contemplate even though
there might not be a great deal of prosperity ahead. That helped a man
wonderfully when it came to casting up accounts. So he was bent to the
cattle thief's case when a man appeared in his door.
This was a tall, bony man with the dust of the long trail on him; a
sour-faced man of thin visage, with long and melancholy nose, a lowering
frown in his unfriendly, small red eyes. A large red mustache drooped
over his mouth, the brim of his sombrero was pressed back against the
crown as if he had arrived devil-come-headlong against a heavy wind.
Judge Thayer took him for a cattleman seeking legal counsel, and invited
him in. The visitor shifted the chafed gear that bore his weapon, as if
to ease it around his gaunt waist, and entered, removing his hat. He
stood a little while looking down at Judge Thayer, a disturbance in his
weathered face that might have been read for a smile, a half-mocking,
half-humorous expression that twitched his big mustache with a catlike
sneer.
"You're the mayor of this man's town, are you, Judge?" he asked.
As the visitor spoke, Judge Thayer's face cleared of the perplexity that
had clouded it. He got up, beaming welcome, offering his hand.
"Seth Craddock, as sure as little apples! I knew you, and I didn't know
you, you old scoundrel! Where have you been all these years?"
Seth Craddock only expanded his facial twitching at this friendly
assault until it became a definite grin. It was a grin that needed no
apology, for all evidence was in its favor that it was so seldom seen by
the eyes of men that it could be forgiven without a plea.
"I've been ridin' the long trail," said Seth.
"With that bunch that just arrived?"
"Yeh. Drove up from the Nueces. I'm quittin'."
"The last time I saw you, Seth, you were butchering two tons of buffalo
a day for the railroaders. I often wondered where you went after you
finished your meat contract."
"I scouted a while for the gover'ment, but we run out of Indians. Then I
went to Texas and rode with the rangers a year or two."
"I guess you kept your gun-barrel hot down in that country, Seth?"
"Yeh. Once in a while it was lively. Dyin' out down there now, quiet as
a school."
"So you turned back to Kansas lookin' for high life. Heard of this burg,
I guess?"
"I kind of thought something might be happenin' off up here, Judge."
"And I was sitting here frying out my soul for the sight of a full-sized
man when you stepped in the door! Sit down; let's you and me have a
talk."
Seth drew a dusty chair from against the wall and arranged himself in
the draft between the front and back doors of the little house. He
leaned his storm-beaten sombrero against the leg of his chair near his
heel, as carefully as if making preparations for quick action in a
hostile country, shook his head when the judge offered a cigar, shifted
his worn cartridge belt a bit with a movement that appeared to be as
unconscious as unnecessary.
"What's restin' so heavy on your mind, Judge?" he inquired.
"Our city marshal stepped in the way of a fool feller's bullet last
night, and all the valuable property in this town is lying open and
unguarded today."
"Don't nobody want the job?"
"Many are called, or seem to feel themselves nominated, but none is
appointed. The appointment is in my hands; the job's yours if you'll do
an old friend a favor and take it. It pays a hundred dollars a month."
Seth's heavy black hair lay in disorder on his high, sharp forehead,
sweated in little ropes, more than half concealing his immense ears. He
smoothed it back now with slow hand, holding a thoughtful silence;
shifted his feet, crossed his legs, looked out through the open door
into the dusty street.
"How does the land lay?" he asked at length.
"You know the name of the town, everybody knows the name of the town.
Well, Seth, it's worse than its name. It's a job; it's a double man's
job. If it was any less, I wouldn't lay it down before you."
"Crooks run things, heh?"
"I'm only a knot on a log. The marshal we had wasn't worth the powder
that killed him. Oh-h, he did kill off a few of 'em, but what we need
here is a man that can see both sides of the street and behind him at
the same time."
"How many folks have you got in this man's town by now, Judge?"
"Between six and seven hundred. And we could double it in three months
if we could clean things up and make it safe."
"How would you do it, Judge? marry everybody?"
"I mean we'd bring settlers in here and put 'em on the land. The
railroad company could shoot farmers in here by the hundreds every month
if it wasn't for the hard name this town's got all over the country. A
good many chance it and come as it is. We could make this town the
supply point for a big territory, we could build up a business that'd
make us as respectable as we're open and notorious now. For I tell you,
Seth, this country around here is God Almighty's granary--it's the wheat
belt of the world."
Seth made no reply. He slewed himself a little to sweep the country over
beyond the railroad station with his sullen red eyes. The heat was
wavering up from the treeless, shrubless expanse; the white sun was over
it as hot as a furnace blast. From the cattle pens the dusty, hoarse
cries of the cowboys sounded, "Ho, ho, ho!" in what seemed derision of
the judge's fervent claims.
"A lot of us have staked our all on the outcome here in Ascalon, we
fellows who were here before the town turned out to be the sink-hole of
perdition that it is today. We built our homes here, and brought our
families out, and we can't afford to abandon it to these crooks and
gamblers and gun-slingers from the four corners of the earth. I let them
put me in for mayor, but I haven't got any more power than a stray dog.
This chance to put in a marshal is the first one I've had to land them a
kick in the gizzards, and by Jeems River, Seth, I want to double 'em
up!"
"It looks like your trick, Judge."
"Yes, if I had the marshal with me the two of us could run this town the
way it ought to be run. And we'd keep the county seat here as sure as
sundown."
"Considerin' a change?"
"The folks over in Glenmore are--the question will come to a vote this
fall. The county seat belongs here, not away off there at Glenmore,
seven miles from the railroad."
"What's your chance?"
"Not very heavy right now. We can out-vote them in town, but the
country's with Glenmore, all on account of our notorious name. Folks
hate to come in here to court, it's got so bad. But we could do a lot of
cleaning up between now and November, Seth."
Seth considered it in silence, his red eyes on the dusty activities of
his late comrades at the cattle pens. He shifted his dusty feet as if
dancing to his slow thoughts, scraping his boot soles grittily on the
floor.
"Yes, I reckon we could, Judge."
"Half the people in Glenmore want to come over to the railroad. They'd
vote with us if they could be made to feel this was a town to bring
their families to."
Seth seemed to take this information like a pill under his tongue and
dissolve it in his reflective way. Judge Thayer left him to his
ruminations, apparently knowing his habits. After a little Seth reached
down for his hat in the manner of a man about to depart.
"All right, Judge; we'll clean up the town and part its hair down the
middle," he said.
Judge Thayer did not give vent to his elation on Seth Craddock's
acceptance of the office of city marshal, although his satisfaction
gleamed from his eyes and radiated from his kindly face. He merely shook
hands with his new officer in the way of men sealing a bargain, swore
him in, and gave him the large shield which had been worn by the many
predecessors of the meat hunter in that uncomfortable office, three of
whom had gone out of the world with lead enough in them to keep them
from tossing in their graves.
This ceremony ended, Seth put his hat firmly on his small, reptilian
head, adding greatly to the ferociousness of his thirsty countenance by
his way of pulling the sombrero down upon his ears.
"Want to walk around with me and introduce me and show me off?" he
asked.
"It'll be the biggest satisfaction in ten years!" Judge Thayer
declared.
CHAPTER III
FIRST BLOOD
Judge Thayer had completed the round of Ascalon's business section with
the town's new peace officer, introducing him in due form. They stood
now in front of the hotel, the plank awning of which extended over the
sidewalk breaking the sun, Judge Thayer about to go his way.
"We've got to change this condition of things, Seth," he said, sweeping
his hand around the quiet square, where nothing seemed awake but a few
loafers along the shady fronts: "we've got to make it a day town instead
of a night roost for the buzzards that wake up after sundown."
Seth did not answer. He stood turning his red eyes up and down the
street, as if calculating distances and advantages for future
emergencies. And as he looked there came driving into the somnolent
square two men on a wagonload of bones.
"Old Joe Lynch; he's loadin' another car of bones," Judge Thayer said.
"He used to pick up meat for me," said Seth in his sententious way,
neither surprised nor pleased on finding this associate of his
adventurous days here in this place of his new beginning.
Joe Lynch drove across the farther side of the square, a block away from
the two officials of Ascalon. There he stopped only long enough to allow
his passenger to alight, and continued on to the railroad siding where
his car stood.
Judge Thayer lingered under the hotel awning, where the breeze struck
refreshingly, perhaps making a pretense of being cooled that was greater
than his necessity, curious to see who it was Lynch had brought to town
on his melancholy load. The passenger, carrying his flat bag, came on
toward the hotel.
"He's a stranger to me," said the judge. His interest ending there, he
went his way to take up again the preparation of his case in defense of
the cattle thief whom he knew to be a thief, and nothing but a thief.
Seth Craddock, the new marshal, glanced sharply at the stranger as he
approached the hotel. It was nothing more severe than Seth's ordinary
scrutiny, but it appeared to the traveler to be at once hostile and
inhospitable, the look of a man who sneered out of his heart and carried
a challenge in his eyes. The stranger made the mental observation that
this citizen was a sour-looking customer, who apparently resented the
coming of one more to the mills of Ascalon's obscene gods.
There was a cluster of flies on the open page of the hotel register,
where somebody had put down a sticky piece of chocolate candy and left
it. This choice confection covered three or four lines immediately below
the last arrival's name, its little trickling rivulets, which the flies
were licking up, spreading like a spider's legs. There was nobody in the
office to receive the traveler's application for quarters, but evidence
of somebody in the remote parts of the house, whence came the sound of a
voice more penetrating than musical, raised in song.
With her apurn pinned round her,
He took her for a swan,
But oh and a-las, it was poor Pol-ly Bawn.
So she sang, the words of the ancient ballad cutting through the
partition like a saw. There was a nasal quality in them, as if the
singer were moved to tears by the pathos of Poor Polly's end. The
traveler laid a finger on the little bell that stood on the cigar case,
sending his alarm through the house.
The song ceased, the blue door with DINING-ROOM in pink across its
panels, shut against the flies, opened with sudden jerk, as if by a
petulant hand. There appeared one who might have been Polly Bawn
herself, taken by the white apron that shrouded her figure from
shoulders to floor. She stood a moment in the door, seeing that it was a
stranger, half closing that gay portal to step behind it and give her
hair that swift little adjustment which, with women the world over, is
the most essential part of the toilet. She appeared smiling then,
somewhat abashed and coy, a fair short girl with a nice figure and
pretty, sophisticated face, auburn curls dangling long at her ears, a
precise row of bangs coming down to her eyebrows. She was a pink and
white little lady, quick on foot, quicker of the blue eyes which
measured the waiting guest from dusty feet to dusty hat in the glance
that flashed over him in business-like brevity.
"Was you wishin' a room?" she inquired.
"If you can accommodate me."
"Register," she said, in voice of command, whirling the book about. At
the same time she discovered the forgotten confection, which she removed
to the top of the cigar case with an annoyed ejaculation under her
breath that sounded rather strong. She applied her apron to the page,
not helping it much, spreading the brown paste rather than removing it.
"You'll have to skip three or four lines, mister, unless you've got a
'delible pencil."
"No, I haven't. I'll write down here where it's dry."
And there the traveler wrote, the girl looking on sharply, spelling the
letters with silently moving lips as the pen trailed them:
Calvin Morgan, Des Moines, Ia.
"In and out, or regular?" the girl asked, twisting the book around to
verify the upside-down spelling of his name.
"I expect it will be only for a few days," Morgan replied, smiling a
little at the pert sufficiency of the clerk.
"It's a dollar a day for board and room--in advance in this man's town."
"Why in this man's town, any more than any other man's town?" the guest
inquired, amused.
"What would you think of a man that would run up a three weeks' bill and
then walk out there and let somebody put a bullet through him?" she
returned by way of answer.
"I think it would be a mean way to beat a board bill," he told her,
seriously. "Do they do that right along here?"
"One smarty from Texas done it three or four months ago. Since then it's
cash in advance."
Morgan thought it was a very wise regulation for a town where perils
were said to be so thick, all in keeping with the notoriety of Ascalon.
He made inquiry about something to eat. The girl's face set in
disfavoring cast as she tossed her head haughtily.
"Dinner's over long ago," she said.
Morgan made amends for this unwitting breach of the rules, wondering
what there was in the air of Ascalon that made people combative. Even
this fresh-faced girl, not twenty, he was sure, was resentful, snappish
without cause, inclined to quarrel if a word got crosswise in a man's
mouth. As he turned these things in mind, casting about for some place
to stow his bag, the girl smiled across at him, the mockery going out of
her bright eyes. Perhaps it was because she felt that she had defended
the ancient right of hostelers to rise in dignified front when a
traveler spoke of a meal out of the regular hour, perhaps because there
was a gentleness and sincerity in the tall, honest-looking man before
her that reached her with an appeal lacking in those who commonly came
and went before her counter.
"Put your grip over there," she nodded, "and I'll see what I can find.
If you don't mind a snack--" she hesitated.
"Anything--a slab of cold meat and a cup of coffee."
"I'll call you," she said, starting for the blue door.
The girl had reached the dining-room door when there entered from the
street a man, lurching when he walked as if the earth tipped under him
like the deck of a ship. He was a young and slender man, dressed rather
loudly in black sateen shirt and scarlet necktie, with broad blue,
tassel-ornamented sleeve holders about his arms. He wore neither coat
nor vest, but was belted with a pistol and booted and spurred, his
calling of cowboy impressed in every line.
The girl paused, hand on the door, waiting to see what he wanted, and
turned back when he rested his arms on the cigar case, clicking the
glass with a coin. While she was making change for him, the cowboy stood
with his newly bought cigar in his mouth, scanning the register. He
seemed sober enough when standing still, save for the vacant,
liquor-dead look of his eyes.
"Who wrote that?" he asked, pointing to Morgan's name.
"That gentleman," the girl replied, placing his change before him.
The cowboy picked up his money with numb fingers, fumbled to put it in
his pocket, dropping it on the floor. He kicked at it with a curse and
let it lie, scowling meantime at Morgan with angry eyes.
"Too good to write your name next to mine, are you?" he sneered. "Afraid
it'd touch your fancy little handwritin', was you?"
"I didn't know it was your name, pardner," Morgan returned, conciliating
him as he would an irresponsible child. "Why, I'd walk a mile to write
my name next to yours any day. There was something on the book----"
"You spit on it! You spit on my name!" the foolish fellow charged,
laying hand to his pistol. "A man that's too good to write his name next
to mine's too good to stay in the same house with me. You'll hit the
breeze out of here, pardner, or you'll swaller lead!"
The girl came swiftly from behind the counter, and ran lightly to the
door. Morgan put up his hand to silence the young man, knowing well that
he could catch his slow arm before he could drag his gun two inches from
the holster.
"Keep your gun where it is, old feller," he suggested, rather than
warned, in good-natured tone. "I didn't mean any insult, but I'll take
my hat off and apologize to you if you want me to. There was a piece of
candy on the book right----"
"I'll put a piece of hot iron in your guts!" the cowboy threatened. He
leaned over the register, hand still on his pistol, and tore out the
offending page, crumpling it into a ball. "You'll eat this, then you'll
hit the road back where you come from!"
The girl was beckoning to somebody from the door. Morgan was more
annoyed and shamed by his part in this foolish scene than he was
disturbed by any feeling of danger. He stood watching the young man's
shooting arm. There was not more than five feet between them; a step, a
sharp clip on the jaw, and the young fool would be helpless. Morgan was
setting himself to act, for the cowboy, whose face was warrant that he
was a simple, harmless fellow when sober, was dragging on his gun, when
one came hastening in past the girl.
This was a no less important person than the new city marshal, whom
Morgan had seen without knowing his official standing, as he arrived at
the hotel.
"This man's raisin' a fuss here--he's tore the register--look what he's
done--tore the register!" the indignant girl charged.
"You're arrested," said the marshal. "Come on."
The cowboy stood mouthing his cigar, a weak look of scorn and derision
in his flushed face. His right hand was still on his pistol, the wadded
page of the register in the other.
"You'd better take his gun," Morgan suggested to the marshal, "he's so
drunk he might hurt himself with it."
Seth Craddock fixed Morgan a moment with his sullen red eyes, in which
the sneer of his heart seemed to speak. But his lips added nothing to
the insult of that disdainful look. He jerked his head toward the door
in command to his prisoner to march.
"Come out! I'll fight both of you!" the cowboy challenged, making for
the door. He was squarely in it, one foot lifted in his drunken
balancing to step down, when Seth Craddock jerked out his pistol between
the lifting and the falling of that unsteady foot, and shot the
retreating man in the back. The cowboy pitched forward into the street,
where he lay stretched and motionless, one spurred foot still in the
door.
Morgan sprang forward with an exclamation of shocked protest at this
unjustified slaughter, while the girl, her blue eyes wide in horror,
shrunk against the counter, hands pressed to her cheeks, a cry of
outraged pity ringing from her lips.
"Resist an officer, will you?" said the city marshal, as he strode
forward and looked down on the first victim in Ascalon of the woeful
harvest his pistol was to reap. So saying, as if publishing his
justification, he sheathed his weapon and walked out, as little moved as
if he had shot the bottom out of a tomato can in practice among friends.
A woman came hastening from the back of the house with dough on her
hands, a worn-faced woman, whose eyes were harried and afraid as if they
had looked on violence until horror had set its seal upon them. She
exclaimed and questioned, panting, frantic, holding her dough-clogged
fingers wide as she bent to look at the slain man in her door.
"It was the new marshal Judge Thayer was in here with just after
dinner," the girl explained, the pink gone out of her pretty face, the
reflection of her mother's horror in her eyes.
"My God!" said the woman, clutching her breast, looking with a wilder
terror into Morgan's face.
"Oh, I wish they'd take him away! I wish they'd take him away!" the girl
moaned, cringing against the counter, covering her face with her hands.
Outside a crowd collected around the fallen man, for common as death by
violence was in the streets of Ascalon, the awe of its swift descent,
the hushing mystery of its silence, fell as coldly over the hearts of
men there as in the walks of peace. Presently the busy undertaker came
with his black wagon to gather up this broken shape of what had been a
man but a few minutes past.
The marshal did not trouble himself in the case further. Up the street
Morgan saw him sauntering along, unmoved and unconcerned, from all
outward show, as if this might have been just one incidental task in a
busy day. Resentment rose in Morgan as he watched the undertaker and his
helper load the body into the wagon with unfeeling roughness; as he saw
the marshal go into a saloon with a crowd of noisy fellows from the
stock pens who appeared to be applauding his deed.
This appeared to Morgan simply murder in the name of the law. That
bragging, simple, whisky-numbed cowboy could not have hurt a cat. All
desire for dinner was gone out of Morgan's stomach, all thought of
preparing it from the girl's mind. She stood in the door with her
mother, watching the black wagon away with this latest victim to be
crushed in Ascalon's infernal mill, twisting her fingers in her apron,
her face as white as the flour on her mother's hands. The undertaker's
man came hurrying back with a bucket of water and broom. The women
turned away out of the door then, while he briskly went to work washing
up the dark little puddle that spread on the boards of the sidewalk.
"Dora, where's your pa?" the elder woman asked, stopping suddenly as she
crossed the room, her face drawn in a quick stroke of fear, her hands
lifted to ease the smothering in her breast again.
"I don't know, Ma. He ain't been around since dinner."
The woman went to the door again, to lean and peer up and down the
street with that great anxiety and trouble in her face that made it old,
and distorted the faint trace of lingering prettiness out of it as if
it had been covered with ashes.
"He's comin'," she said presently, in voice of immeasurable relief. She
turned away from the door without allowing her glance to fall directly
on the wet spot left by the undertaker's man.
Mother and daughter talked together in low words, only a few of which
now and then reached Morgan as he stood near the counter where the
mutilated register lay, turning this melancholy event in his thoughts.
He recovered the torn crumpled page from the floor, smoothed and
replaced it in the book. A man came in, the woman turning with a quick
glad lighting of the face to meet him.
"O Tommy! I was worried to death!" she said.
Tom Conboy, proprietor of the Elkhorn, as the hotel was called, grunted
in discount of this anxiety as he turned his shifty eyes to the
stranger, flicking them on and off like a fly. He saw the coins dropped
by the cowboy, picked them up, put them in his pocket, face red from
what evidently was unaccustomed effort as he straightened his back.
"You seem to be gettin' mighty flush with money around this joint," he
said, severe censure in his tone.
"He dropped it--the man the marshal shot dropped it--it was his," the
girl explained. "I wouldn't touch it!" she shuddered, "not for anything
in the world!"
"Huh!" said Conboy, easily, entirely undisturbed by the dead man's money
in his pocket.
"My God! I wish he hadn't done it here!" the woman moaned.
"I didn't think he'd shoot him or I wouldn't 'a' called him," the girl
pleaded, pity for the deed in her shocked voice. "He didn't need to do
it--he didn't have to do it, at all!"
"Sh-h-h! No niggers in Ireland, now--no-o-o niggers in Ireland!"
Conboy shook his head at her as he spoke, pronouncing this rather
amazing and altogether irrelevant declaration with the utmost gravity,
an admonitory, cautioning inflection in his naturally grave and resonant
voice. The girl said no more on the needless sacrifice of the young
man's life.
"I was goin' to get this gentleman some dinner," she said.
"You'd better go on and do it, then," her father directed, gently enough
for a man of his stamp, rather surprisingly gentle, indeed, Morgan
thought.
Tom Conboy was a short-statured man, slight; his carefully trimmed gray
beard lending a look of serious wisdom to his face which the shiftiness
of his insincere eyes at once seemed to controvert. He wore neither coat
nor vest, but a white shirt with broad starched bosom, a large gold
button in its collarless neckband. A diamond stud flashed in the middle
of his bosom; red elastic bands an inch broad, with silver buckles, held
up the slack of the sleeves which otherwise would have enveloped his
hands.
"Are you goin' to stay in the office a while now, Tommy, and look after
things while Dora and I do the work?" the woman asked.
"I've got to get the jury together for the inquest," Conboy returned,
with the briskness of a man of importance.
"Will I be wanted to give my testimony at the inquest, do you suppose?"
Morgan inquired. "I was here when it happened; I saw the whole thing."
He spoke in the hope that he might be given the opportunity of relieving
the indignation, so strong in him that it was almost oppressive, before
the coroner's jury. Tom Conboy shook his head.
"No, the marshal's testimony is all we'll need," Conboy replied.
"Resistin' arrest and tryin' to escape after arrest. That's all there
was to it. These fellers'll have to learn better than that with this new
man. I know him of old--he's a man that always brings in the meat."
"But he didn't try to escape," Morgan protested. "He was so drunk he
didn't know whether he was coming or going."
Conboy looked at him disfavoringly, as if to warn him to be discreet in
matters of such remote concern to him as this.
"Tut, tut! no niggers in Ireland," said he, shaking his head with an
expression between a caution and a threat.
CHAPTER IV
THE OPTIMIST EXPLAINS
Not more than two hours after the tragedy at the Elkhorn hotel, of which
he was the indirect cause, Calvin Morgan appeared at Judge Thayer's
little office. The judge had finished his preparation for the cattle
thief's case, and now sat ruminating it over his cob pipe. He nodded
encouragingly as Morgan hesitated at the door.
"Come in, Mr. Morgan," he invited, as cordially as if introductions had
passed between them already and relations had been established on a
footing pleasant and profitable to both.
Morgan smiled a little at this ready identification, remembering the
torn page of the hotel register, which all the reading inhabitants of
the town who were awake must have examined before this. He accepted the
chair that Judge Thayer pushed toward him, nodding to the bone-wagon man
who came sauntering past the door at that moment, the long lash of his
bullhide whip trailing in the dust behind him.
"You've come to settle with us, I hear?" said the judge.
"I'm looking around with that thought, sir."
"I don't know how you'll do at the start in the optical way, Mr.
Morgan--I'm afraid not much. I'd advise watch repairing and jewelry in
addition. This town is going to be made a railroad division point
before long, I could get you appointed watch inspector for the company.
Now, I've got a nice little storeroom----"
"I'm afraid you've got me in the wrong deck," Morgan interrupted,
unwilling to allow the judge to go on building his extravagant fancy. "I
could no more fix a watch than I could repair a locomotive, and
spectacles are as far out of my line as specters."
Judge Thayer's face reddened above his thick beard at this easy and
fluent denial of all that he had constructed from a hasty and indefinite
bit of information.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Morgan. It was Joe Lynch, the fellow that drives
the bone wagon, who got me wrong. He told me you were an oculist."
"I think that was his rendition of optimist, perhaps," Morgan said,
laughing with the judge's hearty appreciation of the twist. "I told him,
in response to a curious inquiry, that I was an optimist. I've tried
hard--very hard, sometimes--to live up to it. My profession is one that
makes a heavy drain on all the cheerfulness that nature or art ever
stocked a man with, Judge Thayer."
"It sounds like you might be a lawyer," the judge speculated, "or maybe
a doctor?"
"No, I'm simply an agriculturist, late professor of agronomy in the Iowa
State Agricultural College. It takes optimism, believe me, sir, to try
to get twenty bushels of wheat out of land where only twelve grew
before, or two ears of corn where only two-thirds of one has been the
standard."
"You're right," Judge Thayer agreed heartily; "it takes more faith,
hope, and courage to be a farmer than any other calling on earth. I
often consider the risks a farmer must take year by year in comparison
with other lines of business, staking his all, very frequently, on what
he puts into the furrows, turning his face to God when he has sown his
seed, in faith that rains will fall and frosts will be stayed. It is
heroic, sometimes it is sublimely heroic. And you are going to try your
fortunes here on the soil?"
"I've had my eye on this country a good while in spite of the dismal
tales of hardship and failure that have come eastward out of it. I've
looked to it as the place for me to put some of my theories to the test.
I believe alfalfa, or lucerne, as it is called back East, will thrive
here, and I'm going to risk your derision and go a little farther. I
believe this can be made the greatest wheat country in America."
Judge Thayer brought his hand down with a smack of the palm that made
his papers fly, his face radiating the pleasure that words alone could
not express.
"I've been telling them that for seven years, Morgan!" he said.
"Hasn't it ever been tried out?"
"Tried out? They don't stay long enough to try out anything, Morgan.
They're here today and gone tomorrow, cursing Kansas as they go,
slandering it, branding it as the Tophet of the earth. We've never had
the right kind of people here, they didn't have the courage, the faith,
and the vision. If a man hasn't got the grit and ability to stick
through his losses at any game in this life, Morgan, he'll never win.
And he'll never be anything but a little loser, put him down where you
will."
"I've met hundreds of them dragging their bones out of Kansas the past
four or five years," Morgan nodded. "From what I can gather by talking
with them, the trouble lies in their poverty when they come here. As you
say, they're not staked to play this stiff game. A man ought to
provision himself for a campaign against this country like he would for
an Arctic expedition. If he can't do it, he'd better stay away."
"I guess there's more to that than I ever stopped to consider myself,"
Judge Thayer admitted. "It is a hard country to break, but there are men
somewhere who can subdue it and reap its rewards."
"I tried to induce the railroad company to back me in an experimental
farm out here, but the officials couldn't see it," Morgan said. "I'm
going to tackle it now on my lonesome. The best proof of a man's
confidence in his own theories is to put them into practice himself,
anyway."
"These cattlemen around here will laugh at you and try to discourage
you, Morgan. I'm the standing joke of this country because I still stick
to my theory of wheat."
"The farmers in Iowa laughed their teeth loose when we book farmers at
the college told them they could add a million bushels a year to the
corn crop of the state by putting a few more grains on the ends of the
cobs. Well, they did it, just the same, in time."
"I heard about that," nodded the judge, quite warmed up to this
long-backed stranger.
"Failure is written all over the face of this country," Morgan
continued; "I took a long tramp across it this morning. But I believe
I've got the formula that will tame it."
"I believe you, I believe you can do it," Judge Thayer indorsed him,
with enthusiasm. "I believe you've brought the light of a new epoch into
this country, I believe you're carrying the key that's going to unlock
these prairies and liberate the gold under the grass roots."
"It may be nothing but a dream," said Morgan softly, his eyes fixed on
the blue distances through the open door. "Maybe it will break me and
scatter my bones on the prairie for that old scavenger of men to haul
away."
Judge Thayer shook his head in denial of this possibility, making note
of this rugged dreamer's strong face, strong arms, large, capable hands.
"We're not away out West, as most people seem to think," he said, "only
a little past the middle of the state. My observation through several
years here has been that it rains about as much and as often in this
part of the country as it does in the eastern part of the state, enough
to make two crops in three, anyway, and that's as good as you can count
on without irrigation anywhere."
Morgan agreed with a nod. Judge Thayer went on, "The trouble is, this
prairie sheds water like the roof of a house, shoots it off so quick
into the draws and creeks it never has a chance to soak in. Plow it, I
tell 'em, and keep on plowin' it, in season and out; fix it so it can
soak up the rain and hold it. Is that right?"
"You've got the key to it yourself," Morgan told him, not a little
surprised to hear this uncredited missionary preaching the very doctrine
that men of Morgan's profession had found so hard to make converts to in
the prairie country.
"But it will be two or three years, at least, before you can begin your
experiment with wheat," Judge Thayer regretted. "By that time I'm afraid
the settlers that are taking up land around here now will be broken and
discouraged, gone to spread the curse against Kansas in the same old
bitterness of heart."
"I hope to find a piece of land that somebody has abandoned or wants to
sell, that has been farmed a year or two," Morgan confided. "If I can
get hold of such a place I'll be able to put in a piece of wheat this
fall--even a few acres will start me going. I could enlarge my fields
with my experience."
Judge Thayer said he believed he had the very place Morgan was looking
for, listed for sale. But there were so many of them listed for sale,
the owners gone, their equities long since eaten up by unpaid taxes,
that it took the judge a good while to find the particulars in this
special case.
"Man by the name of Gerhart, mile and a half west of town--that would
bring him pretty near the river--offers his quarter for three hundred
dollars. He's been there about four years, wife died this spring. I
think he's got about eighty acres broken out. Some of that land ought to
be in pretty good shape for wheat by now."
As the day was declining to evening, and Judge Thayer's supper hour was
near, they agreed on postponing until morning the drive out to look at
the dissatisfied settler's land. Morgan was leaving when the judge
called him back from the door.
"I was just wondering whether you'd ever had any editorial experience?"
he said.
"No, I've never been an editor," Morgan returned, speculating alertly on
what might be forthcoming.
"We--our editor--our editor," said the judge, fumbling with it as
if he found the matter a difficult one to fit to the proper words,
"fell into an unfortunate error of judgment a short time ago,
with--um-m-m--somewhat melancholy--melancholy--" the judge paused, as if
feeling of this word to see that it fitted properly, head bent
thoughtfully--"results. Unlucky piece of business for this community,
coming right in the thick of the contest for the county seat. There's a
fight on here, Mr. Morgan, as you may have heard, between Ascalon, the
present county seat, and Glenmore, a God-abandoned little flyspeck on
the map seven miles south of here."
"I hadn't heard of it. And what happened to the editor?"
"Oh, one of our hot-headed boys shot him," said the judge, out of
patience with such trivial and hasty yielding to passion. "Since then
I've been getting out the paper myself--I hold a mortgage on the
property, I'll be obliged to foreclose to protect myself--with the help
of the printer. It's not much of a paper, Morgan, for I haven't got the
time to devote to it with the July term of court coming on, but I have
to get it out every week or lose the county printing contract. There's a
hungry dog over at Glenmore looking on to snatch the bone on the least
possible excuse, and he's got two of the county commissioners with him."
"No, I'm not an editor," Morgan repeated, speculatively, as if he saw
possibilities of distinction in that road.
"Without the press, we are a community disarmed in the midst of our
enemies," said the judge. "Glenmore will overwhelm us and rob us of our
rights, without a champion whose voice is as the voice of a thousand
men."
"I'd never be equal to that," Morgan said, shaking his head in all
seriousness. "Is the editor out of it for good? Is he dead?"
"They have a devilish peculiarity of seldom wounding a man here in
Ascalon, Mr. Morgan. I've wished more than once they were not so cursed
proficient. The poor fellow fell dead, sir, at the first shot, while he
was reaching for his gun."
"I've seen something of their proficiency here," Morgan said, with plain
contempt.
Judge Thayer looked at him sharply. "You refer to that affair at the
hotel this afternoon?"
"It was a brutal and uncalled-for sacrifice of human life! it was murder
in the name of the law."
"I think you are somewhat hasty and unjust in your criticism, Mr.
Morgan," the judge mildly protested. "I know the marshal to be a
cool-headed man, a man who can see perils that you and I might overlook
until too late for our own preservation. The fellow must have made some
break for his gun that you didn't see."
"I hope it was that way," Morgan said, willing to give the marshal every
shadow of justification possible.
"I've known Seth Craddock a long time; he was huntin' buffalo for the
railroad contractors when I first came to this country. Why, I appointed
Seth to the office not more than an hour before that mix-up at the
hotel."
"He's beginning early," Morgan said.
"The man that's going to clean this town up must begin early and work
late," Judge Thayer declared. "An officer that would allow a man to run
a bluff on him wouldn't last two hours."
"I suppose not," Morgan admitted.
"As I told Seth when I swore him in, what we want in Ascalon is a
marshal that will use his gun oftener, and to better purpose, than the
men that have gone before him. This town must be purified, the offal of
humanity that makes a stench until it offends the heavens and spreads
our obscene notoriety to the ends of the earth, must be swept out before
we can induce sober and substantial men to bring their families into
this country."
"It looks reasonable enough," Morgan agreed.
"Hell's kettle is on the fire in this town, Mr. Morgan; the devil's own
stew is bubbling in it. If I could induce you to defer your farming
experiment a few months, as much as I approve it, anxious as I am to see
you demonstrate your theories and mine, I believe we could accomplish
the regeneration of this town. With a man of Craddock's caliber on the
street, and you in the _Headlight_ office speaking with the voice of a
thousand men, we could reverse public opinion and draw friends to our
side. Without some such support, I view the future with gloom and
misgiving. Glenmore is bound to displace us as the capital of this
county; Ascalon will decline to a whistling station by the side of the
track."
"I'm afraid I wouldn't care to hitch up with Mr. Craddock in the
regeneration of Ascalon," Morgan said. "We'd pull so hard in opposite
directions we'd break the harness."
Judge Thayer expressed his regret while he slipped on his black alpaca
coat, asking Morgan to wait until he locked his door, when he would walk
with him as far as the hotel corner. On the way they met a young man who
came bowling along with a great air of importance and self-assurance, a
fresh cigar tilted up in his mouth to such an angle that it threatened
the brim of his large white hat.
Judge Thayer introduced this man as Dell Hutton, county treasurer.
Hutton wrung Morgan's hand with ardent grip, as if he welcomed him into
the brotherhood of the elect in Ascalon, speaking out of the corner of
his mouth around his cigar. He was a thin-mouthed man of twenty-five, or
perhaps a year or two older, with a shrunken weazenness about his face
that made him look like a very old man done over, and but poorly
renovated. His eyes were pale, with shadows in them as of inquiry and
distrust; his stature was short, his frame slight.
Hutton seemed to be deeply, even passionately, interested in the venture
Morgan had come to make in that country. He offered his services in any
exigency where they might be applied, shaking hands again with hard
grip, accompanied by a wrinkling of his thin mouth about his cigar as he
clamped his jaws in the fervor of his earnestness. But he appeared to be
under a great pressure to go his way, his eyes controverting the
sincerity of his words the while.
"He's rather a young man to be filling such a responsible position,"
Morgan ventured as they resumed their way.
"Dell wasn't elected to the office," Judge Thayer explained. "He's
filling out his father's term."
"Did he--die?" Morgan inquired, marveling over the mortality among the
notables of the town.
"He was a victim of this feud in the rivalry for the county seat," Judge
Thayer explained, with sadness. "It was due to Hutton, more than any
other force, that we didn't lose the county seat at the last
election--he kept the cattlemen lined up, was a power among them,
followed that business a long time himself. Yes. He was the first man
that ever drove a herd of cattle from Texas to load for market when this
railroad was put through. Some of those skulkers from Glenmore shot him
down at his door two months after he took office."
"I thought the boy looked like he'd been trained on the range," Morgan
said, thoughtfully.
"Yes, Dell was raised in the saddle, drove several trips from Texas up
here. Dell"--softly, a little sorrowfully, Morgan thought--"was the
other principal in that affair with our late editor."
"Oh, I see. He was exonerated?"
"Clear case of self-defense, proved that Smith--the editor was
Smith--reached for his gun first."
Morgan did not comment, but he thought that this seemed a thing easily
proved in Ascalon. He parted from the judge at the bank corner, which
was across the way from the hotel.
The shadow of the hotel fell far into the public square, and in front of
the building, their chairs placed in what would have been the gutter of
the street if the thoroughfare had been paved, their feet braced with
probably more comfort than grace against the low sidewalk, a row of men
was stationed, like crows on a fence. There must have been twenty or
more of them, in various stages of undress from vest down to suspenders,
from bright cravats flaunting over woolen shirts and white shirts, and
striped shirts and speckled shirts, to unconfined necks laid bare to the
breeze.
Whether these were guests waiting supper, or merely loafers waiting
anything that might happen next, Morgan had not been long enough in town
to determine. He noticed the curious and, he thought, unfriendly eyes
which they turned on him as he approached. And as Morgan set foot on the
sidewalk porch of the hotel, Seth Craddock, the new city marshal, rose
out of the third chair on the end of the row nearest him, hand lifted in
commanding signal to halt.
"You've just got time to git your gripsack," Craddock said, coming
forward as he spoke, but stopping a little to one side as if to allow
Morgan passage to the door.
"Time's no object to me," Morgan returned, good-humored and undisturbed,
thinking this must be one of the jokes at the expense of strangers for
which Ascalon was famous.
Some of the loafers were standing by their chairs in attitude of
indecision, others sat leaning forward to see and hear. Traffic both
ways on the sidewalk came to a sudden halt at the spectacle of two men
in a situation recognized at a glance in quick-triggered Ascalon as
significant, those who came up behind Morgan clearing the way by edging
from the sidewalk into the square.
"The train'll be here in twelve minutes," Craddock announced, watch in
his palm.
"On time, is she?" Morgan said indifferently, starting for the door.
Again Seth Craddock lifted his hand. Those who had remained seated along
the gutter perch up to this moment now got to their feet with such haste
that chairs were upset. Craddock put his hand casually to his pistol, as
a man rests his hand on his hip.
"You're leavin' on it," he said.
"I guess you've got the wrong man," Morgan suggested, noting everything
with comprehensive eye, not a little concerned by the marshal's
threatening attitude. If this were going to turn out a joke, Morgan
wished it might begin very soon to show some of its risible features on
the surface, in order that he might know which way to jump to make the
best figure possible.
"No, I ain't got no wrong man!" Craddock returned, making mockery of
the words, uttering them jeeringly out of the corner of his mouth. He
blasted Morgan with the glare of his malevolent red eyes, redder now
than before his weapon had moistened the street of Ascalon with blood.
"You're the feller that's been shootin' off your mouth about murder in
the name of the law, and you bein' able to take his gun away from that
feller. Well, kid, I'm afraid it's goin' to be a little too rough for
you in this town. You're leavin'--you won't have time to git your
gripsack now, you can write for it!"
Morgan felt the blood flaming into his face with the hot swell of anger.
A moment he stood eye to eye with Craddock, fighting down the defiance
that rose for utterance to his lips. Then he started again toward the
hotel door.
Craddock whipped out his pistol with arm so swift that the eye
multiplied it like a spoke in a quick-spinning wheel. He stood holding
the weapon so, his wrist rather limber, the muzzle of the pistol
pointing in the general direction of Morgan's feet.
"Maybe you can take a gun away from me, little feller?" Craddock
challenged in high mockery, one nostril of his long nose twitching,
lifting his mustache on that side in a snarl.
"Don't point that gun at me, Craddock!" Morgan warned, his voice
unshaken and cool, although the surge of his heart made his seasoned
body vibrate to the finger tips.
"Scratch gravel for the depot!" Craddock commanded, lowering the muzzle
of his gun as if he intended to hasten the going by a shot between the
offender's feet.
The men were separated by not more than two yards, and Morgan made no
movement to widen the breach immediately following the marshal's command
to go. On the contrary, before any that saw him standing there in
apparent indecision, and least of all among them Seth Craddock, could
measure his intention, Morgan stepped aside quicker than the watchers
calculated any living man could move, reached out his long arm a flash
quicker than he had shifted on his feet, and laid hold of the city
marshal's hairy wrist, wrenching it in a twist so bone-breaking that
nerves and muscles failed their office. Nobody saw exactly how he
accomplished it, but the next moment Morgan stepped back from the city
marshal, that officer's revolver in his hand.
"Mr. Craddock," he said, in calm, advisory way, "I expect to stay around
this part of the country some little time, and I'll be obliged to come
to Ascalon once in a while. If you think you're going to feel
uncomfortable every time you see me, I guess the best thing for you to
do is leave. I'm not saying you must leave, I don't set myself up to
tell a man when to come and go without I've got that right over him. I
just suggest it for your comfort and peace of mind. If you stay here
you'll have to get used to seeing me around."
Craddock stood for a breath glaring at the man who had humiliated him in
his new dignity, clutching his half-paralyzed wrist. He said nothing,
but there was the proclamation of a death feud in his eyes.
"Give him a gun, somebody!" said a fool in the crowd that pressed to
the edge of the sidewalk at the marshal's back.
Tom Conboy, standing in his door ten feet away, interposed quickly,
waving the crowd back.
"Tut, tut! No niggers in Ireland, now!" he said.
"He can have this one," said Morgan, still in the same measured, calm
voice. He offered the pistol back to its owner, who snatched it with
ungracious hand, shoved it into his battered scabbard, turned to the
crowd at his back with an oath.
"Scatter out of here!" he ordered, covering his degradation as he might
in this tyrannical exercise of authority.
Morgan looked into the curious faces of the people who blocked the
sidewalk ahead of him, withdrawn a discreet distance, not yet venturing
to come on. Except for the red handkerchief that he had worn about his
neck, he was dressed as when he arrived in Ascalon in Joe Lynch's wagon,
coatless, the dust of the road on his shoes. In place of the bright
handkerchief he now wore a slender black necktie, the ends of it tucked
into his gray woolen shirt.
He felt taller, rawer, more angular than nature had built him as he
stood there looking at the people who had gathered like leaves against a
rock in a brook. He was ashamed of his part in the public show, sorry
that anybody had been by to witness it. In his embarrassment he pushed
his hat back from his forehead, looking around him again as if he would
break through the ranks and hide himself from such confusing publicity.
The crowd was beginning to disperse at Seth Craddock's urging, although
those who had come to a stand on the sidewalk seemed timid about passing
Morgan. They still held back as if to give him room, or in uncertainty
whether it was all over yet. Perhaps they expected Craddock to turn on
Morgan again when he had cleared a proper space for his activities.
As for Morgan, he had dismissed the city marshal from his thoughts, for
something else had risen in his vision more worthy the attention of a
man. This was the face of a girl on the edge of the crowd in front of
him, a tall, strong, pliant creature who leaned a little as if she
looked for her reflection in a stream. She was garbed in a brown duck
riding skirt, white waist with a bright wisp of cravat blowing at her
breast like the red of bittersweet against snow. Her dusty sombrero
threw a shadow over her eyes, but Morgan could see that they were dark
and friendly eyes, as no shadow but night could obscure. The other faces
became in that moment but the incidental background for one; his heart
lifted and leaped as the heart moves and yearns with tender quickening
at the sound of some old melody that makes it glad.
Morgan stepped back, thinking only of her, seeing only her, making a way
for her, only, to pass. That others might follow was not in his mind. He
stepped out of the way for her.
She came on toward him now, one finished, one refined, among that press
of crudity, one unlooked for in that place of wild lusts and dark
passions unrestrained. She carried a packet of newspapers and letters
under her bent arm, telling of her mission on the street; the thong of
her riding quirt was about her wrist. Her soft dark hair was low on her
neck, a flush as of the pleasure that speaks in bounding blood when
friend meets friend glowed in her face. Morgan removed his hat as she
passed him. She looked into his face and smiled.
The little crowd broke and followed, but Morgan, oblivious to the
movement around him, stood on the sidewalk edge looking after her, his
hat in his hand.
CHAPTER V
ASCALON AWAKE
Ascalon was laid out according to the Spanish tradition for arranging
towns that dominated the builders of the West and Southwest in the days
when Santa Fé extended its trade influence over a vast territory.
Although Ascalon was only a stage station in the latter days of traffic
over the Santa Fé Trail, its builders, when it came occasion to expand,
were men who had traded in that capital of the gray desert wastes at the
trail's end, and nothing would serve them but a plaza, with the
courthouse in the middle of it, the principal business establishments
facing it the four sides around.
There were many who called it _the plaza_ still, especially visitors
from along the Rio Grande who came driving their long-horned,
lean-flanked cattle northward over the Chisholm Trail. Santa Fé, at its
worst, could not have been dustier than this town of Ascalon, and
especially the plaza, or public square, in these summer days. Galloping
horses set its dust flying in obscuring clouds; the restless wind that
blew from sunrise till sunset day in and day out from the southwest,
whipped it in sudden gusts of temper, and drove it through open doors,
spreading it like a sun-defying hoarfrost on the low roofs. All
considered, Ascalon was as dry, uncomfortable, unpromising of romance,
as any place that man ever built or nature ever harassed with wearing
wind and warping sun.
The courthouse in the middle of the public square was built of bricks,
of that porous, fiery sort which seem so peculiarly designed to the
monstrous vagaries of rural architecture. Here in Ascalon they fitted
well with the arid appearance of things, as a fiery face goes best with
white eyebrows, anywhere.
The courthouse was a two-storied structure, with the cupola as
indispensable to the old-time Kansas courthouse as a steeple to a
church. The jail was in the basement of it, thus sparing culprits a
certain punishment by concealing the building's raw, red, and crude
lines from the eye. Not that anybody in jail or out of it ever thought
of this advantage, or appreciated it, indeed, for Ascalon was proud of
the courthouse, and fired with a desire and determination to keep it
there in the plaza forever and a day.
There were precedents before them, and plenty of them in that part of
the country, where county seats had been changed, courthouses of red
bricks and gray stones put on skids and moved away, leaving desolation
that neither maledictions could assuage nor oratory could repair. For
prosperity went with the courthouse in those days, and dignity, and
consequence among the peoples of the earth.
Hitching racks, like crude apparatus for athletic exercises, were built
around the courthouse, with good driving distance between them and the
plank sidewalks. Here the riders from distant ranges tied their jaded
mounts, here such as made use of wagons in that land of horseback-going
men hitched their teams when they drove in for supplies.
There was not a shrub in the courthouse square, not the dead and
stricken trunk of a tree standing monument of any attempt to mitigate
the curse of sun. There was not a blade of grass, not a struggling,
wind-blown flower. Only here and there chickweed grew, spreading its
green tracery over the white soil in such sequestered spots as the hoofs
of beast and the feet of men did not stamp and chafe and wear; and in
the angles of the courthouse walls, the Russian thistle, barbed with its
thousand thorns. Men did not consider beauty in Ascalon, this Tophet at
trail's end, save it might be the beauty of human flesh, and then it
must be rouged and powdered, and enforced with every cosmetic mixture to
win attention in an atmosphere where life was lived in a ferment of ugly
strife.
There was in Ascalon in those bloody days a standing coroner's jury, of
which Tom Conboy was the foreman, composed of certain gamblers and town
politicians whose interests were with the vicious element. To these men
the wide notoriety of the town was capital. Therefore, it was seldom,
indeed, that anybody was slain in Ascalon without justification,
according to the findings of this coroner's jury. In this way the
gamblers and divekeepers, and such respectable citizens as chose to
exercise their hands in this exhilarating pastime, were regularly
absolved.
The result of this amicable agreement between the county officials and
the people of the town was that Ascalon became, more than ever, a refuge
for the outlawed and proscribed of other communities. Every train
brought them, and dumped them down on the station platform to find their
way like wolves to their kind into the activities of the town.
Gamblers and gun-slingers, tricksters and sharpers, attended by the
carrion flock of women who always hover after these wreckers and
wastrels, came to Ascalon by scores. It began to appear a question, in
time, of what they were to subsist upon, even though they turned to the
ravening of one another.
But the broad notoriety of Ascalon attended to this, bringing with the
outlawed and debased a fresh and eager train of victims. The sons of
families came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries of
eastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat their
surfeited blood. Unsophisticated young men came, following the lure of
romance; farm boys from the midwestern states came, with a thought of
pioneering and making a new empire of the plow, as their fathers had
smoothed the land in the states already called old.
All of these came with money in their pockets, and nearly all of them,
one day first or last, became contributors to the support of Ascalon's
prostituted population. New victims came to replace the plucked, new
crowds of cowherders rode in from the long trails to the south, relays
of them galloped night after night from the far ranches stretching along
the sandy Arkansas. There was no want of grain to sow in the gaping
furrows struck out by the hands of sin in the raw, treeless, unpainted
city of Ascalon.
And into all this fever of coming and going, this heartbreak of shame
and loss, of quickly drawn weapon, of flash, despairing cry, and
death--this sowing of recklessness and harvesting of despair--into all
this had come Calvin Morgan, a man with a clean heart, a clean purpose
in his soul.
Ascalon once had been illuminated at night about the public square by
kerosene lamps set on posts, after the manner of gas lights in a city,
but the expense of supplying glass day after day to repair the damage
done by roysterers during the night had become so heavy that the town
had abandoned lights long before Morgan's advent there. Only the posts
stood now, scarred by bullets, gnawed by horses which had stood hitched
to them forgotten by their owners who reveled their wages in Ascalon's
beguiling fires. At the time of Morgan's coming, starlight and
moonlight, and such beams as fell through the windows of houses upon the
uneven sidewalk around the square, provided all the illumination that
brightened the streets of Ascalon by night.
On the evening of his mildly adventurous first day in the town, Morgan
sat in front of the Elkhorn hotel, his chair in the gutter, according to
the custom, his feet braced comfortably against the outer edge of the
sidewalk, flanked by other guests and citizens who filled the remaining
seats. Little was said to him of his encounter with the new city
marshal, and that little Morgan made less, and brought to short ending
by his refusal to be led into the matter at all. And as he sat there,
chatting in desultory way, the fretting wind died to a breath, the line
of men in the chairs grew indistinct in the gloom of early night, and
Ascalon rose up like a sleeping wolf, shaking off the drowse of the day,
and sat on its haunches to howl.
This awakening began with the sound of fiddles and pianos in the big
dance hall whose roof covered all the vices which thrive best in the
dark. Later a trombone and cornet joined the original musical din,
lifting their brassy notes on the vexed night air. Bands of horsemen
came galloping in, yelping the short, coyote cries of the cattle lands.
Sometimes one of them let off his pistol as he wheeled his horse up to
the hitching rack, the relief of a simple mind that had no other
expression for its momentary exuberance.
Sidewalks became thronged with people tramping the little round of the
town's diversions, but of different stamp from those who had sparsely
trickled through its sunlight on legitimate business that afternoon.
Cowboys hobbled by in their peggy, high-heeled gait, as clumsy afoot as
penguins; men in white shirts without coats, their skin too tender to
withstand the sun, walked with superior aloofness among the sheep which
had come to their shearing pens, preoccupied in manner, yet alert,
watching, watching, on every hand.
Now and then women passed, but they, also, were of the night, gaudily
bedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian by
day to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad in
Ascalon by night. With the last gleam of day it left the stage to
wantonness.
As the activity of the growing night increased, high-pitched voices of
cowboys who called figures of the dances quavered above the confusion of
sounds, a melancholy note in the long-drawn syllables that seemed a
lament for the waste of youth, and a prophecy of desolation. When the
music fell to momentary silence the clash of pool balls sounded, and the
tramp of feet, and quavering wild feminine laughter rising sharply,
trailing away to distance as if the revelers sailed by on the storm of
their flaming passions, to land by and by on the shores of morning,
draggled, dry-lipped, perhaps with a heartache for the far places left
behind forever.
Morgan was not moved by a curiosity great enough to impel him to make
the round. All this he had seen before, time over, in the frontier towns
of Nebraska, with less noise and open display, certainly, for here in
Ascalon viciousness had a nation-wide notoriety to maintain, and must
intensify all that it touched. He was wondering how the townspeople who
had honest business in life managed to sleep through that rioting, with
the added chance of some fool cowboy sending a bullet through their thin
walls as he galloped away to his distant camp, when Tom Conboy came
through the sidewalk stream to sit beside him in a gutter chair.
The proprietor of the Elkhorn hotel appeared to be under a depression of
spirits. He answered those who addressed him in short words, with manner
withdrawn. Morgan noted that the diamond stud was gone out of the desert
of Conboy's shirt bosom, and that he was belted with a pistol. Presently
the man on Conboy's other hand, who had been trying with little result
to draw him into a conversation, got up and made his way toward the
bright front of the dance hall. Conboy touched Morgan's knee.
"Come into the office, kind of like it happened, a little while after
me," he said, speaking in low voice behind his hand. He rose, stretching
and yawning as if to give his movements a casual appearance, stood a
little while on the edge of the sidewalk, went into the hotel. Morgan
followed him in a few minutes, to find him apparently busy with his
accounts behind the desk.
A little while the proprietor worked on his bookkeeping, Morgan lounging
idly before the cigar case.
"Some fellers up the street lookin' for you," Conboy said, not turning
his head.
"What fellows? What do they want?"
"That bunch of cowboys from the Chisholm Trail."
"I don't know them," said Morgan, not yet getting the drift of what
Conboy evidently meant as a warning.
"They're friends of the city marshal; he belonged to the same outfit,"
Conboy explained, ostensibly setting down figures in his book.
"Thank you," said Morgan, starting for the door.
"Where you goin' to?" Conboy demanded, forgetting caution and possible
complications in his haste to interpose.
"To find out what they want."
"There's no sense in a man runnin' his arm down a lion's throat to see
if he's hungry," Conboy said, making a feint now of moving the cigar
boxes around in the case.
"This town isn't so big that they'd miss a man if they went out to hunt
him. Where are they?"
"I left them at Peden's, the big dance hall up the street. Ain't you got
a gun?"
"No," Morgan returned thoughtfully, as if he had not even considered one
before.
"The best thing you can do is to take a walk out into the country and
forget your way back, kid. Them fellers are goin' to be jangled up just
about right for anything in an hour or so more. I'd advise you to
go--I'll send your grip to you wherever you say."
"You're very kind. How many of them are there?"
"Seven besides Craddock, the rest of them went to Kansas City with the
cattle you saw leave in them three extras this evening. Craddock's
celebratin' his new job, he's leadin' 'em around throwin' everything
wide open to 'em without a cent to pay. 'Charge it to me' he said to
Peden--I was there when they came in--'charge it to me, I'm payin' this
bill.' You know what that means."
"I suppose it means that the collection will be deferred," Morgon said,
grinning over the city marshal's easy cut to generosity.
"Indefinitely postponed," said Conboy, gloomily. "I'm goin' to put all
my good cigars in the safe, and do it right now."
"Here's something you may put in the safe for me, too," said Morgan,
handing over his pocketbook.
"Ain't you goin' to leave town?" Conboy asked, hand stayed hesitantly to
take the purse.
"I've got an appointment with Judge Thayer to look at a piece of land in
the morning," Morgan returned.
"Well, keep out enough to buy a gun, two of 'em if you're a
double-handed man," Conboy counseled.
"I've got what I need," said Morgan, putting the purse in Conboy's hand.
"I'd say for you to take a walk out to Judge Thayer's and stay all night
with him, but them fellers will be around here a couple of weeks, I
expect--till the rest of the outfit comes back for their horses. Just
one night away wouldn't do you any good."
"I couldn't think of it," said Morgan, coldly.
"You know your business, I guess," Conboy yielded, doubtfully, "but
don't play your luck too far. You made a good grab when you took that
feller's gun away from him, but you can't grab eight guns."
"You're right," Morgan agreed.
"If you're a reasonable man, you'll hit the grit out of this burg,"
Conboy urged.
"You said they were at Peden's?"
"First dance house you come to, the biggest one in town. You don't need
to tip it off that I said anything. No niggers in Ireland, you know."
"Not a nigger," said Morgan.
As he stepped into the street, Morgan had no thought of going in any
direction save that which would bring him in conjunction with the men
who sought him. If he began to run at that stage of his experiences, he
reasoned, he would better make a streak of it that would take him out of
the country as fast as his feet would carry him. If those riders of the
Chisholm Trail were going to be there a week or two, he could not dodge
them, and it might be that by facing them unexpectedly and talking it
over man to man before they got too far along in their spree, the
grievance they held against him on Seth Craddock's account could be
adjusted.
He had come to Ascalon in the belief that he could succeed and prosper
in that land which had lured and beckoned, discouraged and broken and
driven forth again ten thousand men. Already there was somebody in it
who had looked for a moment into his soul and called it courageous, and
passed on her way again, he knew not whither. But if Ascalon was so
small that a man whom men sought could not hide in it, the country
around it was not vast enough to swallow one whom his heart desired to
find again.
He would find her; that he had determined hours ago. That should be his
first and greatest purpose in this country now. No man, or band of men,
that ever rode the Chisholm Trail could set his face away from it. He
went on to meet them, his dream before him, the wild sound of Ascalon's
obscene revelry in his ears.
CHAPTER VI
RIDERS OF THE CHISHOLM TRAIL
Peden's emporium of viciousness was a notable establishment in its day.
By far the largest in Ascalon, it housed nearly every branch of
entertainment at which men hazard their fortunes and degrade their
morality. It was a vast shell of planks and shingles, with skeleton
joists and rafters bare overhead, built hastily and crudely to serve its
ephemeral day.
In the farther end there was a stage, upon which mephitic females
displayed their physical lures, to come down and sell drinks at a
commission in the house, and dance with the patrons, at intervals.
Beyond the many small round tables which stood directly in front of the
stage was a clear space for dancing, and on the border of this festival
arena, in the front of the house, the gambling devices. A bar ran the
length of the building on one side from door to orchestra railing. It
was the pride of Ascalon that a hundred men could stand and regale
themselves before this counter at one time.
Five bartenders stood behind this altar of alcohol when Morgan set foot
in the place intent on putting himself in the way of the riders of the
Chisholm Trail. These Texas cowboys were easily identified among the
early activities of the place by the unusual amount of Mexican silver
and leather ornamentation of their apparel. They were a road-worn and
dusty crew, growing noisy and hilarious in their celebration of one of
their number being elevated to the place of so conspicuous power as city
marshal of that famous town. It appeared to have its humorous side from
the loud laughter they were spending over it, and the caressing thumps
which they laid on Seth Craddock's bony back.
They were lined up against the bar, Craddock in the midst of them, a
regiment of bottles before them. Morgan drew near, ordered a drink,
stood waiting the moment of his discovery and what might follow it. The
Texans were trying everything in the stock, from gin to champagne, gay
in the wide choice the marvelous influence of their comrade opened to
them without money or the hint of price.
Morgan lounged at the bar, turning meditatively the little glass of
amber liquor that was the passport to the estate of a proper man in
Ascalon, as in many places neither so notorious nor perilous in those
times. Each of the big metal kerosene lamps swung high on the joists
threw a circular blotch of shadow on the floor, but the light from them
fell brightly on the bar, increased in brilliancy by reflection from the
long row of mirrors.
In this sparkle of glass and bar furniture Morgan stood, conspicuous by
being apart, like a solitary who had ridden in for a jambouree of his
own without companion or friend. He wore his broad-brimmed black hat
with the high crown uncreased, and only for the lack of boots and pistol
he might have passed for a man of the range. The bartender who served
him looked at him with rather puzzled and frequent sidelong turning of
the eyes as he stood brooding over the untasted liquor, as if he sought
to place him in memory, or to classify him among the drift of men who
came in varying moods to his mahogany altar to pay their devotions to
its bottled gods.
Morgan's hat cast a shadow over half his face, making it as stern as a
Covenanter's portrait. His eyes were on the bar, where his great hand
turned and turned the glass, as if his mind were withdrawn a thousand
leagues from the noisy scene about him. But for all that apparently
wrapt and self-centered contemplation, Morgan knew the moment when Seth
Craddock looked his direction and discovered him. At that moment he
lifted his glass and drank.
Craddock turned to his companions, upon whom a quiet settled as they
drew together in brief conference. Presently the city marshal sauntered
out, leaving his comrades of the long trail to carry on their revelry
alone. A gangling young man, swart-faced, fired by the contending
crosses of alcoholic concoctions which he had swallowed, approached
Morgan where he leaned against the bar. This fellow straddled as if he
had a horse between his legs, and he was dusty and road-rough, but newly
shaved and clipped, and perfumed with all the strong scents of the
barber's stock.
"Good evenin', bud. How does your copperosticies seems to segastuate
this evenin'?" he hailed, in a bantering, insolent, overriding way.
"I'm able to be up and around and take a little grub," Morgan returned,
as good-humoredly as if there had been no insulting sneer in the
cowboy's words.
"I hear you're leaving town this evenin'?"
"I guess that's a mistake of the printer," Morgan said with casual ease.
The other men in the party drew around Morgan, some of them challenging
him with insolent glances, all of them holding their peace but the one
who had spoken, who appeared to have been selected for that office.
"A friend of mine told me you was hittin' the grit out of here tonight,"
the young man insisted, putting that in his voice which seemed to admit
no controversy. "This country ain't no place for a granger, bud;
farmin's the unhealthiest business here a man ever took up, they tell
me, he don't live no time at it. Sure, you're hittin' the road out of
here tonight--my friend appointed us a committee to see you off."
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, boys, but your friend's got the wrong
information on me and my movements, whoever he is. I'm goin' to hang
around this town some little time, till my farming tools come, anyhow.
Just pass that word along to your friend, will you, sport?"
"You ain't got erry gun stuck around in your pants, have you, bud?" the
Texan inquired with persuasive gentleness.
"Not the ghost of a gun."
"Grangers burn their eyebrows off and shoot theirselves through the feet
when they go totin' guns around," the fellow said, speaking in the
wheedling, ingratiating way that one addresses an irresponsible child or
a man in alcoholic paresis. The others appeared to find a subtle humor
in their comrade's mode of handling a granger. Morgan grinned with them
as if he found it funny himself.
One fellow stood a little apart from the rest of the band, studying
Morgan with an expression of insolence such as might well warrant the
belief that he held feud with all grangers and made their discomfiture,
dislodgment, and extermination the chief business of his life. This was
a man of unlikely proportions for a trade aback of a horse--short of
legs, heavy of body, long in the reach of his arms. His face was round
and full, fair for one who rode abroad in all seasons under sun and
storm, his teeth small and far apart.
This man said nothing, took no part in the side comment that passed
among his comrades, only grinned occasionally, his eyes unwaveringly on
Morgan's face. Morgan was drawn to note him particularly among this
mainly trifling and innocuous bunch, uneasily impressed by the cold
curiosity of his round, tigerish eyes. He thought the fellow appeared to
be calculating on how much blood a granger of that bulk contained, and
how long it would take him to drink it.
"You ain't got a twenty-two hid around in your pocket nowhere?" the
inquisitor pressed, with comically feigned surprise. Morgan denied the
ownership of even a twenty-two. "I'll have to feel over you and see--I
never saw a granger in my life that didn't tote a twenty-two," the Texan
declared, stepping up to Morgan to put his declaration into effect.
Morgan had stood through this mocking inquisition in careless posture,
elbows on the bar at his back, with as much good humor as if he were a
member of the band taking his turn as the butt of the evening's
merrymaking. Now, as the young Texan approached with the evident
intention of searching him for a weapon, Morgan came suddenly out of his
lounging posture into one of watchfulness and defense. He put up his
hand in admonitory gesture to stay the impending degradation.
"Hands off, pardner!" he warned.
The cowboy stopped, turned to his comrades in simulated amazement.
"Did you hear the pore feller make that noise?" he asked, turning his
head as if he listened, not quite convinced that his ears had not
deceived him.
"He's sick, he orto have a dose of turkentime for the holler horn," said
one.
"He's got the botts--drench him for the botts," another prescribed.
That suggestion appealed to their humor. It was endorsed with laughter
as they pressed around Morgan to cut off his escape.
"I was told you men were looking for me," Morgan said, estimating them
individually and collectively with calculative eyes, "so I stepped in
here where you could find me if you had anything worth a man's time to
say to me. I guess you've shot your wad, and you've got my answer. You
can tell your friend I'm stopping at the Elkhorn hotel, if he don't know
it already."
Morgan moved away from the bar as if to leave the place. They bunched in
front of him to bar his passage, one laying hold of his arm.
"We're fixin' up a little drink for you," this detainer said, indicating
the former spokesman, who was busy at the bar pouring something of the
contents of the various bottles into one that bore a champagne label.
"I've had my drink, it isn't time for another," Morgan said, swinging
his arm, sending the fellow who clung to it headlong through the ranks
of his companions.
At this show of resistance the mask of humor that had covered their
sinister intention was flung aside. The man with the wide-set teeth
stepped into action there, the others giving place to him as to a
recognized champion. He whirled into Morgan, planting a blow just above
the bridge of his nose that sent him back against the bar with a jolt
that made the bottles dance.
It was such a sudden and mighty blow that Morgan was dazed for a moment,
almost blinded. He saw his assailant before him in wavering lines as he
guarded instinctively rather than scientifically against the fierce
follow-up by which the fellow seemed determined to make an inglorious
end of it for the despised granger. Morgan cleared out of the mists of
this sudden assault in a moment, for he was a man who had taken and
given hard blows in more than one knock-down and drag-out in his day. He
caught the swing that was meant for a knock-out on his left guard, and
drove his able right fist into the fellow's face.
The pugilistic cowboy, rare fellow among his kind, went to the floor.
But there was good stuff in him, worthy the confidence his comrades
reposed. For a breath or two he lay on his back as he fell, twisted to
his side with a springy movement of incredible swiftness, and sprang to
his feet. Blood was running from his battered nose and already puffed
lips. The cheers of his comrades warmed him back to battle, and the
onlookers who came pressing from all quarters, drew aside to give them
room to fight.
They began to mix it at a furious pace, both of them sledging heavily,
the advantage of reach and height sparing Morgan much of the heavy
punishment his opponent lacked the cleverness to avoid. While the fellow
doubtless was a champion among the men of his range, he had little
chance against Morgan, imperfect as he was at that game. In a few
minutes of incessant hammering, no breathing spell to break the fierce
encounter, Morgan had chopped the cowboy's face severely. Five times
Morgan knocked him down in less than half as many minutes, the elastic,
enduring fellow coming back each time with admirable courage and vigor.
Morgan's hands were cut from this bare-knuckled mauling, but his
opponent had not landed a damaging blow on his face since the first
unexpected and unguarded one. He could see, from their crowding and
attempts to interfere, that the spirit of fairness had gone out of the
rest of the bunch. An end must be made speedily, or they would climb him
like a pack of wildcats and crush him like a rabbit in a fall. With this
menace plainly before him, Morgan put his best into the rush and wallop
that he meant to finish the fight.
The cowboy's extraordinary resistance broke with the blow; he lay so
long like a dead man where he fell that his comrades brought whisky to
revive him. Presently he struggled to hands and knees, where he stood
coughing blood, Morgan waiting by to see what would follow.
"Take them knucks away from him! he slugged me!" Morgan was amazed to
hear the fellow charge.
"That's not so!" Morgan denied. "Here--search me," he offered, lifting
his arms.
In the code governing personal encounter in those days of the frontier,
which was not so very long ago, just one tick in the great clock of
history, it was permissible to straddle one's enemy when one got him
down, and churn his head against the ground; to gouge out his eyes; to
bite off his ears; to kick him, carve him, mutilate him in various and
unsportsman-like and unspeakable ways. But it was the high crime of the
code to slug him with brass or steel knuckles, commonly called knucks.
The man who carried this reenforcement for the natural fist in his
pocket and used it in a fight was held the lowest of all contemptible
and namelessly vile things. So, these Texas cowboys turned on Morgan at
their comrade's accusation, deaf to any denial, flaming with vengeful
resentment.
They probably would have made an end of Morgan then and there, but for
the interference of Peden, proprietor of the place, who appeared on the
scene of the turmoil at that moment, calm and unruffled, expensive white
sombrero on the back of his head, fresh cigar in his mouth, black frock
coat striking him almost to the knees.
Peden pushed in among the cowboys as they made a rush for Morgan, who
stood his ground, back to the bar, regretting now the foolish impulse
that had led him into this pack of wolves. Peden stepped in front of
Morgan, authority in his very calmness, and restrained the inflamed
Texans.
He asked them to consider the ladies. The ladies were in a terrible
panic, he said, sweeping his hand toward the farther end of the room
where a dozen or so of the creatures whom he dignified with the name
were huddled under the restraint of the chief fiddler, who stood before
them with fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, like sword and buckler.
There was more curiosity than fright in the women, as the most
unsophisticated observer could have read in their kalsomined
countenances. Peden's only object in keeping them back from a closer
enjoyment of the battle was entirely commercial, humanity and delicacy
being no part of his business plan. A live lady was worth a great deal
more to his establishment than one with a stray bullet in her skin,
waiting burial at his expense in the busy undertaker's morgue.
The cowboys yielded immediately to Peden's appeal in behalf of the
ladies, although they very likely would have resented a more obscure
citizen's interference with their plans. They fronted the bar again on
Peden's invitation to pour another drink. Two of them lifted from the
floor the man whom Morgan had fought, and supported him in a weak-kneed
advance upon the bar. They cheered him in his half-blind and bleeding
wretchedness with promise of what that marvelous elixir, whisky, would
do for him once he began to feel the quickening of its potent flame.
Peden indicated by a lifting of the eyebrows, a slight movement of the
head toward the door, that Morgan was to improve this moment by making
a quiet and expeditious get-away. Morgan needed no urging, being quite
willing to allow matters to rest where they stood. He started for the
door, making a little detour to put a faro table, around which several
men were standing, between himself and the men to whom Seth Craddock had
delegated the business of his expulsion from the town. One of the men
supporting their defeated champion saw Morgan as he rounded the table,
and set up the alarm that the granger was breaking for the range.
Even then Morgan could have escaped by a running dash, for those
high-heeled horseback men were not much on foot. But he could not pay
that much for safety before the public of Ascalon, despicable as those
of it gathered there might be. He made a pretense of watching the faro
game while the Texans put down their glasses to rush after him and make
him prisoner, threatening him with clubbed pistols above his head.
The lookout at the faro game, whose patrons were annoyed by this renewal
of the brawl, jumped from his high seat and took a hand in the row.
Friends of the marshal or friends of the devil, he said, made no
difference to him. They'd have to go outside to finish their fuss. This
man, a notorious slayer of his kind, quicker of hand than any man in
Ascalon, it was said, urged them all toward the door.
The cowboys protested against this breach of hospitality, but Peden
stood in his customary pose of calmness to enforce his bouncer's word,
hand pushing back his long black coat where it fell over the holster at
his belt.
Morgan was in no mind to go with them, for he began to have a disturbing
alarm over what these men might do in their drunken vengeance, relieved
as they thought themselves to be of all responsibility to law by the
liberty their friend Craddock had given them. Without regard to the
bouncer's orders or Peden's threatening pose, he began to lay about him
with his fists, making a breach in the ranks of his captors that would
have opened the way to the door in a moment, the outbreak was so
unexpected and violent, if it had not been for a quieting tap the
bouncer gave him with one of the lethal instruments which he carried for
such exigencies.
Morgan was conscious of a sensation of expulsion, which seemed swift,
soft, and soundless, with a dim sense of falling at the end. When his
dispersed senses returned to their seat again, he found himself in the
open night, stretched on the ground, hands bound behind his back.
CHAPTER VII
A GENTLE COWBOY JOKE
As Morgan's faculties cleared out of their turgid whirl, and the stars
began to leave off their frivolous capers and stand still, he heard
voices about him in the dark, and they were discussing the very
interesting question of whether he should be hung like a horse thief or
loaded upon a train and shipped away like sheep.
Morgan's bruised senses assembled and righted at the first conscious
grasp of this argument, as a laboring, buffeted ship rights when its
shifted cargo is flung back to place by the shock of a mighty surge.
Nature was on guard again in a moment, straining and tense in its sentry
over the habitation of a soul so nearly deserted but a minute before.
Morgan listened, sweating in the desperation of his plight.
They had taken him away from the main part of town, as he was aware by
the sound of its revelry in the near distance. Close at hand a railroad
engine was frying and gasping; farther off another was snorting
impatiently as it jerked the iron vertebrae of a long freight train. And
these men whom he could not see around him in the darkness were
discussing the expediency of hanging him while unconscious, against the
morality of waiting for him to come to himself so he might have the
felon's last appeal of prayer.
One maintained that it was against all precedent to hang an unconscious
man and send him off to perdition without a chance to enter a plea for
his soul, and he argued soberly, in the manner of a man who had a spirit
of fairness in him, and a little gleam of reason and morality left. To
Morgan's relief and hope this man went further as he put his view of the
case, even so far as to question their right to hang the granger at all.
They clamored against him and tried to scoff him down, moving with
drunken, scuffing feet near the spot where Morgan lay, as if to put the
sentence into immediate execution.
"Wait a minute now, boys," this unknown, unseen champion pleaded, "let's
me and you talk this thing over some more. That kid put up a man's
fight, even if he is a granger--you'll have to give him credit for that.
I didn't find no knucks on him, and you didn't. He couldn't 'a' dropped
'em on the floor, and he couldn't 'a' swallered 'em. He didn't have no
knucks, boys--that hard-hoofed granger just naturally tore into the
Dutchman with his bare hands. I know he did, his hands is all cut and
swelled up--here, wait till I strike a match and show you."
Morgan thought it wise to feign insensibility while this apparently
sober man among the crew struck a match and rolled his body over to show
the granger's battered hands. The others were not convinced by this
evidence, nor softened in the least. He was a granger, anyhow, a fencer
of the range, an interloper who had come into their ancient domain like
others of his grasshopper tribe to fence up the grazing lands and drive
them from the one calling that they knew. If for no other reason, he
deserved hanging for that. Ask anybody; they'd say the same.
"That ain't no kind of talk," said the defender, reprovingly, "your
daddies and mine was grangers before us, and our kids'll have to be
grangers or nothin' after a while--if any of us ever has any. I was in
for havin' a little fun with this feller; I was in on it with the rest
of you to see the Dutchman hammer him flat, but the Dutchman wasn't a
big enough feller for the job. Where's he at?"
"Layin' up there on the depot platform," somebody said.
"This feller flattened _him_ out, done it like he had him on a anvil,"
the granger's advocate chuckled. "That there freight's goin' to pull out
in a little while--let's look along till we find a empty car and chuck
him in it. By morning he'll be in La Junta. He's had his lesson out of
the cowman's book, he'll never come back to plow up this range."
Morgan thought that, perhaps by adding his own argument to this unknown
friend's, he might move the rest of the bunch from their cruel
determination to have his life. He moved, making a breathing like a man
coming to his senses, and struggled to sit up.
There were exclamations of satisfaction that he had revived in time to
relieve them of the responsibility of sending a man out of the world
without a chance to pray. The man who had championed Morgan's cause
helped him to sit up, asking him with a curious rough kindness if he
wanted a drink. Morgan replied that he did. A bottle was put to his
lips, bruised and swollen until they stood open by the rough usage his
captors had given him while unconscious. He took a swallow of the
whisky, shutting the rest out with tongue against teeth when the fellow
insisted that he take a man's dose.
They drew close around Morgan where he sat, back against this kind
fellow's knee. Morgan could see them plainly now, although it was too
dark to trace their features. One of them dropped the noose of a rope
over his head as the one who stood behind him took the flask from his
lips. Morgan knew by the feel of it against his neck that it was a
platted rawhide, such as the Mexicans term _reata_.
"Granger, if you got anything to say, say it," this one directed. Morgan
recognized him as the one who had opened the trouble in Peden's hall.
Morgan had considerable to say, and he said it without whimper or
tremor, his only appeal being to their fairness and sense of justice
between man and man. He went back a little farther in his simple history
than he had gone with Judge Thayer that afternoon, telling them how he
once had been a cowboy like themselves on the Nebraska and Wyoming
range, leading up briefly, so they might feel they knew him, to his
arrival in Ascalon that day, and his manner of incurring Seth Craddock's
enmity, for which they were considering such an unreasonable punishment.
Inflamed as they were by liquor, and all but insensible to reasonable
argument, this simple story, enforced by the renewed plea of the one who
befriended him, turned two or three others in Morgan's favor. They
probably would have set him free if it had not been for the Dutchman,
who joined them, apparently sober and bitterly vindictive, as they were
considering that step.
The Dutchman was for vengeance on his own account, Seth Craddock out of
the consideration entirely. The granger had slugged him, he maintained;
no man that ever walked on the grass was able to lay him out with bare
hands. If they didn't hang the granger he'd shoot him, then and there,
even though he would have to throw ashes on his stinking blood to keep
it from driving everybody out of town.
Wait a minute, the young man with the straddle suggested, speaking
eagerly, as if he had been struck by an inspiration. The freight train
was just pulling out; suppose they put the rope around the granger's
body instead of his neck, leave his hands tied as they were, and hitch
him to a car! In that way he'd hang himself. It would be plain suicide,
as anybody with eyes could see.
The innocence and humor of this sportful proposal appealed to them at
once. It also satisfied the Dutchman, who seconded it loudly, with
excited enthusiasm. The protests of the granger's defender and friend
were unavailing. They pushed him back, even threatening him with their
guns when he would have interfered to stay the execution of this
inspired sentence.
The train was getting under way; three of the gang laid hold of the
_reata_ and ran, dragging Morgan against his best efforts to brace his
feet and hold them, the others pushing him toward the moving train. The
long freight was bound westward. Morgan and his tormenters were beyond
the railroad station, not far from Judge Thayer's little white office
building, which Morgan could see through the gloom as he vainly turned
his eyes about in the hope of some passing stranger to whom he could
appeal.
Luckily for Morgan, railroad trains did not get under way as quickly in
those days of hand brakes and small engines as now. Added to the weight
of the long string of empty cattle cars which the engine was laboring to
get going was a grade, with several short curves to make it harder where
the road wound in and out among small sand hills. By the time Morgan's
captors had attached the rope to the ladder of a car, the headway of the
train had increased until they were obliged to trot to keep up with it.
Not being fleet of foot in their hobbling footgear when sober, they were
at a double disadvantage when drunk and weaving on their legs. They made
no attempt to follow Morgan and revel in his sufferings and peril, but
fell back, content to enjoy their pleasantry at ease.
Morgan lurched on over the uneven ground, still dizzy and weak from the
bludgeoning he had undergone, unable to help his precarious balance by
the use of his arms, doubly bound now by the rope about his middle which
the Texans had drawn in running noose. It was Morgan's hope in the first
few rods of this frightful journey that a brakeman might appear on top
of the train, whose attention he might attract before the speed became
so great he could no longer maintain it, or a lurch or a stumble in the
ditch at the trackside might throw him under the wheels.
A quick glance forward and back dispelled this hope; there was not the
gleam of a lantern in sight. But somebody was running after him, almost
beside him, and there were yells and shots out of the dark behind. Now
the runner was beside Morgan, hand on his shoulder as if to steady
himself, and Morgan's heart swelled with thankful gratitude for the
unknown friend who had thus risked the displeasure of his comrades to
set him free.
The train was picking up speed rapidly, taxing Morgan's strength to hold
pace with it trussed up as he was, the strain of the hauling rope
feeling as if it would cut his arms to the bone. The man who labored to
hold abreast of Morgan was slashing at the rope. Morgan felt the blade
strike it, the tension yield for a second as if several strands had been
cut. But not severed, not weakened enough to break it. It stiffened
again immediately and the man, clinging desperately to Morgan's shoulder
to hold his place in the quickening race, struck at it again and missed.
There came more shots and shouts. Morgan's heroic friend stumbled, lost
his hold on the shoulder of the man he was trying to save, fell behind
out of sight.
Morgan's poor hope for release from present torture and impending death
now rested in the breaking of the rawhide rope where it had been
weakened by that one desperate slash of the knife. He tried lunging back
against the rope, but the speed of the train was too great; he could not
brace a foot, he could not pause. There were gravel and small boulders
in the ditch here. Morgan feared he would lose his footing and be
dragged to his miserable end.
But onward through the dark he struggled and stumbled, at a pace that
would have taxed an unhampered man to maintain, the strain of the
cutting rope about his body and arms like a band of hot iron. Should a
brakeman appear now on top of the car to which he was tied, Morgan knew
he had little chance of making himself heard through the noise of the
train, spent as he was already, gasping short breaths which he seemed
unable to drive into his burning lungs.
How long could human strength and determination to cling to life endure
this punishment! how long until he must fall and drag, unable to regain
his feet, to be pounded at that cruel rope's end into a mangled,
abhorrent thing!
On, the grind of wheels, the jolt of loose-jointed cars over the
clanking track drowning even the noise of the engine laboring up that
merciful grade; on, staggering and swaying, flung like a pebble on a
cord, shoulder now against the car, feet now flying, half lifted from
the ground, among the stones of the ditch, over the uneven earth, across
gullies, over crossings where there paused no traveler in the black
despair of that night to give him the help for which he perished.
On, the breath that he drew in gasping stridulation like liquid fire in
his throat; on, the calm stars of the unemotional universe above his
head; on, the wind of the wide prairie lands striking his face with
their indefinable sweet scents which even clutching death did not deny
his turbulent senses; on, pain in every nerve; on, joints straining and
starting in their sockets; on, dragged, whipped, lashed from ditch to
ties' end, flung from rocking car to crumbling bank, where jagged rocks
cut his face and freed his blood to streak coldly upon his cheek.
There was no likelihood that the train would stop in many miles--even
now it was gaining speed, the engine over the crest of the grade. Only
for a post that he might snub that stubborn strand of leather upon! only
for a bridge where his swinging weight might break it!
Faster--the train was going faster! The pain of his torture dulling as
overcharged nerves refused to carry the growing load, Morgan still clung
to his feet, pounding along in the dark. He was growing numb in body and
mind, as one overwhelmed by a narcotic drug, yet he clung to the
desperate necessity of keeping on his feet.
How far he had come, how long he might yet endure, he had no thought to
measure. He lived only for the insistent, tenacious purpose of keeping
on his feet, rather than of keeping on his feet to live. He must run and
pant, under the lash of nature that would not let him drop down and die,
as long as a spark of consciousness remained or flying limbs could equal
the speed of the train, helped on by the drag of that rawhide strand
that would not break.
No thought of death appalled him now as at first; its revolting terror
at that rope's end had no place in his thought this crowded, surging
moment. Only to live, to fight and live, to run, unfeeling feet striking
like wood upon the wayside stones, and run, as a maimed, scorched
creature before a fire, to fall into some cool place and live. And live!
and live! In spite of all, to live!
And presently the ground fell away beneath his feet, a swish of branches
was about him, the soft, cool touch of leaves against his face. A moment
he was flung and tangled among willows--it was a strange revelation
through a chink of consciousness in that turmoil of life and death that
swept the identifying scent of willows into his nostrils--and then he
dropped, striking softly where water ran, and closed his eyes, thinking
it must be the end.
CHAPTER VIII
THE AVATISM OF A MAN
Morgan knew that the cogs of the slow machinery by which he had been
hoisted from the saddle to the professorial chair had slipped. As he lay
there on his back in the shallow ripple of the Arkansas River, the long
centipede railroad bridge dark-lined across the broad stream, he turned
it in his mind and knew that it was so.
He had gone back in that brief time of terrific torture to the plane
from which he had risen by hard and determined effort to make of himself
a man in the world of consequence and achievement; back to the savagery
of the old days when he rode the range in summer glare and winter storm.
For it was his life's one aim and intention now to rise from that cool
bed in the river presently and go back to Ascalon, try by sound of voice
those who had subjected him to this torture, separating by that test his
heroic friend from the guilty. The others he intended to kill, man by
man, down to the last unfeeling brute.
The water was not more than two or three inches deep where he lay, but a
little way beyond he could hear it passing with greater volume among the
spiles of the bridge. Fortune had spared him a fall into the deeper
channel, where even a foot of water might have drowned him, strengthless
and fettered as he was. Fate had reserved him for this hour of
vengeance. He turned, wallowing in the shallow water to soak the
rawhide rope, which was already growing soft, the pressure and pain of
it considerably eased on his arms.
He drank, and buried his face in the tepid water, grateful for life,
exulting in the fierce fire that rose in him, triumphing already in the
swift atonement he would call on those wretches to make. Back again to
the ethical standard of those old, hard-riding, hard-drinking,
hard-swearing days on the range, the refinements of his education
submerged, and not one regret for the slip.
Morgan did not realize in that moment of surrender to the primitive
desires which clamored within him how badly he was wrenched and mauled.
He tried the rawhide, swelling his bound arms in the hope that the
slipknot would give a little, but was unable to bring pressure enough on
the rope to ease it in the least.
Eager to begin his harvest of revenge before the men from the Nueces
struck south again over the long trail, Morgan determined to start at
once in search of somebody to free him from his bonds. He could not
return to Ascalon in this shameful plight, his ignominy upon him, an
object of derision. There must be somebody living along the river close
at hand who would cut his bonds and give him a plaster to stick over the
wound he could feel drawing and gaping in his cheek.
When it came to getting to his feet, Morgan learned that his desire had
outgrown his strength. A sickness swept him as he struggled to his
knees; blood burst from his nostrils, the taste of blood was on his
tongue. Dizzy, sick to the core of his heart, sore with a thousand
bruises, shot with a thousand pains which set up with every movement
like the clamor of harassing wolves, he dragged himself on his knees to
the edge of the water, where he lay on his face in the warm sand.
He waited there a long time for the gathering of strength enough to
carry him on his quest of a friendly hand. Only the savage determination
to strike his enemies down, head by head, kept him from perishing as he
lay there sore and bruised, chilled to the marrow in his welling agony
even that hot summer night.
Dawn was breaking when he at last found strength to mount the low bank
through the encumbering brush and vines. His arms were senseless below
the elbows, swollen almost to bursting of veins and skin by the gorged
blood. There was no choice in directions, only to avoid the town. He
faced up the river and trudged on, the cottonwood leaves beginning their
everlasting symphony, that is like the murmur of rain, as the wakening
wind moved them overhead.
Morgan stumbled over tin cans at the edge of the tall grass when the
rising sun was shining across his unprotected eyes. He stood for a
little while, wondering at first sight if this were only another mirage
of the plagued imagination, such as had risen like ephemera while he lay
on the sand bar at the river's edge. He stood with weak legs braced wide
apart to fix his reeling senses on the sight--the amazing, comforting
sight, of a field of growing corn. Only a little field, more properly a
patch, but it was tall and green, in full tassel, the delicate sweet of
its blossoms strong on the dew-damp morning.
Beyond the field he could see the roof of a sod house, and a little of
the brown wall that rose not much higher than the corn. Grass had grown
on the roof, for it was made of strips of sod, also, and turned sere and
brown in the sun. A wire fence stood a prickly barrier between roaming
cattle and this little field of succulent fodder. Morgan directed his
course to skirt the field, and came at last to the cabin door.
In front of the house there was no fence, but a dooryard that seemed to
embrace the rest of the earth. Around the door the ground was trampled
and bare; in front of the house three horses stood, saddled and waiting,
bridle reins on the ground. It looked like a cow camp to Morgan; it
seemed as if he had come back home. A dog rose slowly from where it lay
across the door, bristles rising, foot lifted as if the creature paused
between flight and attack, setting up such an alarm that the horses
bolted a little way and stood wondering.
A woman came to the door, lifted her hands in silent astonishment,
leaning a little to see.
"Heavens above! look at that man!" she cried, her words sounding as from
a great distance in Morgan's dulling ears.
Morgan saw her start toward him, running. He tried to step forward to
meet her, but only his body moved in accord with his will. The earth
seemed to rise and embrace him, letting him down softly, as the arms of
a friend.
It was a new pain that brought Morgan to his senses, the pain of
returning life to his half-dead arms. Somebody was standing beside him
holding these members raised to let the blood drain out of them, chafing
them, and there was a smell of camphor and strong spirits in the place.
"The rope wouldn't 'a' slipped _down_, if they was tryin' to hang him,
anyhow," somebody said with conclusive finality.
"Looks like they lassoed him and drug him," another said, full of the
awe that hushes the human voice when one stands beside the dead.
"Whoever done it ought to be skinned alive!" a woman declared, and
Morgan thanked her in his heart for her sympathy, although there was a
weight of such absolute weakness on his eyes that he could not open them
to see her face.
There was a dim sound of something being stirred in a glass, and the
nerve-waking scent of more ardent spirits.
"If this don't fetch him to," said the voice of the first speaker, the
deep pectoral tone of a seasoned man, "you jump your horse and go for
the doctor, Fred."
Morgan shook his head to throw that obstinate weight from his eyes, or
thought he shook it, but it was only the shadow of a movement. Slight as
it was it brought an exclamation of relief in another voice, a woman's
voice, also, tuned in the music of youth.
"Oh! he moved!" she said. And she was the one who stood beside him,
holding aloft and chafing his blood-gorged arm.
"Blamed if he didn't! Here--try a little of this, son."
Morgan was gathering headway out of the fog so rapidly now that he began
to feel ashamed of this helpless situation in which so many kind hands
were ministering to him as if he were a sick horse. He made a more
determined effort to open his eyes, succeeding this time, although it
seemed to call for as much strength to lift his lids as to shoulder a
sack of wheat. He saw a large hand holding a spoon hovering near his
mouth, and the outline of big shoulders in a red shirt. Morgan swallowed
what was offered him, to feel it go tingling through his nerves with
vivifying warmth, like a message of cheer over a telegraph wire. The
large man who administered the dose was delighted. He spoke
encouragingly, working the spoon faster, as a man blows eagerly when he
sees a flame start weakly in a doubtful fire. The woman with the voice
of youth, who stood on Morgan's left hand, gently put his arm down, as
if modesty would no longer countenance this office of tenderness to a
conscious man.
"Any feelin' in your hands?" the man inquired, bending a whiskered face
down near Morgan's.
"Plenty of it, thank you," Morgan replied, his voice stubborn as a rusty
hinge.
"You'll be all right then, there's no bones broken as far as I can
locate 'em. You just stretch out and take it easy, you'll be all right."
"I gave up--I gave up--too easy," Morgan said, slowly, like a very tired
man.
"Lands alive! gave up!" said the matron of the household, who still held
Morgan's arm up to drain off the congested blood. "Look at your face,
look at your feet! Gave up--lands alive!"
"You're busted up purty bad, old feller," said a young man who seemed to
appear suddenly at Morgan's feet, where he stood looking down with the
most friendly and feeling expression imaginable in his wholesome brown
face.
"That cut on your face ain't deep, it could be closed up and stuck with
strips of plaster and only leave a shallow scar, but it ought to be done
while it's fresh," the boss of the ranch said.
"I'd be greatly obliged to you," Morgan told him, by way of agreement to
the dressing of his wound.
By the time the pioneer of the Arkansas had treated his mysteriously
injured patient's hurts, Morgan had come to himself completely. He was
relieved to know that his collapse at the threshold of that hospitable
home was due to the suffering of his bound arms, rather than any
internal rupture or concussion as he at first feared.
Already his thoughts were running forward, his blood was pounding in his
arteries, in vengeful eagerness to take up the trail of the men who had
subjected him to this inhuman ordeal. He could not hope to repay them
cruelty for cruelty, for he was not a man who did much crippling when it
came to handling a gun, but if he had to follow them to the Nueces, even
to the Rio Grande, for his toll, then he would follow.
The business that had brought him into the Kansas plains could wait;
there was but one big purpose in his life now. He was eager to be up,
with the weight of a certain dependable pistol in his holster, the feel
of a certain rifle in its scabbard on the saddle under his knee.
Sore and bruised as he was, sorer that he would be tomorrow, Morgan
wanted to get up as soon as the long rough cut on his cheek had been
comfortably patched with adhesive tape. He asked the rancher if he would
oblige him with a horse to go to Ascalon, where his trunk containing his
much-needed wardrobe was still in the baggage-room at the depot.
"You couldn't ride to Ascalon this morning, son," the rancher told him,
severely kind.
"You'll do if you can make it in a week," the young man added his
opinion cheerfully.
"Yes, and then some, the way it looks to me," the elder declared.
Morgan started as if to spring from the low couch where they had laid
him when they carried him in, dusty and bloody, fearful and repulsive
sight of maimed flesh and torn clothing that he was.
"I can't stay a week--I can't wait a day! They'll be gone, man!" he
said.
"Maybe they will, son," the rancher agreed, gently pushing him back;
"maybe. But they'll leave tracks."
"Yes, by God! they'll leave tracks!" Morgan muttered.
"Don't you think I'd better send my boy over to town for the doctor?"
the rancher asked.
"Not unless you're uneasy about me."
"No, your head's all right and your bones are whole. You'll heal up, but
it'll take some time."
Morgan said he felt that more had been done for him already than any
number of doctors could have accomplished, for the service had been one
of humanity, with no thought of reward. They would let the doctor stay
in Ascalon, and Morgan would go to him if he felt the need coming on.
The rancher disclaimed credit for a service such as one man owed another
the world over, he said. But it was plain that he was touched by the
outspoken gratitude of this wreckage of humanity that had come halting
in bonds to his door.
"I'm a stranger to this country," Morgan explained, "I arrived in
Ascalon yesterday--" pausing to ponder it, thinking it must have been
longer than a day ago--"yesterday"--with conviction, "a little after
noon. Morgan is my name. I came here to settle on land."
"You're the man that took the new marshal's gun away from him," the
rancher said, nodding slowly. "My daughter knew you the minute she saw
you--she was over there yesterday after the mail."
Morgan's heart jumped. He looked about the room for her, but she and her
mother had withdrawn.
"I guess I made a mistake when I mixed up with him," Morgan said, as if
he excused himself to the absent girl.
"The only mistake you made was when you handed him back his gun. You
ought to 'a' handed it back to a corpse," the rancher said.
"We knew that feller he killed," the younger man explained, with a world
of significance in his voice.
"He used to live up here in this country before he went to Abilene; he'd
come back to blow his money in Ascalon, I guess," the rancher said. "He
was one of them harmless bluffin' boys you could take by the ear and
lead around like he had a ring in his nose."
"That's what I told them," Morgan commented, in thoughtful, distracted
way.
"You sized him up right. He wouldn't 'a' pulled his gun, quick as he was
to slap his hand on it and run a sandy. I guess it was just as well it
happened to him then as some other time. Somebody was bound to kill him
when he got away among strangers."
The rancher, who introduced himself as Stilwell, asked for the details
of the killing, which Morgan gave, together with the trivial thing that
led up to it. The big rancher sighed, shaking his head sadly.
"You ought to took his gun away from him and bent it around his fool
head," he said.
"It would have been better for him, and for me, I guess," Morgan agreed.
"Yes, that marshal was purty sore on you for takin' his gun away from
him right out in public, it looks like," the rancher suggested, a bid in
his manner for the details of his misfortune which Morgan felt were his
by right of hospitality.
"I ran into some of his friends later on. He'd turned the town over to
them, a bunch of cowpunchers just up from the Nueces."
The rancher started at the word, exchanging a startled, meaning look
with his son.
"That outfit that loaded over at Ascalon yesterday?" he inquired.
"Yes; seven or eight of them stayed behind to look after the
horses--eight with the marshal, he's one of the outfit."
"Did them fellers rope you and drag you away out here?" Stilwell
inquired, leaning over in the tensity of his feeling, his tanned face
growing pale, as if the thought of such atrocity turned his blood cold.
"They hitched me to a freight train. The rope broke at the river."
The rancher turned to his son again, making a motion with open hand
outflung as if displaying evidence in some controversy between them that
clinched it on his side without another word. The younger man came a
step nearer Morgan's couch, where he stood with grave face, hesitant, as
if something came forward in his mind to speak. The elder strode to the
door and looked out into the sun of early morning, and the cool shadows
of the cottonwood trees at the riverside which reached almost to his
walls.
"To a train! God A'mighty--to a train!" Morgan heard him say.
"How far is it from Ascalon to the river?" Morgan asked.
"Over two miles! And your hands tied--God A'mighty!"
"You take it easy, they'll not leave Ascalon till Sol Drumm, their boss,
comes back from Kansas City," the young man said. "We're layin' for him
ourselves, we've got a bill against him."
"And we've got about as much show to collect it as we have to dip a
hatful of stars out of the river," Stilwell said, turning gloomily from
the door.
"We'll see about that!" the younger one returned, in high and defiant
stubbornness.
"We've already lost upwards of five hundred head of stock from that
feller's trespass on our range," Stilwell explained. "That gang drove in
here three weeks ago to rest and feed up for market, payin' no attention
to anybody's range or anybody's warning to keep off. They had the men
with them to go where they pleased. Them Texas cattle come up here
loaded with fever ticks, and the bite of them little bugs means death to
a northern herd. They sowed ticks all over my range. I'm still a losin'
cattle, and Lord knows where it will stop."
"You've been working to get a quarantine law passed, I remember," Morgan
said, feeling this outrage as if the cattle were his own.
"Yes, but Congress is asleep, and them fellers down in Texas never shut
their eyes. I warned Drumm to keep off my range, asked him first like a
gentleman, but he drove in one night between my pickets and mixed his
poison cattle with mine out of pure cussidness. He claimed they got
away, and him with fifteen or twenty men to ride herd! It's cost me ten
thousand dollars, at the lowest figure, already, and more goin'. It
looks like it would clean me out."
"You ought to have some recourse against him in law," Morgan said.
"Yes, I thought so, too. I went to the county attorney and wanted to
bring an attachment on Drumm's herd, but he told me there wasn't any law
he could act under, it was anybody's range as much as mine, Texas fever
or no Texas fever. I could sue him, he said, but it was a slim chance.
Well, I'm goin' to see another lawyer--I'll take it up with Judge
Thayer, and see what he can do."
"Drumm'll pay it, down to the last dime!" the young man declared.
"We can't hold him up and take it away from him, Fred," the older man
reproved. "That would be as big a crime as his."
"He'll pay it!" Fred repeated, with what Morgan thought to be admirable
tenacity, even though his means to the desired end might be hard to
justify.
They helped Morgan to another room, where they outfitted him with
clothing to replace his own shredded garments. Stilwell insisted that he
remain as his guest until his hurts were mended, although, he explained,
he could not stay at home to keep him company. His wife and daughter
would talk his arm off without help from the rest of the family. He
would call them in and introduce them.
"My girl's got a new piano--lucky I sent for it before that Texas outfit
struck this range--she can try it out on you," Stilwell said, a laugh
still left in him for an amusing situation in spite of the ruin he
faced.
Morgan could hear the girl and her mother talking in the kitchen, their
voices quite distinct at times as they passed an open door that he could
not see. Lame and aching, hands swollen and purple, he sat in a
rocking-chair by the open window, not so broken by his experiences nor
so depressed by his pains but he yet had the pleasure of anticipation in
meeting this girl. He had determined only a few hours ago that the
country was not big enough to hide her from him. Now Fate had jerked
him with rough hand to the end of his quest before it was fairly begun.
As he thought this, Stilwell came back, convoying his ample red-faced
wife, and almost as ample, and quite as red-faced, daughter. So, there
must have been more than one young lady after mail in Ascalon yesterday
afternoon, thought Morgan, as he got up ruefully, with much pain in his
feet and ankles, rather shamed and taken back, and bowed the best way he
could to this girl who was not _his_ girl, after all his eager
anticipation.
CHAPTER IX
NEWS FROM ASCALON
"Down here in the river bottom, where the water rises close to the top
of the ground, you can raise a little corn and stuff, but take it back
on the prairie a little way and you can't make your seed back, year in
and year out. Plenty of them have come here from the East and tried
it--I suppose you must 'a' seen the traces of them scattered around as
you come through the country east of Ascalon."
Morgan admitted that he had seen such traces, melancholy records of
failure that they were.
"It's all over this country the same way. It broke 'em as fast as they
came, starved 'em and took the heart out of 'em and drove 'em away. You
can't farm this country, Morgan; no man ever learnt anything out of
books that will make him master of these plains with a plow."
So spoke Stilwell, the cattleman, sitting at night before his long, low,
L-shaped sod house with his guest who had been dragged into his
hospitality at the end of a rope. Eight days Morgan had been sequestered
in that primitive home, which had many comforts in spite of the crudity
of its exterior. His soreness had passed from the green and
superficially painful stage to the deeper ache of bruised bones. He
walked with a limp, stiff and stoved in his joints as a foundered horse.
But his hands and arms had recovered their suppleness, and, like an
overgrown fledgling at the edge of the nest, he was thinking of
projecting a flight.
During the time Morgan had been in the Stilwell ranchhouse no news had
come to him from Ascalon. Close as they lived to the town, the Stilwells
had been too deeply taken up with their own problem of pending ruin due
to the loss of their herd from Texas fever infection, to make a trip
even to the post-office for their mail. Violet, the daughter, was on the
range more than half the time, doing what she could to drive the sick
cattle to the river where they might have a better chance to fight the
dread malady.
Morgan's injuries had turned out to be deeper seated and more serious
than he had at first supposed. For several days he was racked with a
fever that threatened to floor him, due to the mental torture of that
terrible night. It had passed, and with it much of his pain, and he
would have gone to Ascalon for his reckoning with the men from the
Nueces two days ago if Stilwell had not argued the folly of attempting
an adjustment under the handicap of his injuries.
Wait a few days longer, the rancher sagely advised, eat and rest, and
rub that good fiery horse liniment of his on the sore spots and swollen
joints. Even if they were gone, which Stilwell knew would not be the
case for Drumm would not have made it back from Kansas City yet, Morgan
could follow them. And to do that he must be sound and strong.
Stilwell had put off even his own case against the Texas stockman, he
had been so urged for time in getting his sick cattle down to the shade
and water along the river. Now the job seemed over, for all he could
do, and was taking his ease at home this night, intending to go early in
the morning and put his case for damages against Drumm into Judge
Thayer's hands.
Through Morgan's days of sickness and waiting for strength, he was
attended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, when
Violet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on her
new piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason to
expect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of the shallow
Arkansas.
Violet was a girl of large frame, large bones in her wrists, large
fingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhat
too long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by a
wistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizon
of her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two men
talked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of the
trampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple melody with a
soft, expressive tenderness as sweet to him as any music Morgan ever had
heard. For he understood that the instrument was the medium of
expression for this prairie girl's soul, reaching out from its shelter
of sod laid upon sod to what aspirations, following what longings,
mounting to what ambitions, none in her daily contact ever knew.
Stilwell was downcast by the blow he had received in the loss of more
than half his herd through the Texas scourge. It had taken years of
hardship and striving, fighting drouth and winter storm, preying wolves
and preying men, to build the herd up to the point where profits were
about ready to be enjoyed.
Nothing but a frost would put an end to the scourge of Texas fever; in
those days no other remedy had been discovered. Before nature could send
this relief Stilwell feared the rest of his cattle would die, although
he had driven them from the contaminated range. If that happened he
would be wiped out, for he was too old, he said, to start at the bottom
and build up another herd.
It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soil
instead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called down
the cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage that
country had made of men's hopes. He dismissed that subject very soon as
one unworthy of even acrimonious debate or further denunciation, to
dwell on his losses and the bleakness of the future as it presented
itself through the bones of his dead cattle.
As they sat talking, the soft notes of Violet's melody soothing to the
ears as a distant song, the young man Fred came riding in from Ascalon,
the bearer of news. He began to talk before he struck the ground,
breathlessly, like a man who had beheld unbelievable things.
"That gang from Texas has took the town--everybody's hidin' out," he
reported.
"Took the town?" said Stilwell, incredulously.
"Stores all shut up, post-office locked and old man Flower settin' in
the upstairs winder with his Winchester across his leg waitin' for them
to bust in the door and steal the gover'ment money!"
"Listen to that!" said Stilwell, as the young man stood there hat off,
mopping the sweat of excitement from his forehead. "Where's that
man-eatin' marshal feller at?"
"He's killin' off everybody in town but his friends--he's killed eight
men, a man a day, since he's been in office. He's got everybody lookin'
for a hole."
"A man a day!" said Morgan, scarcely able to believe the news.
"Who was they?" Stilwell inquired, bringing his chair down from its easy
slant against the sod wall, leaning forward to catch the particulars of
this unequaled record of slaughter.
"I didn't hear," said Fred, panting faster than his hard-ridden horse.
"I hope none of the boys off of this range around here got into it with
him," Stilwell said.
"They say he's closed up all the gamblin' joints and saloons but
Peden's, and the bank's been shut four or five days, Judge Thayer and a
bunch of fellers inside of it with rifles. Tom Conboy told me the judge
had telegraphed to the governor asking him to send soldiers to restore
law and order in the town."
"Law and order!" Stilwell scorned. "All the law and order they ever had
in that hell-hole a man'd never miss."
"Where's the sheriff--what's he doing to restore order?" Morgan
inquired.
"The sheriff ain't doin' nothing. I ain't been over there, but I know
that much," Stilwell said.
"They say he's out after some rustlers," Fred replied.
"Yes, and he'll stay out till the trouble's over and come back without a
hide or hair of a rustler. What else are they doin'?"
"Rairin' and shootin'," said Fred, winded by the enormity of this
outlawry, even though bred in an atmosphere of violence.
"Are they hittin' anybody, or just shootin' for noise?" Stilwell asked.
"Well, I know they took a crack at me when I went out of Conboy's to git
my horse."
Mrs. Stilwell and Violet, who had hastened out on Fred's excited
arrival, exclaimed in concern at this, the mother going to her boy to
feel him over as for wounds, standing by him a little while with arm
around him.
"Did you shoot back?" Stilwell wanted to know.
"I hope I did," Fred replied.
Stilwell got up, and stood looking at the moon a little while as if
calculating the time of night.
"They need a man or two over there to clean that gang up," he said.
"Well, it ain't my business to do it, as long as they didn't hit you."
Mrs. Stilwell chided him sharply, perhaps having history behind her to
justify her alarm at these symptoms.
"Let them fight it out among themselves, the wolves!" she said.
Morgan had drawn a little apart from the family group, walking to the
corner of the house where he stood looking off toward Ascalon, still and
tense as if he listened for the sounds of conflict. He was dressed in
Stilwell's clothes, which were somewhat too roomy of body but nothing
too large otherwise, for both of them had the stature of proper men.
His feet were in slippers, his ankles bandaged and soaked with the
penetrating liniment designed alike for the ailments of man and beast.
Violet studied him as he stood there between her and the moon, his face
sterner for the ordeal of suffering that had tried his manhood in that
two-mile run beside the train, where nothing but a sublime defiance of
death had held him to his feet.
He had told her of his seven-years' struggle upward from the cowboy's
saddle to a place of honor in the faculty of the institution where he
had beaten out the hard, slow path to learning; she knew of his purpose
in coming to the western Kansas plains. Until this moment she had
believed it to be a misleading and destructive illusion that would break
his heart and rive his soul, as it had the hearts and souls of thousands
of brave men and women before him.
Now she had a new revelation, the moonlight on his face, bright in his
fair hair, picturing him as rugged as a rock uplifted against the dim
sky. She knew him then for a man such as she never had met in the narrow
circle of her life before, a man strong to live in his purpose and
strong to die in it if the need might be. He would conquer where others
had failed; the strength of his soul was written in his earnest face.
"I think I'll go over to Ascalon," Morgan said presently, turning to
them, speaking slowly. "Will you let me have a horse?"
"Go to Ascalon! Lands save us!" Mrs. Stilwell exclaimed.
"No, no--not tonight!" Violet protested, hurrying forward as if she
would stay him by force.
"You wait till morning, son," Stilwell counseled calmly, so calmly,
indeed, that his wife turned to him sharply. "Maybe I'll go with you in
the morning."
"You've got no business there--let them kill each other off if they want
to, but you keep out of it!" said his wife.
"If you'll let me have a horse--" Morgan began again, with the
insistence of a man unmoved.
"You forgot about our cattle, Mother," Stilwell chided, ignoring
Morgan's request. "I'm goin' to sue Sol Drumm, I'm goin' to have the
papers ready to serve on him the minute he steps off of the train. If
there's any way to make him pay for the damage he's done me I'm goin' to
do it."
"There's more than one way," said Fred. "If the law can't----"
"Then we lose," his father finished for him, in the calm resignation of
a just man.
Morgan's intention of going to Ascalon to square accounts with his
persecutors as soon as he had the strength to warrant such a move was no
secret in the Stilwell family. Fred had offered his services at the
beginning, and the one cowboy now left out of the five but recently
employed by Stilwell had laid his pistol on the table and told Morgan
that he was the man who went with it, both of them at his service when
the hour of reckoning should arrive. Now Stilwell himself was beginning
to show the pistol itch in his palm.
Morgan was grateful for all this uprising on the part of his new
friends in his behalf, to whom his suffering and the cruelty of his
ordeal appealed strongly for sympathy, but he could not accept any
assistance at their hands. There could be no satisfaction in justice
applied by any hand but his own. If otherwise, he might as well go to
the county attorney, lodge complaints, obtain warrants and send his
enemies to jail.
No, it was a case for personal attention; it was a one-man job. What
they were to suffer for their great wrong against him, he must inflict
with his own weapon, like the savage Comanche whose camp fires were
scarcely cold in that place.
So Morgan spoke again of going that night to Ascalon, only to be set
upon by all of them and argued into submission. Eager as Fred was to go
along and have a hand in the fray, he was against going that night.
Violet came and laid her good wholesome, sympathetic hand on Morgan's
arm and looked into his face with a plea in her eyes that was stronger
than words. He couldn't bear his feet in the stirrups with his ankles
all swollen and sore as they were, she said; wait a day or two--wait a
week. What did it matter if they should leave in the meantime, and go
back down the wild trail to Texas? So much the better; let them go.
Morgan smiled to hear her say it would be better if they should get
away, for she was one of the forgiving of this world, in whose breast
the fire of vengeance would find no fuel to nurse its hot spark and
burst into raging flame. He yielded to their entreaties and reasoning,
agreeing to defer his expedition against his enemies until morning, but
not an hour longer.
When the others had gone to bed, Morgan went down to the river through
the broad notch in the low bank where the Santa Fé Trail used to cross.
This old road was brush-grown now, with only a dusty path winding along
it where the cattle passed to drink. The hoof-cut soil was warm and soft
to his bruised feet; the bitter scent of the willows was strong on the
cooling night as he brushed among them. Out across the broad golden bars
he went, seeking the shallow ripple to which the stream shrunk in the
summer days between rains, sitting by it when he came to it at last,
bathing his feet in the tepid water.
There he sat for the cure of the water on his bruised, fevered joints,
raking the fire of his hatred together until it grew and leaped within
him like a tempest. As the Indian warrior watches the night out with
song of defiance and dance of death to inflame him to his grim purpose
of the dawn, so this man fallen from the ways of gentleness into the
abyss of savagery spurred himself to a grim and terrible frenzy by
visiting his wrath in anticipation upon his enemies.
Unworthy as they were, obscure and trivial; riotous, ignorant, bestial
in their lives, he would lower himself to their level for one blood-red
hour to carry to them a punishment more terrible than the noose. As from
the dead he would rise up to strike them with terror. In the morning,
when the sun was striking long shadows of shrub and bunched bluestem
over the prairie levels; in the morning, when the wind was as weak as a
young fawn.
CHAPTER X
THE HOUR OF VENGEANCE
The proscribed of the earth were sleeping late in Ascalon that morning,
as they slept late every morning, bright or cloudy, head-heavy with the
late watch and debaucheries of the night. Few were on the street in
pursuit of the small amount of legitimate business the town transacted
during the burning hours when the moles of the night lay housed in
gloom, when Morgan walked from the baggage-room of the railroad depot.
Few who saw Morgan on the day of his arrival in Ascalon would have
recognized him now. He had been obliged to go to the bottom of his trunk
for the outfit that he treasured out of sentiment for the old days
rather than in any expectation of needing it again--the rig he had worn
into the college town, a matter of six hundred miles from his range, to
begin a new life. Now he had fallen from the eminence. He was going back
to the old.
The gray wool shirt was wrinkled and stained by weather and wear, the
roomy corduroy trousers were worn from saddle chafing, the big spurs
were rusted of rowel and shank. But the boots were new--he had bought
them before leaving the range, to wear in college, laying them aside
with regret when he found them not just the thing in vogue--and they
were still brave in glossy bronze of quilted tops, little marred by
that last long ride out of his far-away past. His cream-colored hat was
battered and old, for he had worn it five years in all weather, crushed
from the pressure of packing, but he pinched the tall crown to a point
as he used to wear it, and turned the broad brim back from his forehead
according to the habit of his former days.
This had been his gala costume in other times, kept in the bunkhouse at
the ranch for days of fiesta, nights of dancing, and wild dissipation
when he rode with his fellows to the three-days' distant town. His old
pistol was in his holster, and his empty cartridge belt about his
middle, the rifle, in saddle holster, that he used to carry for wolves
and rustlers, in his hand.
Morgan stood a moment, leaning the rifle against the depot end, to take
the bright silk handkerchief from about his neck, as if he considered it
as being too festive for the somber business before him. The station
agent stood at the corner of the building, watching him curiously.
The horse that Morgan had borrowed from Stilwell lifted its head with a
start as he approached where it stood at the side of the station
platform, as if it questioned him on the reason for this transformation
and the honesty of his purpose. Morgan did not mount the horse, although
he walked with difficulty in the tight boots which had lain like the
shed habits of his past so many years unstretched by a foot. He went
leading the horse, rein over his arm, to the hitching rack in front of
the hotel, under the plank canopy of which Stilwell and his son waited
his coming.
Stilwell had made it plain to Morgan at the beginning, to save his
feelings and his pride, that they were not attending him on the
expedition against his enemies with any intention of helping him. Just
to be there in case of outside interference, and to enjoy the spectacle
of justice being done by a strong hand. Stilwell's account, personally,
was not against these men, he said, although they had driven their herd
upon his range and spread infection among his cattle. That would be
taken up with Sol Drumm when he came back from Kansas City with the
money from his cattle sale.
Morgan went to the hardware store, two doors from the hotel, from which
he presently emerged with a coil of new rope, a row of new cartridges in
his belt, and pockets heavy with a reserve supply. Tom Conboy was
standing in his door, looking up and down the street in the manner of a
man who felt his position insecure. Morgan saw that he was haggard and
worn as from long vigils and anxieties, although he had about him still
an air of assurance and self-sufficiency. Morgan passed him in the door
and entered the office unrecognized, although Conboy searched him with a
disfavoring and suspicious eye.
In the office there was evidence of conflict and turmoil. The showcase
was broken, the large iron safe lay overturned on the floor. The blue
door leading into the dining-room had been burst from its hinges, its
panels cracked, and now stood in the office leaning against the
partition like a champion against the ropes. Conboy turned from his
watch at the street door with reluctance, to see what the visitor
desired, and at the same moment Dora appeared in the doorless frame
within.
"Mr. Morgan!" she cried, incredulity, surprise, pleasure, mingled in her
voice.
She paused a moment, eyes round, hands lifted, her pretty mouth agape,
but came on again almost at once, eagerness brushing all other emotions
out of her face. "Wherever in the world have you been? What in the name
of goodness is the matter with your face?" She turned Morgan a little to
let the light fall on his wound.
Grim as Morgan's business was that morning, bitter as his savage heart,
he had a nook in his soul for sympathetic Dora, and a smile that came so
hard and vanished so quickly that it seemed it must have hurt him in the
giving more than the breaking of a bone.
"_Mister_ Morgan!" said Dora, hardly a breath between her last word and
the next, "what_ever_ have you been doin' to your face?"
"No niggers in Ireland, now--no-o-o niggers in Ireland!" Conboy warned
her, coming forward with no less interest than his daughter's to peer
into Morgan's bruised and marred face. "Well, well!"--with much surprise
altogether genuine, "you're back again, Mr. Morgan?"
"Wherever _have_ you been?" Dora persisted, no more interested in
niggers in Ireland than elsewhere.
"I fell among thieves," Morgan told her, gravely. Then to Conboy: "Is
that gang from Texas stopping here?"
"No, they lay up at Peden's on the floor where they happen to fall,"
Conboy replied. "If there ever was a curse turned loose on a town that
gang--look at that showcase, look at that door, look at that safe. They
took the town last night, a decent woman didn't dare to show her face
outside the door and wasn't safe in the house. They tried to blow that
safe with powder when I wouldn't open it and give them the money. But
they didn't even jar it--your money's in there, Mr. Morgan, safe."
"Oh, it was awful!" said Dora. "Oh, you've got your gun! If some
man----"
"Sh-h-h! No nig----"
"Where's the marshal?" Morgan asked.
"Took the train east last night. The operator told me he got a wire from
Sol Drumm, boss of the outfit, to meet him in Abilene today. He swore
them six ruffians in as deputies before he went and left them in charge
of the town."
"Six? Where's the other one?"
Conboy looked at him with quick flashing of his shifty eyes. "Don't you
know?" he asked, with significant shrewdness, smiling a little as if to
show his friendly appreciation of the joke.
"What in the hell do you mean?" Morgan demanded.
"No niggers in Ireland, now," Conboy said soothingly, his face growing
white. "One of them was killed down by the railroad track the night you
left. They said you shot him and hopped a freight."
Morgan said no more, but turned toward the door to leave.
"The inquest hasn't been held over him yet, we've been kept so busy with
the marshal's cases we didn't get around to him," Conboy explained.
"Maybe you can throw some light on that case?"
"I can throw a lot of it," Morgan said, and walked out with that word to
where he had left his horse.
There Morgan cut six lengths from his new rope, drawing the pieces
through his belt in the manner of a man carrying string for sewing grain
sacks. He took the rifle from the saddle, filled its magazine, and
started toward Peden's place, which was on the next corner beyond the
hotel, on the same side of the square. When he had gone a few rods,
halting on his lame feet, alert as a hunter who expects the game to
break from cover, Stilwell and Fred got up from their apparently
disinterested lounging in front of the hotel and followed leisurely
after him.
Many of the little business houses around the square were closed. There
was a litter of glass on the plank sidewalk, where proprietors stood
gloomily looking at broken windows, or were setting about replacing them
with boards after the hurricane of deviltry that swept the town the
night past. Those who were abroad in the sunlight of early morning
making their purchases for the day, moved with trepidation, putting
their feet down quietly, hastening on their way.
An old man who walked ahead of Morgan appeared to be the only unshaken
and unconcerned person in this place of sleeping passions. He carried a
thick hickory stick with immense crook, which he pegged down in time to
his short steps, relying on it for support not at all, his lean old jaw
chopping his cud as nimbly as a sheep's. But when Morgan's shadow,
stretching far ahead, fell beside him, he started like a dozing horse,
whirled about with stick upraised, and stood so in attitude of menace
and defense until the stranger had passed on.
Conboy was alert in his door, watching to see what new nest of trouble
Morgan was about to stir with that threatening rifle. Others seemed to
feel the threat that stalked with this grim man. Life quickened in the
somnolent town as to the sound of a fire bell as he passed; people stood
watching after him; came to doors and windows to lean and look. A few
moments after his passing the street behind him became almost magically
alive, although it was a silent, expectant, fearful interest that
communicated itself in whispers and low breath.
Who was this stranger with the mark of conflict on his face, this
unusual weapon in the brawls and tragedies of Ascalon held ready in his
hands? What grievance had he? what authority? Was he the bringer of
peace in the name of the law that had been so long degraded and defied,
or only another gambler in the lives of men? They waited, whispering, in
silence as of a deserted city, to see and hear.
There was only one priest of alcohol attending the long altar where men
sacrificed their manhood in Peden's deserted hall that morning. He was
quite sufficient for all the demands of the hour, his only customers
being the unprofitable gang of cattle herders whom Morgan sought. True
to their training in early rising, no matter what the stress of the
night past, no matter how broken by alarm and storm, they were all
awake, like sailors called to their watch. They were improving while it
might last the delegated authority of Seth Craddock, which opened the
treasures of a thousand bottles at a word.
The gambling tables in the front of the house were covered with black
cloths, which draped them almost to the floor, like palls of the dead.
Down at the farther end of the long hall a man was sweeping up the
débris of the night, his steps echoing in the silence of the place. For
there was no hilarity in the sodden crew lined up at the bar for the
first drink of the day. They were red-eyed, crumpled, dirty; frowsled of
hair as they had risen from the floor.
Peden's hall was not designed for the traffic of daylight. There was
gloom among its bare girders, shadows lay along its walls. Only through
the open door came in a broad and healthy band of light, which spread as
it reached and faltered as it groped, spending itself a little way
beyond the place where the lone bartender served his profitless
customers.
Morgan walked into the place down this path of light unnoticed by the
men at the bar or the one who served them, for they were wrangling with
him over some demand that he seemed reluctant to supply. At the end of
the bar, not a rod separating them, Morgan stopped like a casual
customer, waiting his moment.
The question between bartender and the gang quartered upon the town was
one of champagne. It was no drink, said the bartender, to lay the
foundation of a day's business with the bottle upon. Whisky was the
article to put inside a man's skin at that hour of the morning, and then
in small shots, not too often. They deferred to his experience,
accepting whisky. As they lined up with breastbones against the bar to
pour down the charge, Morgan threw his rifle down on them.
No chance to drop a hand to a gun standing shoulder to shoulder with
gizzards pressed against the bar; no chance to swerve or duck and make a
quick sling of it and a quicker shot, with the bore of that big rifle
ready to cough sixteen chunks of lead in half as many seconds, any one
of them hitting hard enough to drill through them, man by man, down to
the last head in the line. So their arms went up and strained high above
their heads, as if eager to show their desire to comply without
reservation to the unspoken command. Morgan had not said a word.
The bartender, accepting the situation as generally inclusive, put his
hands up along with his deadbeat patrons. And there they stood one
straining moment, the man with the broom down in the gloom of the
farther end of the building, unconscious of what was going on, whistling
as he swept among the peanut hulls.
Morgan signaled with his head for the bartender to come over the
barrier, which he did, with alacrity, and stood at the farther end of
the line, hands up, a raw-fisted, hollow-faced Irishman with bristling
short hair. Morgan jerked his head again, repeating the signal when the
bartender looked in puzzled fright into his face to read the meaning.
Then the fellow got it, and came forward, a vast relief spreading in his
combative features.
Morgan indicated the rope ends dangling at his belt. Almost beaming,
quite triumphant in his eagerness, the bartender grasped his meaning at
a glance. He began tying the ruffians' hands behind their backs, and
tying them well, with a zest in his work that increased as he traveled
down the line.
"Champagne, is it?" said he, mocking them, a big foot in the small of
the victim's back as he pulled so hard it made him squeal. "Nothing
short of champoggany wather will suit the taste av ye this fine marin',
and you with a thousand dollars' wort' of goods swilled into your
paunches the past week! I'll give you a dose of champoggany wather
you'll not soon forget, ye strivin' devils! This sheriff is the man
that'll hang ye for your murthers and crimes, ye bastes!" And with each
expletive a kick, but not administered in any case until he had turned
his head with sly caution to see whether it would be permitted by this
silent avenger who had come to Ascalon in the hour of its darkest need.
While Morgan's captives cursed him, knowing now who he was, and cursed
the bartender whom they had overriden and mocked, insulted and abused in
the security of their collective strength and notorious deeds, the
shadow of two men fell across the threshold of Peden's door. There the
shadows lay through the brief moments of this little drama's enactment,
immovable, as though cast by men who watched.
The porter came forward from his sweeping to look on this degradation of
the desperados, mocking them, returning them curse for curse, voluble in
picturesque combinations of damning sentences as if he had practiced
excommunication longer than the oldest pope who ever lived. In the
excess of his scorn for their fallen might he smeared his filthy broom
across their faces, paying back insult for insult, bold and secure under
the protection of this stern eagle of a man who had dropped on Ascalon
as from a cloud.
When the last man was bound, the last kick applied by the bartender's
great, square-toed foot, Morgan motioned his sullen captives toward the
door.
"Wait a minute--have something on the house," the bartender urged.
Morgan lifted his hand in gesture at once silencing and denying, and
marched out after the heroes of the Chisholm Trail. Through it all he
had not spoken.
They cursed Morgan as he drove them into the street, and surged against
their bonds, the only silent one among them the Dutchman, and the only
sober one. Now and then Morgan saw his face as the others bunched and
shifted in their struggles to break loose, his mocking, sneering, pasty
white face, his wide-set teeth small and white as a young pup's. His
eyes were hateful as a rattlesnake's; lecherous eyes, debased.
Morgan herded them into the public square beyond the line of hitching
racks which stood like a skeleton fence between courthouse and business
buildings. People came pouring from every house to see, hurrying,
crowding, talking in hushed voices, wondering in a hundred conjectures
what this man was going to do. Gamblers and nighthawks, roused by the
very feeling of something unusual, hastened out half dressed, to stand
in slippers and collarless shirts, looking on in silent speculation.
Citizens, respectable and otherwise, who had suffered loss and
humiliation, danger and terror at the hands of these men, exulted now in
their downfall. Some said this man was a sheriff from Texas, who had
tracked them to Ascalon and was now taking them to jail to await a
train; some said he was a special government officer, others that the
governor had sent him in place of troops, knowing him to be sufficient
in himself. Boys ran along in open-mouthed admiration, pattering their
bare feet in the thick dust, as Morgan drove his captives down the
inside of the hitching racks; the outpouring of citizens, parasites,
outcasts of the earth, swept after in a growing stream.
From all sides they came to witness this great adventure, unusual for
Ascalon in that the guilty had been humbled and the arrogant brought
low. Across the square they came running, on the courthouse steps they
stood. In front of the hotel there was a crowd, which moved forward to
meet Morgan as he came marching like an avenger behind his captives, who
were now beginning to show alarm, sobered by their unexampled situation,
sweating in the agony of their quaking hearts.
At the hitching rack where his horse stood, Morgan halted the six men.
He took the remainder of his new rope from the saddle, laced it through
the bonds on the Texans' wrists, backed them up to the horizontal pole
of the hitching rack, and tied them there in a line, facing inward upon
the square. As he moved about his business with deliberate, yet swift
and sure hand of vengeance well plotted in advance, Morgan kept his
rifle leaning near, watching the crowd for any outbreak of friends who
might rise in defense of these men, or any movement that might threaten
interference with his plans.
When he had finished binding the six men, backs to the rack, Morgan
beckoned a group of boys to him, spoke to them in undertone that even
the nearest in the crowd did not hear. Off the youngsters ran, so full
of the importance of their part in that great event that they would not
stay to be questioned nor halt for the briefest word.
In a little while the lads came hurrying back, with empty goods boxes
and barrels, fragments of packing cases, all sorts of dry wood to which
they could lay their eager hands. This they piled where Morgan
indicated, to stand by panting, eyes big in excitement and wondering
admiration for this mighty man.
Mrs. Conboy, standing at the edge of the sidewalk before her door, not
more than ten yards from the spot where Morgan was making these
unaccountable preparations, leaned with a new horror in her fear-haunted
eyes to see.
"My God! he's goin' to burn them!" she said. "Oh, my God!"
CHAPTER XI
THE PENALTY
Whatever the stranger's intention toward the rough riders of the
Chisholm Trail who had terrorized good and bad alike in Ascalon for a
week, whether to roast them alive as they stood in a row with backs to
the hitching rack, or to inflict some other equally terrible punishment;
or whether he was simply staking them there while he cooked his
breakfast cowboy fashion, not willing to trust them out of sight while
he regaled himself in a restaurant, nobody quite understood. Mrs.
Conboy's exclamation appeared to voice the general belief of the crowd.
Murmurs of disapproval began to rise.
One of the leading moralists of the town, proprietor of a
knock-down-and-drag-out, was loudest in his protestations that such a
happening in the public square of Ascalon, in the broad light of day,
the assembled inhabitants looking on, would give the place a name from
which it never would recover. This fellow, a gross man of swinging
paunch, a goitre enlarging and disfiguring his naturally thick, ugly
neck, had scrambled from his bed in haste at the thrilling of the
general alarm of something unusual in the daylight annals of the town.
His bare feet were thrust into slippers, his great white shirt was
collarless, dainty narrow blue silk suspenders held up his
hogshead-measure pantaloons. The redness of unfinished sleep was in his
eyes.
"I tell you, men, this ain't a goin' to do--this ain't no town down
south where they take niggers out and burn 'em," he said. "I ain't got
no use for that gang, myself, but I've got the good of the town and my
business to consider, like all the rest of you have."
There must have been in town that day forty or more cowboys from Texas
and the Nation, as the Cherokee country south was called. These for the
greater part were still sober, not having been paid off, still on duty
caring for the horses left behind them when the cattle were loaded and
shipped, or for the herds resting and grazing close by after the long
drive. They began to gather curiously around the fat man who had the
fair repute of Ascalon so close to his heart, listening to his efforts
to set a current of resentment against the stranger stirring in the awed
crowd. They began to turn toward Morgan now, with close talk among
themselves, regarding him yet as something more than a common man, not
keen to spring into somebody else's trouble and get their fingers
scorched.
"What's he going to do with them?" one of these inquired.
"Burn 'em," the fat man replied, as readily as if he had it from
Morgan's own mouth, and as strongly denunciatory as though the disgrace
of it reached to his fair fame and good business already. "You boys
ain't goin' to stand around here and see men from your own country burnt
like niggers, are you? Well, you don't look like a bunch that'd do
it--you don't look like it to me."
"What did they do to him?" one of the cowboys asked, not greatly fired
by the fat man's sectional appeal.
Stilwell came loitering among them at that point, a man of their own
calling, sympathies, and traditions, with the shoulder-lurching gait of
a man who had spent most of his years in the saddle. He told them in a
few feeling, picturesque words the extent of Morgan's grievance against
the six, and left it with them to say whether he was to be interfered
with in his exaction of a just and fitting payment.
"I don't know what he's goin' to do," Stilwell said, "but if he wants to
roast 'em and eat 'em"--looking about him with stern eyes--"this is his
day."
"If he needs any help there's plenty of it here," said a cowboy from the
Nation, hooking his thumb with lazy but expressive movement under the
cartridge belt around his slim waist.
The fat publican subsided, seeing his little ripple of protest flattened
out by the spirit of fair play. He backed to the sidewalk, where he
stood in conference with Tom Conboy, and there was heard a reference to
niggers in Ireland, pronounced with wise twisting of the head.
Morgan selected, in the face of this little flurry of opposition and
defense, a box from among the odds and ends brought him by the boys, sat
on it facing his prisoners and broke bits of wood for a fire. People
began pressing a little nearer to see what was to come, but when Morgan,
with eye watchful to see even the shifting of a foot in the crowd,
reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, there was an immediate
scramble to the sidewalk. This left twenty feet of dusty white road
unoccupied, a margin on the page where this remarkable incident in
Ascalon's record of tragedies was being written.
Midway of his line of captives, six feet in front of the nearest man,
Morgan kindled a fire, adding wood as the blaze grew, apparently as
oblivious of his surroundings as if in a camp a hundred miles from a
house. When he had the fire established to his liking, he took from his
saddle an iron implement, at the sight of which a murmur and a movement
of new interest stirred the crowd.
This iron contrivance was a rod, little thicker than a man's finger,
which terminated in a flat plate wrought with some kind of open-work
device. This flat portion, which was about as broad as the span of a
man's two hands and perhaps six or eight inches long, appeared to be a
continuation of the handle, bent and hammered to form the crude pattern,
and the wonderment and speculation, contriving and guessing, all passed
out of the people when they beheld this thing. That was a cattle
country; they knew it for a branding iron.
Morgan thrust the brand into the fire, piled wood around it, leaning
over it a little in watchful intent. This relic of his past he also had
retrieved from the bottom of his trunk along with boots and spurs,
corduroys and hat, and it had been a long time, indeed, since he heated
it to apply the Three Crow brand to the shoulder of a beast. That brand,
his father's brand in the early days in the Sioux country where he was
the pioneer cattleman, never had been heated to come in contact with
such base skins as these, Morgan reflected, and it would not be so
dishonored now if cattle were carrying it on any range.
When the Indians killed his father and drove off the last of the herd,
the Three Crow became a discontinued brand in the Northwest. The son had
kept this iron which his father had carried at his saddle horn as a
souvenir of the times when life was not worth much between the Black
Hills and the Platte. The brand was not recorded anywhere today; the
brand books of the cattle-growers' associations did not contain it. But
it was his mark; he intended to set it on these cattle, disfiguration of
face for disfiguration, and turn them loose to return smelling of the
hot iron among their kind.
Sodden with the dregs of last night's carousel, slow-headed, surly as
the Texans were when Morgan encountered them, they were all alert and
fully cognizant of their peril now. No rough jest passed from mouth to
mouth; there was no sneer, no laugh of bravado, no defiance. Some of
them had curses left in them as they sweated in the fear of Morgan's
silent preparations and lunged on their ropes in the hope of breaking
loose. All but the Dutchman appealed to the crowd to interfere,
promising rewards, making pledges in the name of their absent patron,
Seth Craddock, the dreaded slayer of men.
Now and again one of them shouted a name, generally Peden's name, or the
name of some dealer or bouncer in his hall. Nobody answered, nobody
raised hand or voice to interfere or protest. During their short reign
of pillage and debauchery under the protection of the city marshal, the
members of the gang had not made a friend who cared to risk his skin to
save theirs.
To add to their disgrace and humiliation, their big pistols hung in the
holsters on their thighs. People, especially the men of the range,
remarked this full armament, marveling how the stranger had taken six
men of such desperate notoriety all strapped with their guns, but they
understood at once his purpose in allowing the weapons to hang under
their impotent hands. It was a mockery of their bravado, a belittlement
of their bluff and swagger in the brief day of their oppression.
Morgan withdrew the brand from the fire, knocking the clinging bits of
wood from it against the ground.
The Dutchman was first in the line at Morgan's right hand as he turned
from the fire with the branding iron red-hot in his hand. Near the
Dutchman stood Morgan's borrowed horse, drowsing in the sun with head
down, its weight on three legs, one ear set in its inherited caution to
catch the least alarm. From the first moment of his encounter with these
scoundrels Morgan had not lowered himself to address them a single word.
Such commands as he had given them had been in dumb show, as to driven
creatures. This rule of silence he held still as he approached the first
object of his vengeance.
The Dutchman started back from the iron in sudden rousing from his
brooding silence, fear and hate convulsing his snarling face, shrinking
back against the timber of the hitching rack as far as he could
withdraw, where he stood with shoulders hunched about his neck, savage
as a chained wolf. He began to writhe and kick as Morgan laid hold of
his neck to hold him steady for the cruel kiss of the iron.
The fellow squirmed and lunged, with head lowered, trying to get on the
other side of the rack, his companions who were within reach joining in
kicking at Morgan, adding their curses and cries to the Dutchman's
silent fight to save his skin. They raised such a commotion of noise and
dust that it spread to the crowd, which pressed up with a great clamor
of derision, pity, laughter, and shrill cries.
The cowboys, feeling themselves privileged spectators by reason of craft
affiliation, made a ring around the scene of punishment, shouting in
enjoyment of the spectacle, for it was quite in harmony with the cruel
jokes and wild pranks which made up the humorous diversions of their
lives.
"You'll have to hog-tie that feller," said one, drawing nearer than the
rest in his interest.
Morgan paused a moment, brand uplifted, as if he considered the friendly
suggestion. The Dutchman was cringing before him, head drawn between his
shoulders, face as near the ground as he could strain the ropes which
bound him. Morgan kicked the fellow's feet from under him, leaving him
hanging by his hands.
The spectators cheered this adroit movement, laughing at the spectacle
of the Dutchman hanging face downward on his ropes, and Morgan, sweating
in the heat of the fire and sun, exertion and passion, careless of
everything, thoughtless of all but his unsatisfied vengeance, straddled
the Dutchman's neck as if he were a calf. He brought the iron down
within an inch or two of the Dutchman's face, calculating how much of
the crude device of three flying crows he could get between mouth and
ear, and as Morgan stood so with the hot iron poised, the Dutchman
choking between his clamping knees, a hand clutched his arm, jerking the
hovering brand away.
Morgan had not heard a step near him through the turmoil of his hate,
nor seen any person approaching to interfere. Now he whirled, pistol
slung out, facing about to account with the one who dared break in to
stay his hand in the administration of a punishment that he considered
all too inadequate and humane.
There was a girl standing by him, her restraining hand still on his arm,
the sun glinting in the gloss of her dark hair, her dark eyes fixed on
him in denial, in a softness of pity that Morgan knew was not for his
victims alone. And so in that revel of base surrender to his primal
passions she had come to him, she whom his heart sought among the faces
of women; in that manner she had found him, and found him, as Morgan
knew in his abased heart, at his worst.
There was not a word, not the whisper of a word, in the crowd around
them. There was scarcely the moving of a breath.
"Give me that iron, Mr. Morgan!" she demanded in voice that trembled
from the surge of her perturbed breast.
Morgan stood confronting her in the fierce pose of a man prepared to
contend to the last extreme with any who had come to stay his hand in
his hour of requital. The glowing iron, from which little wavers of heat
rose in the sun, he grasped in one hand; in the other his pistol, elbow
close to his side, threatening the quarter from which interference had
come. Still he demurred at her demand, refusing the outstretched hand.
"Give it to me!" she said again, drawing nearer, but a little space
between them now, so near he fancied her breath, panting from her open
lips, on his cheek.
Silent, grim, still clouded by the vapors of his passion, Morgan stood
denying her, not able to adjust himself in wrench so sudden to the calm
plane of his normal life.
"Not for their sake--for your own!" she pleaded, her hand gentle on his
arm.
The set muscles of his pistol arm relaxed, the muzzle of the weapon
dropped slowly with the surge of dark passion in his breast.
"They deserve it, and worse, but not from you, Mr. Morgan. Leave them to
the law--give me that iron."
Morgan yielded it into her hand, slowly slipped his pistol back into the
holster, slowly raised his hand to his forehead, pushed back his hat,
swept his hand across his eyes like one waking from an oppressive dream.
He looked around at the silent people, hundreds of them, it seemed to
him, for the first time fully conscious of the spectacular drama he had
been playing before their astonished eyes.
The Dutchman had struggled to his knees, where he leaned with neck
outstretched as if he waited the stroke of the headsman's sword, unable
to regain his feet. The girl looked with serious eyes into Morgan's
face, the hot branding iron in her hand.
"I think you'd better lock them up in jail, Mr. Morgan," she said.
Morgan did not reply. He stood with bent head, his emotions roiled like
a turgid brook, a feeling over him of awakening daze, such as one
experiences in a sweat of agony after dreaming of falling from some
terrifying height. Morgan had just struck the bottom of the precipice in
his wild, self-effacing dream. The shock of waking was numbing; there
was no room for anything in his righted consciousness but a vast,
down-bearing sense of shame. She had seen a side of his nature long
submerged, long fought, long ago conquered as he believed; the
vindictive, the savage part of him, the cruel and unforgiving.
Public interest in the line of captives along the hitching rack was
waking in a new direction all around the sun-burned square. It was
beginning to come home to every staid and sober man in the assembly that
he had a close interest in the disposition of these men.
"I don't know about that jail business and the law, Miss Retty," said a
severe dark man who pushed into the space where Morgan and the girl
stood. "We've been dressin' and feedin' and standin' the loss through
breakin' and stealin' these fellers have imposed on this town for a week
and more now, and I'm one that don't think much of lockin' them up in
jail to lay there and eat off of the county and maybe be turned loose
after a while. You'd just as well try to carry water up here from the
river in a gunny sack as convict a crook in this county any more."
This man found supporters at once. They came pushing forward, the
resentment of insult and oppression darkening their faces, to shake
threatening fists in the faces of the Dutchman and his companions.
"The best medicine for a gang like this is a cottonwood limb and a
rope," the man who had spoken declared.
It began to look exceedingly dark for the unlucky desperadoes inside of
the next minute. The suggestion of hanging them immediately became an
avowed intention; preparations for carrying it into effect began on the
spot. While some ran to the hardware store for rope, others discussed
the means of employing it to carry out the public sentence.
Hanging never had been popular in Ascalon, mainly because of the
barrenness of the country, which offered no convenient branches except
on the cottonwoods along the river. Wagon tongues upended and propped by
neckyokes had been known to serve in their time, and telegraph poles
when the railroad built through. But gibbets of this sort had their
shortcomings and vexations. There was nothing so comfortable for all
concerned as a tree, and trees did not grow by nature or by art in
Ascalon. So there was talk of an expedition to the river, where all the
six might be accommodated on one tree.
The girl who had taken the branding iron from Morgan and cooled the heat
of his resentment and vengeance quicker than the iron had cooled, stood
looking about into the serious faces of the men who suddenly had
determined to finish for Morgan the business he had begun. Her face was
white, horror distended her eyes; she seemed to have no words for a plea
against this rapidly growing plan.
One of the doomed men behind her began to whimper and beg, appealing to
her in his mother's name to save him. He was a young man, whose weak
face was lined by the excesses of his unrestrained days in Ascalon. His
hat had fallen off, his foretop of brown hair straggled over his wild
eyes.
"Come away from here," said Morgan, turning to her now, his voice rough
and still shaken by his subsiding passion. He took the hot iron from
her, thinking of the trough at the public well where he might cool it.
"Don't let them do it," she implored, putting out her hands to him in
appeal.
"Now Miss Rhetta, you'd better run along," a man urged kindly.
Morgan stood beside her in the narrowing circle about the six men who
had been condemned by public sentiment in less than sixty seconds and
scarcely more words, the hot end of the branding iron in the dust at his
feet. He was silent, yet apparently agitated by a strong emotion, as a
man might be who had leaped a crevasse in fleeing a pressing peril, upon
which he feared to look back.
She whom the man had called Rhetta picked up the young cowboy's hat and
put it on his head.
"Hush!" she charged, in reply to his whimpering intercession for mercy.
"Mr. Morgan isn't going to let them hang you."
Morgan started out of his thoughtful glooming as if a reviving wind had
struck his face, all alert again in a moment, but silent and inscrutable
as before. He leaned his brand against the hitching post, recovered his
rifle where it lay in the dust beside the scattered sticks of his fire,
making himself a little room as he moved about.
Those who had talked of hanging the six now suspended sentence while
waiting the outcome of this new activity on the part of the avenger. A
man who came from somewhere with a coil of rope on his arm stood at the
edge of the newly widened circle with fallen countenance, like one who
arrived too late at some great event in which he had expected to be the
leading actor.
Morgan began stripping belts and pistols from his captives, throwing the
gear at the foot of the post where his branding iron stood. When he had
stripped the last one he paused a moment as if considering something,
the weapon in his hand. The girl Rhetta had not added a word to her
appeal in behalf of the unworthy rascals who stood sweating in terror
before the threatening crowd. But she looked now into Morgan's face with
hopeful understanding, the color coming back to her drained cheeks, a
light of admiration in her eyes. As for Morgan, his own face appeared to
have cleared of a cloud. There was a gleam of deep-kindling humor in his
eyes.
"Gentlemen, there will not be any hanging in Ascalon this morning," he
announced.
He threw the last pistol down with the others, nodded Stilwell to him,
whispered a word or two. Stilwell went shouldering off through the
crowd. Morgan sheathed his rifle in the battered scabbard that hung on
his saddle. In a little while Stilwell came back with a saw.
Morgan took the tool and sawed through the pole to which his captives
were made fast. Stilwell held up the severed end while Morgan cut the
other, freeing from the bolted posts the four-inch section of pole to
which the cowboys were tied, leaving it hanging from the ropes at their
wrists, dangling a little below their hands.
The late lords of the plains were such a dejected and altogether
sneaking looking crew, shorn of their power by the hands of one man,
stripped of their roaring weapons, tied like cattle to a hurdle, that
the vengeful spirit of Ascalon veered in a glance to humorous
appreciation of the comedy that was beginning before their eyes.
The cowboys who had stood ready a few minutes past to help hang the
outfit, fairly rolled with laughter at the sight of this miserable
example of complete degradation, through which the meanness of their
kind was so ludicrously apparent. The citizenry and floating population
of the town joined in the merriment, and the lowering clouds of tragedy
were swept away on a gale of laughter that echoed along the jagged
business front.
But the girl Rhetta was not laughing. Perplexed, troubled, she laid her
hand on Morgan's arm as he stood beside his horse about to mount.
"What are you going to do with them now, Mr. Morgan?" she inquired.
"They're going to start for Texas down the Chisholm Trail," he said,
smiling down at her from the saddle.
And in that manner they set out from Ascalon, carrying the pole at their
backs, Morgan driving them ahead of him, starting them in a trot which
increased to a hobbling run as they bore away past the railroad station
and struck the broad trampled highway to the south.
Afoot and horseback the town and the visitors in it came after them,
shooting and shouting, getting far more enjoyment out of it than they
would have got out of a hanging, as even the most contrary among them
admitted. For this was a drama in which the boys and girls took part,
and even the Baptist preacher, who had a church as big as a mouse trap,
stood grinning in appreciation as they passed, and said something about
it being a parallel of Samson, and the foxes with their tails tied
together being driven away into the Philistines' corn.
The crowd followed to the rise half a mile south of town, where most of
it halted, only the cowboys and mounted men accompanying Morgan to the
river. There they turned back, also, leaving it to Morgan to carry out
the rest of his program alone, it being the general opinion that he
intended to herd the six beyond the cottonwoods on the farther shore and
despatch them clean-handed, according to what was owing to him on their
account.
Morgan urged his captives on, still keeping them on the trot, although
it was becoming a staggering and wabbling progression, the weaker in
the line held up by the more enduring. They were experiencing in a small
and colorless measure, as faint by comparison, certainly, as the smell
of smoke to the feel of fire on the naked skin, what they had given
Morgan in the hour of their cruel mastery.
At last one of them could stumble on no farther. He fell, dragging down
two others who were not able to sustain his weight. There Morgan left
them, a mile or more beyond the river, knowing they would not have far
to travel before they came across somebody who would set them free.
The Dutchman, stronger and fresher than any of his companions, turned as
if he would speak when Morgan started to leave. Morgan checked his horse
to hear what the fellow might have to say, but nothing came out of the
ugly mouth but a grin of such derision, such mockery, such hate, that
Morgan felt as if the bright day contracted to shadows and a chill crept
into the pelting heat of the sun. He thought, gravely and soberly, that
he would be sparing the world at large, and himself specifically, future
pain and trouble by putting this scoundrel out of the way as a man would
remove a vicious beast.
Whatever justification the past, the present, or the future might plead
for this course, Morgan was too much himself again to yield. He turned
from them, giving the Dutchman his life to make out of it what he might.
From the top one of the ridges such as billowed like swells of the sea
that gray-green, treeless plain, Morgan looked back. All of them but
the Dutchman were either lying or sitting on the ground, beaten and
winded by the torture of their bonds and the hard drive of more than
three miles in the burning sun. The Dutchman still kept his feet,
although the drag of the pole upon him must have been sore and heavy, as
if he must stand to send his curse out after the man who had bent him to
his humiliation.
And Morgan knew that the Dutchman was not a conquered man, nor bowed in
his spirit, nor turned one moment away from his thought of revenge.
Again the bright day seemed to contract and grow chill around him, like
the oncoming shadow and breath of storm. He felt that this man would
return in his day to trouble him, low-devising, dark and secret and
meanly covert as a wolf prowling in the night.
The last look Morgan had of the Dutchman he was gazing that way still,
his face peculiarly white, the weight of the pole and his fallen
comrades dragging down on his bound arms. Morgan could fancy still, even
over the distance between them, the small teeth, wide set in the red
gums like a pup's, and the loathsome glitter of his sneering eyes.
CHAPTER XII
IN PLACE OF A REGIMENT
Morgan rode back to town in thoughtful, serious mood after conducting
the six desperadoes across the small trickle of the Arkansas River. He
was not satisfied with the morning's adventure, no matter to what extent
it reflected credit on his manhood and competency in the public mind of
Ascalon. He would have been easier in all conscience and higher in his
own esteem if it had not happened at all.
He thought soberly now of getting his trunk over to Conboy's from the
station and changing back into the garb of civilization before meeting
that girl again, that wonderful girl, that remarkable woman who could
play a tune on him to suit her caprice, he thought, as she would have
fingered a violin.
Judge Thayer's little office, with the white stakes behind it marking
off the unsold lots like graves of a giant race, reminded Morgan of his
broken engagement to look at the farm. He hitched his horse at the rack
running out from one corner of the building, where other horses had
stood fighting flies until they had stamped a hollow like a buffalo
wallow in the dusty ground.
Judge Thayer got up from the accumulated business on his desk at the
sound of Morgan's step in his door, and came forward with welcome in his
beaming face, warmth of friendliness and admiration in every hair of
his beard, where the gray twinkled like laughter among the black.
"I asked the governor for a company of militia to put down the disorder
and outlawry in this town--I didn't think less than a company could do
it," said the judge.
"Is he sending them?" Morgan inquired with polite interest.
"No, I'm glad to say he refused. He referred me to the sheriff."
"And the sheriff will act, I suppose?"
"Act?" Judge Thayer repeated, turning the word curiously. "Act!"--with
all the contempt that could be centered in such a short
expression--"yes, he'll act like a forsworn and traitorous coward, the
friend to thieves that he's always been! We don't need him, we don't
need the governor's petted, stall-fed militia, when we've got one man
that's a regiment in himself!"
The judge must shake hands with Morgan again, and clap him on the
shoulder to further express his admiration and the feeling of security
his single-handed exploit against the oppressors of Ascalon had brought
to the town.
"I and the other officers and directors sat up in the bank four nights,
lights out and guns loaded, sweatin' blood, expecting a raid by that
gang. They had this town buffaloed, Morgan. I'm glad you came back here
today and showed us the pattern of a real, old-fashioned man."
"I guess I was lucky," Morgan said, with modest depreciation of his
valor, exceedingly uncomfortable to stand there and hear this
loud-spoken praise of a deed he would rather have the public forget.
"Maybe you call it luck where you came from, but we've got another name
for it here in Ascalon."
"I'm sorry I couldn't keep my engagement to look at that farm, Judge
Thayer. You must have heard my reason for it."
"Stilwell told me. It's a marvel you ever came back at all."
"If the farm isn't sold----"
"No," said the judge hastily, as if to turn him away from the subject.
"Come in and sit down--there's a bigger thing than farming on hand for
you if you can see your interests in it as I see them, Mr. Morgan. A
man's got to trample down the briars before he makes his bed sometimes,
you know--come on in out of this cussed sun.
"Morgan, the situation in Ascalon is like this," Judge Thayer resumed,
seated at his desk, Morgan between him and the door in much the same
position that Seth Craddock had sat on the day of his arrival not long
before; "we've got a city marshal that's bigger than the authority that
created him, bigger than anything on earth that ever wore a star. Seth
Craddock's enlarged himself and his authority until he's become a curse
and a scourge to the citizens of this town."
"I heard something of his doings from Fred Stilwell. Why don't you fire
him?"
"Morgan, I approached him," said the judge, with an air of injury. "I
believe on my soul the old devil spared my life only because I had
befriended him in past days. There's a spark of gratitude in him that
the drenching of blood hasn't put out. If it had been anybody else he'd
have shot him dead."
"Hm-m-m-m!" said Morgan, grunting his sympathy, eyes on the floor.
"Morgan, that fellow's killed eight men in as many days! He's got a
regular program--a man a day."
"It looks like something ought to be done to stop him."
"The old devil's shrewd, he's had legal counsel from no less illustrious
source than the county attorney, who's so crooked he couldn't lie on the
side of a hill without rollin' down it like a hoop. Seth knows he fills
an elective office, he's beyond the power of mayor and council to
remove. The only way he can be ousted is by proceedings in court, which
he could wear along till his term expired. We can't fire him, Morgan.
He'll go on till he depopulates this town!"
"It's a remarkable situation," Morgan said.
"He's a jackal, which is neither wolf nor dog. He's never killed a man
here yet out of necessity--he just shoots them down to see them kick, or
to gratify some monstrous delight that has transformed him from the man
I used to know."
"He may be insane," Morgan suggested.
"I don't know, but I don't think so. I can't abase my mind low enough to
fathom that man."
"It's a wonder somebody hasn't killed him," Morgan speculated.
"He never arrests anybody, there hasn't been a prisoner in the
calaboose since he took charge of this town. Notoriety has turned his
head, notoriety seems to put a halo around him that makes a troop of
sycophants look up to him as a saint. Look here--look at this!"
The judge held out a newspaper, shaking it viciously, his face clouded
with displeasure.
"Here's a piece two columns long about that scoundrel in the _Kansas
City Times_--the notoriety of the town is obscured by the bloody
reputation of its marshal."
"It must be gratifying to a man of his ambitions," Morgan commented,
glancing curiously over the story, his mind on the first victim of
Craddock's gun in that town.
"It's a disgrace that some of us feel, whatever it may be to him. I
expected him to confine his gun to gamblers and crooks and these vermin
that hang around the women of the dance houses, but he's right-hand man
with them, they're all on his staff."
Morgan looked up in amazement, hardly able to believe what he heard.
"It's enough to wind any decent man," Judge Thayer nodded. "You remember
his first case--that fool cowboy he killed at the hotel?"
"I was just thinking of him," Morgan said.
"That's the kind he goes in for, cowboys from the range, green, innocent
boys, harmless if you take 'em right. Yesterday afternoon he killed a
young fellow from Glenmore. It's going to bring retaliation and reprisal
on us, it's going to hurt us in this contest over the county seat."
"I shouldn't wonder," said Morgan, hoping the reprisal would be swift
and severe.
"I think the man's blood mad," Judge Thayer speculated, in a hopeless
way. "It must be the outcome of all that slaughter among the buffalo.
He's not a brave man, he lacks the bearing and the full look of the eye
of a courageous man, but he carries two guns now, Morgan, and he can
sling out and shoot a man with incredible speed. And we've got him
quartered on us for nearly two years unless somebody from Glendora comes
over and nails him. We can't fire him, we don't dare to approach him to
suggest his abdication. Morgan, we're in a three-cornered hell of a
fix!"
"Can't the fellow be prosecuted for some of these murders? Isn't there
some way the law can reach him?"
"The coroner's jury absolves him regularly," the judge replied wearily.
"At first they did it because it was the routine, and now they do it to
save their hides. No, there's just one quick and sure way of heading
that devil off in his red trail that I can see, Morgan, and that's for
me to act while he's away. He's gone on some high-flyin' expedition to
Abilene, leaving the town without a peace officer at the mercy of
bandits and thieves. I have the authority to swear in a deputy marshal,
or a hundred of them."
Morgan looked up again quickly from his speculative study of the boards
in Judge Thayer's floor, to meet the elder man's shrewd eyes with a look
of complete understanding. So they sat a moment, each reading the other
as easily as one counts pebbles at the bottom of a clear spring.
"I don't believe I'm the man you're looking for," Morgan said.
"You're the only man that can do it, Morgan. It looks to me like you're
appointed by Providence to step in here and save this town from this
reign of murder."
"Oh!" said Morgan, impatiently, discounting the judge's fervid words.
"You can supplant him, you can strip him of his badge of office when he
steps from the train, and you're the one man that _can_ do it!"
Morgan shook his head, whether in denial of his attributed valor and
prowess, or in declination to assume the proffered honor, Judge Thayer
could not tell.
"I believe you'd do it without ever throwing a gun down on him," Judge
Thayer declared.
"I know he could!" said a clear, hearty, confident voice from the door.
"Come in and help me convince him, Rhetta," Judge Thayer said, his
gray-flecked beard twinkling with the pleasure that beamed from his
eyes. "Mr. Morgan, my daughter. You have met before."
Morgan rose in considerable confusion, feeling more like an abashed and
clumsy cowboy than he ever had felt before in his life. He stood with
his battered hat held flat against his body at his belt, turning the old
thing foolishly like a wheel, so unexpectedly confronted by this girl
again, before whom he desired to appear as a man, and the best that was
in the best man that he could ever be. And she stood smiling before him,
mischief and mastery in her laughing eyes, confident as one who had
subjugated him already, playing a tune on him, surely--a tune that came
like a little voice out of his heart.
"I didn't know, I didn't suspect," he said.
"Of course not. She isn't anything like me." Judge Thayer laughed over
it, mightily pleased by this evidence of confusion in a man who could
heat his branding iron to set his mark on half a dozen desperadoes, yet
turned to dough before the eyes of a simple maid.
"No more than a bird is like a bear," said Morgan, thinking aloud,
racing mentally the next moment to snatch back his words and shape them
in more conventional phrase. But too late; their joint laughter drowned
his attempt to set it right, and the world lost a compliment that might
have graced a courtier's tongue, perhaps. But, not likely.
Morgan proffered the chair he had occupied, but Rhetta knew of one in
reserve behind the display of wheat and oats in sheaf on the table. This
she brought, seating herself near the door, making a triangle from which
Morgan had no escape save through the roof.
Judge Thayer resumed the discussion of the most vital matter in Ascalon
that hour, pressing Morgan to take the oath of office then and there.
"I wouldn't ask Mr. Morgan to take the office," said Rhetta when Judge
Thayer paused, "if I felt safe to stay in Ascalon another day with
anybody else as marshal."
"That's a compelling reason for a man to take a job," Morgan told her,
looking for a daring moment into the cool clarity of her honest brown
eyes. "But I might make it worse instead of better. Trouble came to
this town with me; it seems to stick to my heels like a dog."
"You got rid of most of it this morning--_that_ gang will never come
back," she said.
Morgan looked out of the open door, a thoughtfulness in his eyes that
the nearer attraction could not for the moment dispel. "One of them
will," he replied.
"Oh, one!" said she, discounting that one to nothing at all.
"The gamblers and saloon men are right about it," Morgan said, turning
to the judge; "this town will dry up and blow away as soon as it loses
its notorious name. If you want to kill Ascalon, enforce the law. The
question is, how many people here want it done?"
"The respectable majority, I can assure you on that."
"Nearly everybody you talk to say they'd rather have Ascalon a whistling
station on the railroad, where you could go to sleep in peace and get up
feeling safe, than the awful place it is now," Rhetta said. She removed
her sombrero as she spoke, and dropped it on the floor at her feet, as
though weary of the turmoil that vexed her days.
Morgan noted for the first time that she was not dressed for the saddle
today as on the occasion of their first meeting, but garbed in becoming
simplicity in serge skirt and brown linen waist, a little golden bar
with garnets at her throat. Her redundant dark hair, soft in its dusky
shade as summer shadows in a deep wood, was coiled in a twisted heap to
fit the crown of her mannish sombrero. It came down lightly over the
tips of her ears in pretty disorder, due to the excitement of the
morning, and she was fair as a camelia blossom and fresh as an evening
primrose of her native prairie land.
"I wouldn't like to be the man that killed Ascalon, after all its highly
painted past," Morgan said, trying to turn it off lightly. "It might be
better for all the respectable people to go away and leave it wholly
wicked, according to its fame."
"That might work to the satisfaction of all concerned, Mr. Morgan, if we
had wagons and tents, and nothing more," said the judge. "We could very
well pick up and pull out in that case. But a lot of us have staked all
we own on the future of this town and the country around it. We were
here before Ascalon became a plague spot and a by-word in the mouths of
men; we started it right, but it went wrong as soon as it was able to
walk."
"It seems to have wandered around quite a bit since then," Morgan said,
sparing them a grin.
"It's been a wayward child," Rhetta sighed. "We're ashamed of our
responsibility for it now."
"It would mean ruination to most of us to pull out and leave it to these
wolves," said the judge. "We couldn't think of that."
"Of course not, I was only making a poor joke when I talked of a
retreat," Morgan said. "Things will begin to die down here in a year or
two--I've seen towns like this before, they always calm down and take up
business seriously in time, or blow away and vanish completely. That's
what happens to most of them if they're let go their course--change and
shift, range breaking up into farms, cowboys going on, take care of
that."
"I don't think Ascalon will go out that way--not if we can keep the
county seat," Judge Thayer said. "If you were to step into the breach
while that killer's away and rub even one little white spot in the
town----"
Morgan seemed to interpose in the manner of throwing out his hand, a
gesture speaking of the fatuity and his unwillingness to set himself to
the task.
"Not just temporarily, we don't mean just temporarily, Mr. Morgan, but
for good," Rhetta urged. "I want to take over editing the paper and be
of some use in the world, but I couldn't think of doing it with all this
killing going on, and a lot of wild men shooting out windows and
everything that way."
"No, of course you couldn't," Morgan agreed.
"The railroad immigration agent has been trying to locate a colony of
Mennonites here," Judge Thayer said, "fifty families or more of them,
but the notoriety of the town made the elders skittish. They were out
here this spring, liked the country, saw its future with eyes that
revealed like telescopes, and would have bought ten sections of land to
begin with if it hadn't been for two or three killings while they were
here."
"It was the same way with those people from Pennsylvania," said Rhetta.
"We had a crowd of Pennsylvania Dutch out here a week or two after the
Mennonites," the judge enlarged, "smellin' around hot-foot on the trail
as hounds, but this atmosphere of Ascalon and its bad influence on the
country wouldn't be good for their young folks, they said. So _they_
backed off. And that's the way it's gone, that's the way it will go. The
blight of Ascalon falls over this country for fifty miles around, the
finest country the Almighty ever scattered grass seed over.
"You saw the possibilities of it from a distance, Mr. Morgan; others
have seen it. Wouldn't you be doing humanity a larger service, a more
immediate and applicable service, by clearing away the pest spot, curing
the repulsive infection that keeps them away from its benefits and
rewards, than by plowing up eighty acres and putting in a crop of wheat?
A man's got to trample down his bed-ground, as I've said already,
Morgan, before he can spread his blankets sometimes. This is one of the
places, this is one of the times."
Morgan thought it over, hands on his thighs, head bent a little, eyes on
his boots, conscious that the girl was watching him anxiously, as one on
trial at the bar watches a doubtful jury when counsel makes the last
appeal.
"There's a lot of logic in what you say," Morgan admitted; "it ought to
appeal to a man big enough, confident enough, to undertake and put the
job through."
He looked up suddenly, answering directly Rhetta Thayer's anxious,
expectant, appealing brown eyes. "For if he should fail, bungle it, and
have to throw down his hand before he'd won the game, it would be
Katy-bar-the-door for that man. He'd have to know how far the people of
this town wanted him to go before starting, and there's only one
boundary--the limit of the law. If they want anything less than that a
man had better keep hands off, for anything like a compromise between
black and white would be a fizzle."
Rhetta nodded, her bosom quivering with the pounding of her expectant
heart, her throat throbbing, her hands clenched as if she held on in
desperate hope of rescue. Judge Thayer said no more. He sat watching
Morgan's face, knowing well when a word too many might change the
verdict to his loss.
"The question is, how far do they want a man to go in the regeneration
of Ascalon? How many are willing to put purity above profit for a while?
Business would suffer; it would be as dead here as a grasshopper after a
prairie fire while readjustment to new conditions shaped. It might be a
year or two before healthy legitimate trade could take the place of this
flashy life, and it might never rebound from the operation. A man would
want the people who are calling for law and order here to be satisfied
with the new conditions; he wouldn't want any whiners at the funeral."
"New people would come, new business would grow, as soon as the news got
abroad that a different condition prevailed in this town," Judge Thayer
said. "I can satisfy you in an hour that the business men want what
they're demanding, and will be satisfied to take the risk of the
result."
"I came out here to farm," Morgan said, unwilling to put down his plans
for a questionable and dangerous service to a doubtful community.
"There'll not be much sod broken between now and late fall, from the
present look of things," the judge said. "We've had the longest dry
spell I've ever seen in this country--going on four weeks now without a
drop of rain. It comes that way once every five or seven years, but that
also happens back in Ohio and other places men consider especially
favored," he hastened to conclude.
"I didn't intend to break sod," Morgan reflected, "a man couldn't sow
wheat in raw sod. That's why I wanted to look at that claim down by the
river."
"It will keep. Or you could buy it, and hire your crop put in while
you're marshal here in town."
"And I could edit the paper. Between us we could save the county seat."
Rhetta spoke quite seriously, so seriously, indeed, that her father
laughed.
"I had forgotten all about saving the county seat--I was considering
only the soul of Ascalon," he said.
"If you refuse to let father swear you in, Mr. Morgan, Craddock will say
you were afraid. I'd hate to have him do that," said Rhetta.
"He might," Morgan granted, and with subdued voice and thoughtful manner
that gave them a fresh rebound of hope.
And at length they had their will, but not until Morgan had gone the
round of the business men on the public square, gathering the assurance
of great and small that they were weary of bloodshed and violence,
notoriety and unrest; that they would let the bars down to him if he
would undertake cleaning up the town, and abide by what might come of it
without a growl.
When they returned to Judge Thayer's office Morgan took the oath to
enforce the statutes of the state of Kansas and the ordinances of the
city of Ascalon, Rhetta standing by with palpitating breast and glowing
eyes, hands behind her like a little girl waiting her turn in a spelling
class. When Morgan lowered his hand Rhetta started out of her expectant
pose, producing with a show of triumph a short piece of broad white
ribbon, with CITY MARSHAL stamped on it in tall black letters.
Judge Thayer laughed as Morgan backed away from her when she advanced to
pin it on his breast.
"I set up the type and printed it myself on the proof press," she said,
in pretty appeal to him to stand and be hitched to this sign of his new
office.
"It's so--it's rather--prominent, isn't it?" he said, still edging away.
"There isn't any regular shiny badge for you, the great, grisly Mr.
Craddock wore away the only one the town owns. Please, Mr.
Morgan--you'll have to wear _something_ to show your authority, won't
he, Pa?"
"It would be wiser to wear it till I can send for another badge, Morgan,
or we can get the old one away from Seth. Your authority would be
questioned without a badge, they're strong for badges in this town."
So Morgan stood like a family horse while Rhetta pinned the ribbon to
the pocket of his dingy gray woolen shirt, where it flaunted its
unmistakable proclamation in a manner much more effective than any
police shield or star ever devised. Rhetta pressed it down hard with the
palm of her hand to make the stiff ribbon assume a graceful hang, so
hard that she must have felt the kick of the new officer's heart just
under it. And she looked up into his eyes with a glad, confident smile.
"I feel safe _now_," she said, sighing as one who puts down a wearing
burden at the end of a toilsome journey.
CHAPTER XIII
THE HAND OF THE LAW
The stars came out over a strange, silent, astonished, confounded,
stupefied Ascalon that night. The wolf-howling of its revelry was
stilled, the clamor of its obscene diversions was hushed. It was as if
the sparkling tent of the heavens were a great bowl turned over the
place, hushing its stridulous merriment, stifling its wild laughter and
dry-throated feminine screams.
The windows of Peden's hall were dark, the black covers were drawn over
the gambling tables, the great bar stood in the gloom without one priest
of alcohol to administer the hilarious rites across its glistening altar
boards.
As usual, even more than usual, the streets around the public square
were lively with people, coming and passing through the beams of light
from windows, smoking and talking and idling in groups, but there was no
movement of festivity abroad in the night, no yelping of departing
rangers. It was as if the town had died suddenly, so suddenly that all
within it were struck dumb by the event.
For the new city marshal, the interloper as many held him to be, the
tall, solemn, long-stepping stranger who carried a rifle always ready
like a man looking for a coyote, had put the lock of his prohibition on
everything within the town. Everything that counted, that is, in the
valuation of the proscribed, and the victims who came like ephemera on
the night wind to scorch and shrivel and be drained in their bright,
illusive fires. The law long flouted, made a joke of, despised, had come
to Ascalon and laid hold of its alluring institutions with stern and
paralyzing might.
Early in the first hours of his authority the new city marshal, or
deputy marshal, to be exact, had received from unimpeachable source, no
less than a thick volume of the statutes, that the laws of the state of
Kansas, which he had sworn to enforce, prohibited the sale of
intoxicating liquors; prohibited gambling and games of chance;
interdicted the operation of immoral resorts--put a lock and key in his
hand, in short, that would shut up the ribald pleasures of Ascalon like
a tomb. As for the ordinances of the city, which he also had obligated
himself to apply, Morgan had not found time to work down to them. There
appeared to be authority in the thick volume Judge Thayer had lent him
to last Ascalon a long time. If he should find himself running short
from that source, then the city ordinances could be drawn upon in their
time and place.
Exclusive of the mighty Peden, the other traffickers in vice were
inconsequential, mere retailers, hucksters, peddlers in their way. They
were as vicious as unquenchable fire, certainly, and numerous, but
small, and largely under the patronage of the king of the proscribed,
Peden of the hundred-foot bar.
And this Peden was a big, broad-chested, muscular man, whose neck rose
like a mortised beam out of his shoulders, straight with the back of his
head. His face was handsome in a bold, shrewd mold, but dark as if his
blood carried the taint of a baser race. He went about always dressed in
a long frock coat, with no vest to obscure the spread of his white shirt
front; low collar, with narrow black tie done in exact bow;
broad-brimmed white sombrero tilted back from his forehead, a cigar that
always seemed fresh under his great mustache.
This mustache, heavy, black, was the one sinister feature of the man's
otherwise rather open and confidence-winning face. It was a cloud that
more than half obscured the nature of the man, an ambush where his
passions and dark subterfuges lay concealed.
Peden had met the order to close his doors with smiling loftiness, easy
understanding of what he read it to mean. Astonished to find his offer
of money silently and sternly ignored, Peden had grown contemptuously
defiant. If it was a bid for him to raise the ante, Morgan was starting
off on a lame leg, he said. Ten dollars a night was as much as the
friendship of any man that ever wore the collar of the law was worth to
him. Take it or leave it, and be cursed to him, with embellishments of
profanity and debasement of language which were new and astonishing even
to Morgan's sophisticated ears. Peden turned his back to the new officer
after drenching him down with this deluge of abuse, setting his face
about the business of the night.
And there self-confident defiance, fattened a long time on the belief
that law was a thing to be sneered down, met inflexible resolution. The
substitute city marshal had a gift of making a few words go a long way;
Peden put out his lights and locked his doors. In the train of his
darkness others were swallowed. Within two hours after nightfall the
town was submerged in gloom.
Threats, maledictions, followed Morgan as he walked the round of the
public square, rifle ready for instant use, pistol on his thigh. And the
blessing of many a mother whose sons and daughters stood at the perilous
crater of that infernal pit went out through the dark after him, also;
and the prayers of honest folk that no skulking coward might shoot him
down out of the shelter of the night.
Even as they cursed him behind his back, the outlawed sneered at Morgan
and the new order that seemed to threaten the world-wide fame of
Ascalon. It was only the brief oppression of transient authority, they
said; wait till Seth Craddock came back and you would see this range
wolf throw dust for the timber.
They spoke with great confidence and kindling pleasure of Seth's return,
and the amusing show that would attend his resumption of authority. For
it was understood that Seth would not come alone. Peden, it was said,
had attended to that already by telegraph. Certain handy gun-slingers
would come with him from Kansas City and Abilene, friends of Peden who
had made reputations and had no scruples about maintaining them.
As the night lengthened this feeling of security, of pleasurable
anticipation, increased. This little break in its life would do the town
good; things would whirl away with recharged energy when the doors were
opened again. Money would simply accumulate in the period of stagnation
to be thrown into the mill with greater abandon than before by the
fools who stood around waiting for the show to resume.
And the spectacle of seeing Seth Craddock drive this simpleton clear
over the edge of the earth would be a diversion that would compensate
for many empty days. That alone would be a thing worth waiting for, they
said.
Time began to walk in slack traces, the heavy wain of night at its slow
heels, for the dealers and sharpers, mackerels and frail, spangled women
to whom the open air was as strange as sunlight to an earthworm. They
passed from malediction and muttered threat against the man who had
brought this sudden change in their accustomed lives, to a state of
indignant rebellion as they milled round the square and watched him
tramp his unending beat.
A little way inside the line of hitching racks Morgan walked, away from
the thronged sidewalk, in the clear where all could see him and a shot
from some dark window would not imperil the life of another. Around and
around the square he tramped in the dusty, hoof-cut street, keeping his
own counsel, unspeaking and unspoken to, the living spirit of the mighty
law.
It was a high-handed piece of business, the bleached men and kalsomined
women declared, as they passed from the humor of contemplating Seth
Craddock's return to fretful chafing against the restraint of the
present hour. How did it come that one man could lord it over a whole
town of free and independent Americans that way? Why didn't somebody
take a shot at him? Why didn't they defy him, go and open the doors and
let this thirsty, money-padded throng up to the gambling tables and
bars?
They asked to be told what had become of the manhood of Ascalon, and
asked it with contempt. What was the fame of the town based upon but a
bluff when one man was able to shut it up as tight as a trunk, and strut
around that way adding the insult of his tyrannical presence to the act
of his oppressive hand. There were plenty of questions and suggestions,
but nobody went beyond them.
The moon was in mid-heaven, untroubled by a veil of cloud; the day wind
was resting under the edge of the world, asleep. Around and around the
public square this sentinel of the new moral force that had laid its
hand over Ascalon tramped the white road. Rangers from far cow camps,
disappointed of their night's debauch, began to mount and ride away,
turning in their saddles as they went for one more look at the lone
sentry who was a regiment in himself, indeed.
The bleached men began to yawn, the medicated women to slip away. Good
citizens who had watched in anxiety, fearful that this rash champion of
the new order would find a bullet between his shoulders before midnight,
began to breathe easier and seek their beds in a strange state of
security. Ascalon was shut up; the howling of its wastrels was stilled.
It was incredible, but true.
By midnight the last cowboy had gone galloping on his long ride to carry
the news of Ascalon's eclipse over the desolate gray prairie; an hour
later the only sign of life in the town was the greasy light of the
Santa Fé café, where a few lingering nondescripts were supping on cove
oyster stew. These came out at last, to stand a little while like
stranded mariners on a lonesome beach watching for a rescuing sail, then
parted and went clumping their various ways over the rattling board
walks.
Morgan stopped at the pump in the square to refresh himself with a
drink. A dog came and lapped out of the trough, stood a little while
when its thirst was satisfied, turning its head listening, as though it
missed something out of the night. It trotted off presently, in angling
gait like a ferry boat making a crossing against an outrunning tide. It
was the last living thing on the streets of the town but the weary city
marshal, who stood with hat off at the pump to feel the cool wind that
came across the sleeping prairie before the dawn.
At that same hour another watcher turned from her open window, where she
had sat a long time straining into the silence that blessed the town.
She had been clutching her heart in the dread of hearing a shot, full of
upbraidings for the peril she had thrust upon this chivalrous man. For
he would not have assumed the office but for her solicitation, she knew
well. She stretched out her hand into the moonlight as if she wafted him
her benediction for the peace he had brought, a great, glad surge of
something more tender than gratitude in her warm young bosom.
In a little while she came to the window again, when the moonlight was
slanting into it, and stood leaning her hands on the sill, her dark hair
coming down in a cloud over her white night dress. She strained again
into the quiet night, listening, and listening, smiled. Then she stood
straight, touched finger tips to her lips and waved away a kiss into the
moonlight and the little timid awakening wind that came out of the east
like a young hare before the dawn.
CHAPTER XIV
SOME FOOL WITH A GUN
Morgan was roused out of his brief sleep at the Elkhorn hotel shortly
after sunrise by the night telegrapher at the railroad station, who came
with a telegram.
"I thought you'd like to have it as soon as possible," the operator
said, in apology for his early intrusion, standing by Morgan's bed, Tom
Conboy attending just outside the door with ear primed to pick up the
smallest word.
"Sure--much obliged," Morgan returned, his voice hoarse with broken
sleep, his head not instantly clear of its flying clouds. The operator
lingered while Morgan ran his eye over the few words.
"Much obliged, old feller," Morgan said, warmly, giving the young man a
quick look of understanding that must serve in place of more words,
seeing that Conboy had his head within the door.
Morgan heard the operator denying Conboy the secret of the message in
the hall outside his door. Conboy had lived long enough in Ascalon to
know when to curb his curiosity. He tiptoed away from Morgan's door,
repressing his desire behind his beard.
Knowing that he could not sleep again after that abrupt break in his
rest, Morgan rose and dressed. Once or twice he referred again to the
message that lay spread on his pillow.
Craddock wired Peden last night that he would arrive on number
seven at 1:20 this afternoon.
That was the content of the message, not a telegram at all, but a
friendly note of warning from the night operator, who had come over to
the hotel to go to bed. The young man had shrewdly adopted this means to
cover his information, knowing that Peden's wrath was mighty and his
vengeance far-reaching. Nobody in town could question the delivery of a
telegram.
Morgan had expected Craddock to hasten back and attempt to recover his
scepter and resume his sway over Ascalon, where the destructive sickle
of his passion for blood could be plied with safety under the shelter of
his prostituted office. But he did not expect him to return so soon. It
pleased him better that the issue was to be brought to a speedy trial
between them. While he had his feet wet, he reasoned, he would just as
well cross the stream.
Conboy was sweeping the office, having laid the thick of the dust with a
sprinkling can. He paused in his work to give Morgan a shrewd, sharp
look.
"Important news when it pulls a man out of bed this early," Conboy
ventured, "and him needin' sleep like you do."
"Yes," said Morgan, going on to the door.
Conboy came after him, voice lowered almost to a whisper as he spoke,
eyes turning about as if he expected a spy to bob up behind his
counter.
"I heard it passed around late last night that Craddock was comin'
back."
"Wasn't he expected to?" Morgan inquired, indifferently, wholly
undisturbed.
Conboy watched him keenly, standing half behind him, to note any sign of
panic or uneasiness that would tell him which side he should support
with his valuable sympathy and profound philosophy.
"From the way things point, I think they're lookin' for him back today,"
he said.
"The quicker the sooner," Morgan replied in offhand cowboy way.
Conboy was left on middle ground, not certain whether Morgan would flee
before the arrival of the man whose powers he had usurped, or stand his
ground and shoot it out. It was an uncomfortable moment; a man must be
on one side or the other to be safe. In the history of Ascalon it was
the neutral who generally got knocked down and trampled, and lost his
pocketbook and watch, as happens to the gaping nonparticipants in the
squabbles of humanity everywhere.
"From what I hear goin' around," Conboy continued, dropping his voice to
a cautious, confidential pitch, "there'll be a bunch of bad men along in
a day or two to help Craddock hold things down. It looks to me like it's
goin' to be more than any one man can handle."
"It may be that way," Morgan said, lingering in the door, Conboy doing
his talking from the rear. Morgan was thinking the morning had a
freshness in it like a newly gathered flower.
"It'll mean part closed and part open if that man takes hold of this
town again," Conboy said. "Him and Peden they're as thick as three in a
bed. Close all of 'em, like you did last night, or give everybody a fair
whack. That's what I say."
"Yes," abstractedly from Morgan.
"It was kind of quiet and slow in town last night, slowest night I've
ever had since I bought this dump. I guess I'd have to move away if
things run along that way, but I don't know. Maybe business would pick
up when people got used to the new deal. Goin' to let 'em open tonight?"
"Night's a long way off," Morgan said, leaving the question open for
Conboy to make what he could out of it.
Conboy was of the number who could see no existence for Ascalon but a
vicious one, yet he was no partisan of Seth Craddock, having a soreness
in his recollection of many indignities suffered at the hands of the
city marshal's Texas friends, even of Craddock's overriding and sardonic
disdain. Yet he would rather have Craddock, and the town open, than
Morgan and stagnation. He came to that conclusion with Morgan's evasion
of his direct question. The interests of Peden and his kind were
Conboy's interests. He stood like a housemaid with dustpan and broom to
gather up the wreckage of the night.
"When can I get breakfast?" Morgan inquired, turning suddenly, catching
Conboy with his new resolution in his shifty, flickering eyes, reading
him to the marrow of his bones.
"It's a little early--not half-past five," Conboy returned, covering his
confusion as well as he could by referring to his thick silver watch.
"We don't begin to serve till six, the earliest of 'em don't come in
before then. If you feel like turnin' in for a sleep, we'll take care of
you when you get up."
Morgan said he had sleep enough to carry him over the day. Dora,
yawning, disheveled, appeared in the dining-room door at that moment,
tying her all-enveloping white apron around her like Poor Polly Bawn.
She blushed when she saw Morgan, and put up her hands to smooth her
hair.
"I had the best sleep last night I can remember in a coon's age--I felt
so _safe_," she said.
"You always was safe enough," Conboy told her, not in the best of humor.
"Safe enough! I can show you five bullet holes in the walls of my room,
Mr. Morgan--one of 'em through the head of my bed!"
"Pretty close," Morgan said, answering the animation of her rosy,
friendly face with a smile.
"Never mind about bullet holes--you go and begin makin' holes in a piece
of biscuit dough," her father commanded.
"When I get good and ready," said Dora, serenely. "You wouldn't care if
we got shot to pieces every night as long as we could get up in the
morning and make biscuits!"
"Yes, and some of you'd be rootin' around somebody else's kitchen for
biscuits to fill your craws if this town laid dead a little while
longer," Conboy fired back, his true feeling in the matter revealed.
"I can get a job of biscuit shooter any day," Dora told him, untroubled
by the outlook of disaster that attended upon peace and quiet. "I'd
rather not have no guests than drunks that come in stagger blind and
shoot the plaster off of the wall. It ain't so funny to wake up with
your ears full of lime! Ma's sick of it, and I'm sick of it, and it'd be
a blessin' if Mr. Morgan would keep the joints all shut till the drunks
in this town dried up like dead snakes!"
"You, and your ma!" Conboy grumbled, bearing on an old grievance, an old
theme of servitude and discontent.
Morgan recalled the gaunt anxiety of Mrs. Conboy's eyes, hollow of every
emotion, as they seemed, but unrest and straining fear. Dora had gone
unmarked yet by the cursed fires of Ascalon; only her tongue discovered
that the poison of their fumes had reached her heart.
"I'd like to put strickenine in some of their biscuits!" Dora declared,
with passionate vehemence.
"Tut-tut! no niggers----"
"How's your face, Mr. Morgan?" Dora inquired, out of one mood into
another so quickly the transition was bewildering.
"Face?" said Morgan, embarrassed for want of her meaning. "Oh," putting
his hand to the forgotten wound--"about well, thank you, Miss Dora. I
guess my good looks are ruined, though."
Dora half closed her eyes in arch expression, pursing her lips as if she
meant to give him either a whistle or a kiss, laughed merrily, and ran
off to cut patterns in a sheet of biscuit dough. She left such a
clearness and good humor in the morning air that Morgan felt quite light
at heart as he started for a morning walk.
Morgan was still wearing the cowboy garb that he had drawn from the
bottom of his trunk among the things which he believed belonged to a
past age and closed period of his life's story. He had deliberated the
question well the night before, reaching the conclusion that, as he had
stepped out of his proper character, lapsed back, in a word, to
raw-handed dealings with the rough edges of the world, he would better
dress the part. He would be less conspicuous in that dress, and it would
be his introduction and credentials to the men of the range.
Last night's long vigil, tramping around the square in his high-heeled,
tight-fitting boots, had not hastened the cure of his bruised ankles and
sore feet. This morning he limped like a trapped wolf, as he said to
himself when he started to take a look around and see whether any of the
outlawed had made bold to open their doors.
Few people were out of bed in Ascalon at that hour, although the sun was
almost an hour high. As Morgan passed along he heard the crackling of
kindling being broken in kitchens. Here and there the eager smoke of
fresh fires rose straight toward the blue. No stores were open yet; the
doors of the saloons remained closed as the night before. Morgan paused
at the bank corner after making the round of the square.
Ahead of him the principal residence street of the town stretched, the
houses standing in exclusive withdrawal far apart on large plots of
ground, a treeless, dusty, unlovely lane. Here the summer sun raked roof
and window with its untempered fire; here the winds of winter bombarded
door and pane with shrapnel of sleet and charge of snow, whistling on
cornice and eaves, fluttering in chimney like the beat of exhausted
wings.
Morgan knew well enough how the place would appear in that bitter
season; he had lived in the lonely desolation of a village on the bald,
unsheltered plain. How did Rhetta Thayer endure the winter, he wondered,
when she could not gallop away into the friendly solitude of the clean,
unpeopled prairie? Where did she live? Which house would be Judge
Thayer's among the bright-painted dwellings along that raw lane? He
favored one of the few white ones, a house with a wide porch screened by
morning-glory vines, a gallant row of hollyhocks in the distance.
Lawn grass had been sown in many of the yards, where it had flourished
until the scorching summer drouth. Even now there were little rugs of
green against north walls where the noonday shadows fell, but the rest
of the lawns were withered and brown. Some hardy flowers, such as
zinnias and marigolds, stood clumped about dooryards; in the kitchen
gardens tasseled corn rose tall, dust thick on the guttered blades.
Morgan turned from this scene in which Ascalon presented its better
side, to skirmish along the street running behind Peden's establishment.
It might be well, for future exigencies, to fix as much of the geography
of the place in his mind as possible. He wondered if there had been a
back-door traffic in any of the saloons last night as he passed long
strings of empty beer kegs, concluding that it was very likely something
had been done in that way.
Across the street from Peden's back door was a large vacant piece of
ground, a wilderness of cans, bottles, packing boxes, broken barrels. On
one corner, diagonally across from where Morgan stood, facing on the
other street, a ragged, weathered tent was pitched. Out of this the
sound of contending children came, the strident, commanding voice of a
woman breaking sharply to still the commotion that shook her unstable
home. Morgan knew this must be the home of the cattle thief whose case
Judge Thayer had undertaken. He wondered why even a cattle thief would
choose that site at the back door of perdition to pitch his tent and
lodge his family.
A bullet clipping close past his ear, the sharp sound of a pistol shot
behind him, startled him out of this speculation.
Morgan did not believe at once, even as he wheeled gun in hand to
confront the careless gun-handler or the assassin, as the case might
prove, that the shot could have been intended for him, but out of
caution he darted as quick as an Indian behind a pyramid of beer kegs.
From that shelter he explored in the direction of the shot, but saw
nobody.
There was ample barrier for a lurking man all along the street on
Peden's side. From behind beer cases and kegs, whisky barrels, wagons,
corners of small houses, one could have taken a shot at him; or from a
window or back door. There was no smoke hanging to mark the spot.
Morgan slipped softly from his concealment, coming out at Peden's back
door. Bending low, he hurried back over the track he had come, keeping
the heaps of kegs, barrels, and boxes between him and the road. And
there, twenty yards or so distant, in a space between two wagons, he saw
a man standing, pistol in hand, all set and primed for another shot, but
looking rather puzzled and uncertain over the sudden disappearance of
his mark.
Morgan was upon him in a few silent strides, unseen and unheard, his gun
raised to throw a quick shot if the situation called for it. The man was
Dell Hutton, the county treasurer. His face was white. There was the
look in his eyes of a man condemned when he turned and confronted
Morgan.
"Who was it that shot at you, Morgan?" he inquired, his voice husky in
the fog of his fright. He was laboring hard to put a face on it that
would make him the champion of peace; he peered around with simulated
caution, as if he had rushed to the spot ready to uphold the law.
Morgan let the pitiful effort pass for what it was worth, and that was
very little.
"I don't know who it was, Hutton," he replied, with a careless laugh,
putting his pistol away. "If you see him, tell him I let a little thing
like that pass--once."
Morgan did not linger for any further words. Several shock-haired
children had come bursting from the tent, their contention silenced.
They stood looking at Morgan as he came back into the road, wonder in
their muggy faces. Heads appeared at windows, back doors opened
cautiously, showing eyes at cracks.
"Some fool shootin' off his gun," Morgan heard a man growl as he passed
under a window of a thin-sided house, from which the excited voices of
women came like the squeaks of unnested mice.
"What was goin' on back there?" Conboy inquired as Morgan approached the
hotel. The proprietor was a little way out from his door, anxiety,
rather than interest, in his face.
"Some fool shootin' off his gun, I guess," Morgan replied, feeling that
the answer fitted the case very well.
He gave Dora the same explanation when she met him at the blue door of
the dining-room, trouble in her fair blue eyes. She looked at him with
keen questioning, not satisfied that she had heard it all.
"I hope he burnt his fingers," she said.
CHAPTER XV
WILL HIS LUCK HOLD?
Dora escorted Morgan to a table apart from the few heavy feeders who
were already engaged, indicating to the other two girls who served with
her in the dining-room that this was her special customer and guest of
honor. She whirled the merry-go-round caster to bring the salt and
pepper to his hand; just so she placed his knife and fork, and plate
overturned to keep the flies off the business side of it. Then she
hurried away for his breakfast, asking no questions bearing on his
preferences or desires.
A plain breakfast in those vigorous times was unvarying--beefsteak, ham
or bacon to give it a savor, eggs, fried potatoes, hot biscuits, coffee.
It was the same as dinner, which came on the stroke of twelve, and none
of your six-o'clock pretenses about _that_ meal, except there was no
pie; identical with supper, save for the boiled potatoes and rice
pudding. A man of proper proportions never wanted any more; he could not
thrive on any less. And the only kind of a liver they ever worried about
in that time on the plains of Kansas was a white one. That was the only
disease of that organ known.
Dora was troubled; her face reflected her unrest as glass reflects
firelight, her blue eyes were clouded by its gloom. She made a pretense
of brushing crumbs from the cloth where there were no crumbs, in order
to furnish an excuse to stoop and bring her lips nearer Morgan's ear.
"He's comin' on the one-twenty this afternoon--I got it straight he's
comin'. I thought maybe you'd like to know," she said.
Morgan lifted his eyes in feigned surprise at this news, not having it
in his heart to cloud her generous act by the revelation of a suspicion
that it was no news to him.
"You mean----?"
"I got it straight," Dora nodded.
"Thank you, Miss Dora."
"I hope to God," she said, for it was their manner to speak ardently in
Ascalon in those days, "you'll beat him to it when he gets off of the
train!"
"A man can only do his best, Dora," he said gently, moved by her honest
friendship, simple wild thing though she was.
"If I was a man I'd take my gun and go with you to meet him," she
declared.
"I know you would. But maybe there'll not be any fuss at all."
"There'll be fuss enough, all right!" Dora protested. "If he comes
alone--but maybe he'll not _come_ alone."
A man who rose from a near-by table came over to shake hands with
Morgan, and express his appreciation for the good beginning he had made
as peace officer of the town. Dora snatched Morgan's cup and hastened
away for more coffee. When she returned the citizen was on his way to
the door.
"Craddock used to come in here and wolf his meals down," she said,
picking up her theme in the same troubled key, "just like it didn't
amount to nothing to kill a man a day. I looked to see blood on the
tablecloth every time his hand touched it."
"It's a shame you girls had to wait on the brute," Morgan said.
"Girls! he wouldn't let anybody but me wait on him." Dora frowned, her
face coloring. She bent a little, lowering her voice. "Why, Mr. Morgan,
what do you suppose? He wanted me to _marry_ him!"
"That old buffalo wrangler? Well, he _is_ kind of previous!"
"He's too fresh to keep, I told him. Marry _him_! He used to come in
here, Mr. Morgan, and put his hat down by his foot so he could grab it
and run out and kill another man without losin' time. He never used to
take his guns off and hang 'em up like other gentlemen when they eat. He
just set there watchin' and turnin' his mean old eyes all the time. He's
afraid of them, I know by the way he always tried to look behind him
without turnin' his head, never sayin' a word to anybody, he's afraid."
"Afraid of whom, Dora?"
"The ghosts of them murdered men!"
Morgan shook his head after seeming to think it over a little while. "I
don't believe they'd trouble him much, Dora."
"I'd rather wait on a dog!" she said, scorn and rebellion in her pretty
eyes.
"You can marry somebody else and beat him on that game, anyhow. I'll
bet there are plenty of them standing around waiting."
"O Mr. Morgan!" Dora was drowned in blushes, greatly pleased. "Not so
many as you might think," turning her eyes upon him with coquettish
challenge, "only Mr. Gray and Riley Caldwell, the printer on the
_Headlight_."
"Mr. Gray, the druggist?"
"Yes, but he's too old for me!" Dora sighed, "forty if he's a day. He's
got money, though, and he's perfec'ly _grand_ on the pieanno. You ought
to hear him play _The Maiden's Prayer_!"
"I'll listen out for him. I saw him washing his window a while ago--a
tall man with a big white shirt."
"Yes," abstractedly, "that was him. He's an elegant fine man, but I
don't give a snap for none of 'em. I wish I could leave this town and
never come back. You'll be in for dinner, won't you?" as Morgan pushed
back from the repletion of that standard meal.
"And for supper, too, I hope," he said, turning it off as a joke.
"I hope to God!" said Dora fervently, seeing no joke in the uncertainty
at all.
Excitement was laying hold of Ascalon even at that early hour. When
Morgan went on the street after breakfast he found many people going
about, gathering in groups along the shady fronts, or hastening singly
in the manner of men bound upon the confirmation of unusual news. The
pale fish of the night were out in considerable numbers, leaking
cigarette smoke through all the apertures of their faces as they
grouped according to their kind to discuss the probabilities of the
day. Seth Craddock was coming back with fire in his red eyes; their
deliverer was on his way.
There was no secret of Seth's coming any longer. Even Peden leered in
triumph when he met Morgan as he sauntered outside his closed door in
the peculiar distinction of his black coat, which the strong sun of that
summer morning was not powerful enough to strip from his broad back.
None of the saloons or resorts made an attempt to open their doors to
business. The proprietors appeared to have, on the other hand, a secret
pleasure in keeping them closed, perhaps counting on the gain that would
be theirs when this brief prohibition should come to its end.
Opposed to this pleasurable expectancy of the proscribed was the
uneasiness and doubt of the respectable. True, this man Morgan had taken
Seth Craddock's gun away from him once, but luck must have had much to
do with his preservation in that perilous adventure. Morgan had rounded
up the Texas men quartered on the town under Craddock's patronage, also,
but they were sluggish from their debauch, and he had approached them
with the caution of a man coming up on the blind side of a horse.
Yesterday that had looked like a big, heroic thing for one man to
accomplish, but in the light of reflection today it must be admitted
that it was mainly luck.
Yes, Morgan had closed up the town last night, defying even Peden in his
own hall, where defiance as a rule meant business for the undertaker.
But the glamour of his morning's success was still over him at that
time; Peden and his bouncers were a little cautious, a little cowed. He
could not close the town up another night; murmurs of defiance were
beginning to rise already.
And so the people who had applauded his drastic enforcement of the law
last night, became of no more support to Morgan today than a furrow of
sand. Luck was a great thing if a man could play it forever, they said,
but it was too much to believe that luck would hold even twice with
Morgan when he confronted Seth Craddock that afternoon.
Morgan walked about the square that morning like a stranger. Few spoke
to him, many turned inward from their doors when they saw him coming,
afraid that a little friendship publicly displayed might be laid up
against them for a terrible reckoning of interest by and by. Morgan was
neither offended nor downcast by this public coldness in the quarter
where he had a right to expect commendation and support. He understood
too well the lengths that animosities ran in such a town as Ascalon. A
living coward was more comfortable than a dead reformer, according to
their philosophy.
It was when passing the post-office, about nine o'clock in the morning,
that Morgan met Rhetta Thayer. She saw him coming, and waited. Her face
was flushed; indignation disturbed the placidity of her eyes.
"They don't deserve it, the cowards!" she burst out, after a greeting
too serious to admit a smile.
"Deserve what?" he inquired, looking about in mystification, wondering
if something had happened in the post-office to fire this indignation.
"The help and protection of a brave man!" she said.
Morgan was so suddenly confused by this frank, impetuous appreciation of
his efforts, for there was no mistaking the application, that he could
not find a word. Rhetta did not give him much time, to be sure, but ran
on with her denunciation of the citizenry of the town.
"I wouldn't turn a hand for them again, Mr. Morgan--I'd throw up the
whole thing and let them cringe like dogs before that murderer when he
comes back! It's good enough for them, it's all they deserve."
"You can't expect them to be very warm toward a stranger," he said,
excusing them according to what he knew to be their due.
"They're afraid you can't do it, they're telling one another your luck
will fail this time. Luck! that's all the sense there is in _that_ bunch
of cowards."
"They may be right," he said, thoughtfully.
"You know they're not right!" she flashed back, defending him against
himself as though he were another.
"I don't expect any generosity from them," he said, gentle in his tone
and undisturbed. "They're afraid if my luck should happen to turn
against me they'd have to pay for any friendship shown me here this
morning. Business is business, even in Ascalon."
"Luck!" she scoffed. "It's funny you're the only lucky man that's struck
this town in a long time, then. If it's all luck, why don't some of them
try their hands at rounding up the crooks and killers of this town and
showing them the road the way you did that gang yesterday? Yes, I know
all about that kind of luck."
Morgan walked with her toward Judge Thayer's office, whither she was
bound with the mail. Behind them the loafers snickered and passed quips
of doubtful humor and undoubted obscenity, but careful to present the
face of decorum until Morgan was well beyond their voices. No matter
what doubt they had of his luck holding with Seth Craddock, they were
not of a mind to make a trial of it on themselves.
"I think the best thing to do with this town is just let it go till it
dries up and blows away," she said, with the vindictive impatience of
youth. "What little good there is in it isn't worth the trouble of
cleaning up to save."
"Your father's got everything centered here, he told me. There must be a
good many honest people in the same boat."
"Maybe we could sell out for something, enough to take us away from
here. Of course we expected Ascalon to turn out a different town when we
came here, the railroad promised to do so much. But there's nothing to
make a town when the cattle are gone. We might as well let it begin to
die right now."
"You're gloomy this morning, Miss Thayer. You remember the Mennonites
that wanted to settle here and were afraid?"
"There's no use for you to throw your life away making the country safe
for them."
"Of course not. I hadn't thought of them."
"Nor any of these cold-nosed cowards that turn their backs on you for
fear your luck's going to change. Luck! the fools!"
"They don't figure in the case at all, Miss Thayer."
"If it's on account of your own future, if you're trampling down a place
in the briars to make your bed, as pa called it, then I think you can
find a nicer place to camp than Ascalon. It never will repay the peril
you'll run and the blood you'll lose--have lost already."
"I'm further out of the calculation than anybody, Miss Thayer."
"I don't see what other motive there can be, then," she reflected, eyes
bent to the ground as she walked slowly by his side.
"A lady asked me to undertake it. I'm doing it for her," he replied.
"She was a thoughtless, selfish person!" Rhetta said, her deep feeling
stressed in the flush of her face, her accusation as vehement as if she
laid charges against another. "Last night she thought it over; she had
time to realize the danger she'd asked a generous stranger to assume.
She wants to withdraw the request today--she asks you to give it up and
let Ascalon go on its wicked way."
"Tell her," said he gently, holding her pleading, pained eyes a moment
with his assuring gaze, "that a man can't drop a piece of work like this
and turn his back on it and walk away. They'd say in Ascalon that he was
a coward, and they'd be telling the truth."
"Oh! I oughtn't have argued you into it!" she regretted, bitter in her
self-blame. "But the thought of that terrible, cruel man, of all he's
killed, all he will kill if he comes back--made a selfish coward of me.
We had gone through a week of terror--you can't understand a woman's
terror of that kind of men, storming the streets at night uncurbed!"
"A man can only guess."
"I was so grateful to you for driving them away from here, for purifying
the air after them like a rain, that I urged you to go ahead and finish
the job, just as if we were conferring a great favor! I didn't think at
the time, but I've thought it all over since."
"You mustn't worry about it any more. It is a great favor, a great
honor, to be asked to serve you at all."
"You're too generous, Mr. Morgan. There are only a few of us here who
care about order and peace--you can see that for yourself this
morning--no matter what assurance they gave you yesterday. Let it go. If
you don't want to get your horse and ride away, you can at least resign.
You've got justification enough for that, you've seen the men that
promised to support you yesterday turn their backs on you when you came
up the street today. They don't want the town shut up, they don't want
it changed--not when it hits their pocketbooks. You can tell pa that,
and resign--or I'll tell him--it was my fault, I got you into it."
"You couldn't expect me to do that--you don't expect it," he chided, his
voice grave and low.
"I can want you to do it--I don't expect it."
"Of course not. We'll not talk about it any more."
They continued toward her father's office in silence, crossing the
stretch of barren in which the little catalpa tree stood. Rhetta looked
up into his face.
"You've never killed a man, Mr. Morgan," she said, more as a positive
statement than as a question.
"No, I never have, Miss Thayer," Morgan answered her, as ingenuously
sincere as she had asked it.
"I think I know it by the touch of a man's hand," she said, her face
growing pale from her deep revulsion. "I shudder at the touch of blood.
If you could be spared that in the ordeal ahead of you!"
"There's no backing out of it. The challenge has passed," he said.
"No, there's no way. He's coming--he knows you're waiting for him. But I
hope you'll not have to--I hope you'll come out of it _clean_! A curse
of blood falls on every man that takes this office. I wish--I hope, you
can keep clear of that."
CHAPTER XVI
THE MEAT HUNTER COMES
The few courageous and hopeful ones who remained loyal to Morgan were
somewhat assured, the doubtful ones agitated a bit more in their
indecision, when he appeared on horseback a little past the turn of day.
These latter people, whose courage had leaked out overnight, now began
to weigh again their business interests and personal safety in the
balance of their wavering judgment.
Morgan, on horseback, looked like a lucky man; they admitted that. Much
more lucky, indeed, than he had appeared that morning when he went
limping around the square. It was a question whether to come over to his
side again, openly and warmly, or to hold back until he proved himself
to be as lucky as he looked. A man might as well nail up his door and
leave town as fall under the disfavor of Seth Craddock. So, while they
wavered, they were still not quite convinced.
Prominent among the business men who had revised their attitude on
reform as the shadow of Seth Craddock approached Ascalon was Earl Gray,
the druggist, one of the notables on Dora Conboy's waiting list.
Druggist Gray was a man who wore bell-bottomed trousers and a moleskin
vest without a coat. His hair had a fetching crinkle to it, which he
prized above all things in bottles and out, and wore long, like the man
on the label.
There was so much hair about Mr. Gray, counting mustache and all, that
his face and body seemed drained and attenuated by the contribution of
sustenance to keep the adornment flourishing in its brown abundance. For
Gray was a tall, thin, bony-kneed man, with long flat feet like wedges
of cheese. His eyes were hollow and melancholy, as if he bore a sorrow;
his nose was high and bony, and bleak in his sharp, thin-cheeked face.
Gray expressed himself openly to the undertaker, in whom he found a
cautious, but warm supporter of his views. There would be fevers and
ills with Ascalon closed up, Gray said he knew very well, just as there
would be deaths and burials in the natural course of events under the
same conditions. But there would be neither patches for the broken,
stitches for the cut nor powders for the headaches of debauchery called
for then as now; and all the burying there would be an undertaker might
do under his thumb nail.
They'd go to drugging themselves with boneset tea, and mullein tea, and
bitter-root powders and wahoo bark, said Gray. Likewise, they'd turn to
burying one another, after the ways of pioneers, who were as resourceful
in deaths and funerals as in drugs and fomentations. Pioneers, such as
would be left in that country after Morgan had shut Ascalon up and
driven away those who were dependent on one another for their skinning
and fleecing, filching and plundering, did not lean on any man. Such as
came there to plow up the prairies would be of the same stuff,
rough-barked men and women who called in neither doctor to be born nor
undertaker to be buried.
It was a gloomy outlook, the town closed up and everybody gone, said
Gray. What would a man do with his building, what would a man do with
his stock?
"Maybe Craddock ain't no saint and angel, but he makes business in this
town," said Gray.
"Makes business!" the undertaker echoed, with abstraction and looking
far away as if he already saw the train of oncoming, independent,
self-burying pioneers over against the horizon.
"If this feller's luck don't go ag'in' him, you might as well ship all
your coffins away but one--they'll need one to bury the town in. What do
you think of him ridin' around the depot down there, drawin' a deadline
that no man ain't goin' to be allowed to cross till the one-twenty pulls
out? Kind of high-handed deal, I call it!"
"I've got a case of shrouds comin' in by express on that train, two
cases layin' in my place waitin' on 'em," the undertaker said,
resentfully, waking out of his abstraction and apparent apathy.
"_You_ have!" said Gray, eying him suddenly.
"He stopped me as I was goin' over to wait around till the train come
in, drove me back like I was a cow. He said it didn't make no difference
how much business I had at the depot, it would have to wait till the
train was gone. When a citizen and a taxpayer of this town can't even
cross the road like a shanghai rooster, things is comin' to a hell of a
pass!"
"Well, I ain't got no business at the depot this afternoon, or I bet you
a cracker I'd be over there," Gray boasted. "I think I'll close up a
while and go down to the hotel where I can see better--it's only forty
minutes till she's due."
"Might as well, everybody's down there. You won't sell as much as a pack
of gum till the train's gone and this thing's off of people's minds."
Gray went in for his hat, to spend a good deal of time at the glass
behind his prescription case setting it at the most seductive slant upon
his luxuriant brown curls. This was an extremely enticing small hat,
just a shade lighter brown than the druggist's wavy hair. It looked like
a cork in a bottle placed by a tipsy hand as Druggist Gray passed down
the street toward the hotel, to post himself where he might see how well
Morgan's luck was going to hold in this encounter with the meat hunter
of the Cimarron.
As the undertaker had said, nearly everybody in Ascalon was already
collected in front and in the near vicinity of the hotel, fringing the
square in gay-splotched crowds. Beneath the canopy of the Elkhorn hotel
many were assembled, as many indeed, as could conveniently stand, for
that bit of shade was a blessing on the sun-parched front of Ascalon's
bleak street.
Business was generally suspended in this hour of uncertainty, public
feeling was drawn as tight as a banjo head in the sun. In the courthouse
the few officials and clerks necessary to the county's business were at
the windows looking upon the station, all expecting a tragedy of such
stirring dimensions as Ascalon never had witnessed.
The stage was set, the audience was in waiting, one of the principal
actors stood visible in the wings. With the rush of the passenger train
from the east Seth Craddock would make his dramatic entry, in true color
with his violent notoriety and prominence in the cast.
Unless friends came with Craddock, these two men would hold the stage
for the enactment of that swift drama alone. Morgan, silent, determined,
inflexible, had drawn his line around the depot, across which no man
dared to pass. No friend of Craddock should meet him for support of
warning word or armed hand; no innocent one should be jeopardized by a
curiosity that might lead to death.
The moving question now was, had Peden's gun-notable friends joined
Craddock? If so, it would call for a vast amount of luck to overcome
their combined numbers and dexterity.
Morgan was troubled by this same question as he waited in the saddle
where the sun bore hot upon him at the side of the station platform.
About there, at that point, the station agent had told him, the
smoking-car would stand when the train came to a stop, the engine at the
water tank. When Craddock came down out of the train, would he come
alone?
Morgan was mounted on the horse borrowed from Stilwell, an agile young
animal, tractable and intelligent. A yellow slicker was rolled and tied
at the cantle of the saddle; at the horn a coil of brown rope hung,
pliant and smooth from much use upon the range among cattle. Morgan's
rifle was slung on the saddle in its worn scabbard, its battered stock,
from which the varnish had gone long ago in the hard usage of many
years, close to the rider's hand.
It needed no announcement of wailing whistle or clanging bell to tell
Ascalon of the approach of a train from the east. In that direction the
fall of the land toward the Arkansas River began many miles distant from
the town, seeming to blend downward from a great height which dimmed out
in blue haze against the horizon. A little way along this high pitch of
land, before it turned down the grade that led into the river valley,
the railroad ran transversely.
The moment a train mounted this land's edge and swept along the straight
transverse section of track, it was in full sight of Ascalon, day or
night, except in stormy weather, although many miles away. A man still
had ample time to shine his shoes, pack his valise, put on his collar
and coat--if he wore them--walk to the depot and buy his ticket, after
the train came in sight on top of this distant hill.
Once the train headed straight for Ascalon it dropped out of sight, and
one unused to the trend of things might wonder if it had gone off on
another line. Presently it would appear again, laboring up out of a dip,
rise the intervening billow of land, small as a toy that one could hold
in the hand, and sink out of sight again. This way it approached
Ascalon, now promising, now denying, drawing into plainer sight with
every rise.
On this particular afternoon when the sun-baked people of Ascalon stood
waiting in such tensity of expectation that their minds were ready to
crack like the dry, contracting earth beneath their feet, it seemed that
nature had laid off that land across which the railroad ran with the
sole view of adding to the dramatic value of Seth Craddock's entry in
this historic hour. Certainly art could not have devised a more
effective means of whetting the anxiety, straining the suspense, than
this.
When the train first came in sight over the hill there was a murmur, a
movement of feet as people shifted to points believed to be more
advantageous for seeing the coming drama; watches clicked, comments
passed on the exactness to the schedule; breaths were drawn with fresh
tingling of hope, or falling of doubt and despair.
Morgan was watching that far skyline for the first smoke, for the first
gleam of windows in the sun as the train swept round the curve heading
for a little while into the north. He noted the murmur and movement of
the watchers as it came in sight; wondered if any breast but one was
agitated by a pang of friendly concern, wondered if any hand loosed
weapon in its sheath to strike in his support if necessity should call
for such intervention. He knew that Rhetta Thayer stood in the shade of
the bank with her father and others; he was cheered by the support of
her presence to witness his triumph or fall.
Now, as the train swept into the first obscuring swale, Morgan rode
around the depot again to see that none had slipped through either in
malice or curiosity. Only the station agent was in sight, pulling a
truck with three trunks on it to the spot where he estimated the
baggage-car would stop. Morgan rode back again to take his stand at the
point where arrivals by train crossed from depot into town. His left
hand was toward the waiting crowd, kept back by his injunction fifty
yards or more from the station; his right toward the track on which the
train would come.
Conversation in the crowd fell away. Peden, garbed in his long coat, was
seen shouldering through in front of the hotel, the nearest point to the
set and waiting stage. As always, Peden wore a pistol strapped about him
on ornate belt, the holster carrying the weapon under the skirt of his
coat. His presence on the forward fringe of the crowd seemed to many as
an upraised hand to strike the waiting horseman in the back.
Morgan saw Peden when he came and took his stand there, and saw others
in his employ stationed along the front of the line. He believed they
were there to throw their weight on Craddock's beam of the balance the
moment they should see him outmastered and outweighed.
Because he mistrusted these men, because he did not know, indeed,
whether there was a man among all those who had pledged their moral
support who would lift a hand to aid him even if summoned to do so,
Morgan kept his attention divided, one eye on the signs and portents of
the crowd, one on keeping the depot platform clear.
Morgan did not know whether even Judge Thayer and the men who had
guarded the bank with him would risk one shot in his defense if the
outlawed forces should sweep forward and overwhelm him. He doubted it
very much. It was well enough to delegate this business to a stranger,
one impartial between the lines, but they could not be expected to turn
their weapons on their fellow-townsmen and depositors in the bank, no
matter how their money came, no matter how much the law might lack an
upholding hand.
The train came clattering over the switch, safety valve roaring, bell
ringing as gaily as if arriving in Ascalon were a joyous event in its
day. Conductor and brakeman stood on the steps ready to swing to the
platform; the express messenger lolled with bored weariness in the door
of his car, scorning the dangerous notoriety of the town by exposing to
the eye all the boxed treasure that it contained. Passengers crowded
platforms, leaning and looking, ready to alight for a minute, so they
might be able to relate the remainder of their lives how they braved the
perils of Ascalon one time and came out unsinged.
A movement went over the watching people of the town, assembled along
its business front, as wind ripples suddenly a field of grain. Nobody
had breath for a word; dry lips were pressed tightly in the varying
emotions of hope, fear, expectancy, desire. Morgan was seen to be busy
for a moment with something about his saddle; it was thought he was
drawing his rifle out of its case.
Nearly opposite where Morgan waited, the first coach of the train
stopped. Instantly, like children freed from school, the eager
passengers poured off for their adventurous breath of this most wicked
town's intoxicating air. Morgan's whole attention was now fixed on the
movement around the train. He shifted his horse to face that way,
risking what might develop behind him, one hand engaged with the bridle
rein, the other seemingly dropped carelessly on his thigh.
And in that squaring of expectation, that pause of breathless waiting,
Seth Craddock descended from the smoking-car, his alpaca coat carried in
the crook of his left elbow, his right hand lingering a moment on the
guard of the car step. The hasty ones who had waited on the car platform
were down ahead of him, standing a little way from the steps; others who
wanted to get off came pressing behind him, in their ignorance that they
were handling a bit of Ascalon's most infernal furnishing, pushing him
out into the timid crowd of their fellows.
A moment Craddock stood, taller than the tallest there, sweeping his
quick glance about for signs of the expected hostility, the trinkets of
silver on the band of his costly new sombrero shining in the sun. Then
he came striding among the gaping passengers, like a man stalking among
tall weeds, something unmistakably expressive of disdain in his
carriage.
There he paused again, and put on his coat, plainly mystified and
troubled by the absence of townspeople from the depot, and the sight of
them lined up across the square as if they waited a circus parade. All
that he saw between himself and that fringe of puzzling, silent people
was a cowboy sitting astraddle of his bay horse at the end of the
station platform.
And as Craddock started away from the crowd of curious passengers who
were whispering and speculating behind him, pointing him out to each
other, wondering what notable he might be; as Craddock started down the
platform away from there, the voice of the conductor warning all to
clamber aboard, the waiting cowboy tightened the reins a little, causing
his horse to prick up its ears and start with a thrill of expectancy
which the rider could feel ripple over its smooth hide under the
pressure of his knees.
Craddock came on down the platform, turning his head on his long neck in
the way of a man entirely mystified and suspicious, alone, unsupported
by even as much as the shadow of a strange gun-slinger or local friend.
What was passing through the fellow's head Morgan could pretty well
guess. There was a little break of humor in it, for all the tight-drawn
nerves, for all the chance, for all the desperation of the gathering
moment. The grim old killer couldn't make out whether it was through
admiration of him the people had gathered to welcome him home, or in
expectation of something connected with the arrival of the train. Two
rods or so from where Morgan waited him, Craddock stopped to look back
at the train, now gathering slow headway, and around the deserted
platform, down which the station agent came dragging a mail sack.
It was when he turned again from this suspicious questioning into things
which gave him back no reply, that Craddock recognized the hitherto
unsuspected cowboy. In a start he stiffened to action, flinging hand to
his pistol. But a heartbeat quicker, like a flash of sunbeam from a
mirror, the coiled rope flew out from Morgan's high-flung arm.
As the swift-running noose settled over Craddock's body, the horse
leaped at the pressure of its rider's knees. Craddock fired as the
flying rope snatched him from his feet, the noose binding his arms
impotently to his sides; in his rage he fired again and again as he
dragged in ludicrous tangle of long, thrashing legs from the platform
into the dust.
There, in a cloud of obscuring dust from the trampled road, the horse
holding the line taut, Morgan flung from the saddle in the nimble way of
a range man, bent over the fallen slayer of men a little while. When the
first of the crowd came breaking across the broad space intervening and
drew up panting and breathless in admiration of the bold thing they had
witnessed, Seth Craddock lay hog-tied and harmless on the ground, one
pistol a few feet from where he struggled in his ropes, the other in the
holster at his side.
And there came Judge Thayer, in his capacity as mayor, officious and
radiant, proud and filled with a new feeling of safety and importance,
and took the badge of office from Craddock's breast, in all haste, as if
it were the most important act in this spectacular triumph, this
bloodless victory over a bloody man.
CHAPTER XVII
WITH CLEAN HANDS
Seth Craddock was a defiant, although a fallen man. He refused to resign
the office of marshal of the third-class city of Ascalon when Morgan
released his feet at Judge Thayer's direction, allowing him to stand.
Somebody brought his hat and put it down harshly on his small,
turtle-like head, flaring out his big red ears. There he stood,
glowering, dusty, blood on his face from an abrasion he had got in the
rough handling at the end of Morgan's rope.
Judge Thayer said it made no difference whether he gave up the office
willingly, he was without a voice in the matter, anyhow. He was fired,
and that's all there was to it. But no, said Seth; not at all. The
statutes upheld him, the constitution supported him, and hell and
damnation and many other forces which he enumerated in his red-tongued
defiance, could not move him out of that office. He demanded to be
allowed to consult his lawyer, he glared around and cursed the curious
and unawed public which laughed at his plight and the figure he cut,
ordering somebody to go and fetch the county attorney, on pain of death
when he should come again into the freedom of his hands.
But nobody moved, except to shift from one foot to the other and laugh.
The terror seemed to have departed out of Seth Craddock's name and
presence; a terrible man is no longer fearful when he has been dragged
publicly at the end of a cow rope and tied up in the public place like a
calf for the branding iron.
The county attorney was discreet enough to keep his distance. He did not
come forward with advice on habeas corpus and constitutional rights.
Only Earl Gray, the druggist, with seven kinds of perfumery on his hair,
came out of the crowd with smirking face, ingratiating, servile,
offering Morgan a cigar. The look that Morgan gave him would have wilted
the tobacco in its green leaf. It wilted Druggist Gray. He turned back
into the crowd and eliminated himself from the day's adventure like
smoke on the evening wind.
Peden was seen, soon after Craddock's dusty downfall, making his way
back to the shelter of his hall, a cloud on his dark face, a sneer of
contempt in his eyes. His bearing was proclamation that he had expected
a great deal more of Seth Craddock, and that the support of his
influence was from that moment withdrawn. But there was nothing in his
manner of a disturbed or defeated man. Those who knew him best, indeed,
felt that he had played only a preliminary hand and, finding it weak,
had taken up the deck for a stronger deal.
Seth Craddock stood with his back to the station platform, hands bound
behind him, his authority gone. A little way to one side Morgan waited
beside his horse, his pistol under his hand, rifle on the saddle, not so
confident that all was won as to lay himself open to a surprise. Judge
Thayer was holding a session with Craddock, the town, good and bad,
looking on with varying emotions of mirth, disappointment, and disgust.
Judge Thayer unbuckled Craddock's belt and remaining pistol, picked up
the empty weapon from the ground, sheathed it in the holster opposite
its once terrifying mate, and gave them to Morgan. Morgan hung them on
his saddle horn, and the wives and mothers of Ascalon who had trembled
for their husbands and sons when they heard the roar of those guns in
days past, drew great breaths of relief, and looked into each other's
faces and smiled.
"We can't hold you for any of the killings you've done here, Seth,
though some of them were unjustified, we know," Judge Thayer said.
"You've been cleared by the coroner's jury in each case, there's no use
for us to open them again. But you'll have to leave this town. Your
friends went yesterday, escorted by Mr. Morgan across the Arkansas
River. You can follow them if you want to--you might overtake 'em
somewhere down in the Nation--you'll have to go in the same direction,
in peace if you will, otherwise if you won't."
"I'm marshal of this town," Seth still persisted, in the belief that
forces were gathering to his rescue, one could see. "The only way I'll
ever leave till I'm ready to go'll be in a box!"
Certainly, Seth did not end the defiance and the declaration that way,
nor issue it from his mouth in such pale and commonplace hues. Judge
Thayer argued with him, after his kindly disposition, perhaps not a
little sorry for the man who had outgrown his office and abused the
friend who had elevated him to it.
Seth remained as obdurate as a trapped wolf. He roved his eyes around,
craned his long, wrinkled neck, looking for the succor that was so long
in coming. He repeated, with blasting enlargement, that the only way
they could send him out of Ascalon would be in a box.
Judge Thayer drew apart to consult Morgan, in low tones. Morgan was
undisturbed by Craddock's unbending opinion that he had plenty of law
behind him to sustain his contention that he could not be removed from
office. It did not matter how much ammunition a man had if he couldn't
shoot it. It was Morgan's opinion, given with the light of humor
quickening in his eyes, that they ought to take Craddock at his word.
"Ship him out?" said Judge Thayer.
"In a box," Morgan nodded, face as sober as judgment, the humor growing
in his eyes.
"But we can't butcher the fellow like a hog!" Judge Thayer protested.
"Live hogs are shipped in boxes, right along," Morgan explained.
Judge Thayer saw the light; his pepper-and-salt whiskers twinkled and
spread around his mouth, and rose so high in their bristling over his
silent laughter that they threatened his eyes. He turned to Craddock,
forcing a sober front.
"All right, Seth, we'll take you up on it. You're going out of town in a
box," he said.
Judge Thayer ordered the undertaker to bring over a coffin box, the
longest one he had. The word ran like a prairie fire from those who
heard the order given, that they were going to shoot Craddock for his
crimes and bury him on the spot.
There was not a little disappointment, but more relief, in the public
mind when it became understood that Craddock was not to be shot. As a
mockery of his past oppression and terrible name, he was to be nailed up
in a box and shipped out like a snake. And so it turned out again in
Ascalon that comedy came in to end the play where tragedy had begun it.
Morgan bore no part in this unexpected climax to his hard-straining and
doubt-clouded day. He stood by watchful and alert, a great peace in his
mind, a great lightness. He had come through it according to Rhetta
Thayer's wish, according to his own desire, with no man's blood upon his
hands.
There were many willing ones who came forward to make light the labor of
Seth Craddock's packing. They unbound his hands with derision and
bundled him into the capacious long box against his strivings and curses
with scorn. Morgan suggested the enclosure of a jug of water. Let him
frizzle and fry, they said. They'd bore an auger hole or two in the box
to give him air, and that was greater humanity than he deserved. Morgan
insisted on at least a bottle of water, and had his way, against
grumbling.
The undertaker officiated, as if it were a regular funeral, putting the
long screws in the stout lid while citizens sat on it to hold the
explosive old villain down. They fastened him in as securely as if he
were a dead man, in all sobriety, boxed up againt the worms of the
grave.
Then the question rose of where to send him, and how. On the first part
of it the public was of undivided mind. No matter where he went, or in
what direction, let it be far. On the second division there was some
argument. Some held for shipping him by freight, as livestock, and some
were for express as the quickest way to the end of a long journey. For
the farther out of sight he could be carried in the shortest possible
time, they said, the better for all concerned.
There the station agent was called in to lend the counsel of his
official position. A man could not be shipped by freight if alive, he
said. He could be sent as a corpse is sent, by paying the rate of a fare
and a half and stowing him in the baggage-car with trunks and dogs. The
undertaker was of the same opinion, which he expressed gravely, with
becoming sadness and gloom.
Judge Thayer wrote the address on the shipping tag, the undertaker
tacked it on Seth Craddock's case, and then the amazed people of Ascalon
came forward surrounding the case, and read:
Chief of Police,
Kansas City, Missouri.
That was the consignee of the strangest shipment ever billed out of
Ascalon. People wondered what the chief of police would do with his
gift. They wished him well of it, with all their hearts.
Meantime Seth Craddock, with the blood of eight men on his hands, was
making more noise in the coffin box than a sack of cats. It was a most
undignified way for a man of his sanguinary reputation to accept this
humiliation at the hands of a public that he had outraged. A mule in a
box stall could not have made a greater clatter with heels against
planks than the fallen city marshal of Ascalon drummed up with his on
the stout end of the coffin box. He cursed as he kicked, and called in
muffled voice on the friends of his brief day of power to come and set
him free.
But the sycophants who had hung to his heels like hand-fed dogs when
power glorified him like a glistening garment and exalted him high above
other men, turned out as all time-servers and cowardly courtiers always
finish when the object of their transitory adulation falls with his
belly in the dust. They sneered, they jeered, they turned white-shirted
coatless backs upon his box with derisive, despising laughter on their
night-pale faces. Seth Craddock was a mighty man as long as he had a
license to walk about and slay, but fastened up in a box like a corpse
for shipment at the rate of the dead, he was only a hull and an empty
husk of a man.
They said he was a coward; they had known it all along. It called for a
coward to shoot men down like rabbits. That was not the way of a brave
and worthy man. This great moral conclusion they reached readily enough,
Seth Craddock securely caged before them. If Morgan's rope had missed
its mark, if a snarl had shortened it a foot; if Craddock had been a
second sooner in starting to draw his gun, this wave of moral exaltation
would not have descended upon Ascalon that day.
There was some concern over the holding quality of the box. People
feared Craddock might burst out of it before going far, and return
against them for the reckoning so volubly threatened. The undertaker
quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing
out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out
of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that
thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help if _he_ screwed him
shut in that most competent container of the mortal remains of man.
Thus assured, the citizens carried the box in festive spirit, with more
charity and kindness toward old Seth than he deserved, and stood it on
end in the shadow of the depot. There was an auger hole on a level with
Seth's eye, through which he could glower out for his last look on
Ascalon, and the people who gathered around to deride him and triumph in
his overthrow.
Through this small opening Seth cursed them, checking such of them off
by name as he recognized, setting them down in his memory for the
vengeance he declared he would return speedily and exact. There he
stood, like Don Quixote in his cage, his red eye to the hole, swearing
as terribly as any man that marched in that hard-boiled army in Flanders
long ago.
Those who had been awed by his grim silence in the days when he ruled
above all law in Ascalon, were surprised now by his volubility. Under
provocation Craddock could say as much as the next man, it appeared.
Unquestionably, he could express his limited thoughts in words luridly
strange. He wearied of this arraignment at last, and subsided. Long
before the train came he lapsed into his natural blue sulkiness,
remaining as quiet behind his auger hole as one ready for the grave.
They loaded Craddock on a truck when the train from the west whistled,
trundled him down the platform and posted him ready to load in the
baggage-car, attended by a large, jubilant crowd. There was so much
hilarity in this gathering for a funeral, indeed, and so much profanity,
denunciation, and threat issuing out of the coffin box--for Seth broke
out again the minute they moved him--that the baggage-man aboard the
train demurred on receiving the shipment. He closed the door against the
eager citizens who mounted the truck to shove the box aboard, leaving
only opening enough for him to stand flatwise in and shout up the
platform to the conductor.
This conductor was a notable man in his day on that pioneer railroad. He
was a bony, irascible man, fiery of face, with a high hook nose that had
been smashed to one side in some battle when he was construction foreman
in his days of lowly beginning. He wore a pistol strapped around his
long coat, which garment was braided and buttoned like an ambassador's,
and he was notable throughout the land of cattle and cards as a man who
could reach far and hit hard. If Seth Craddock had applied to him for
instruction in invective and profanity, veteran that he was he would
have been put at the very foot of the primer class.
Now this mighty man came striding down the platform, thrusting his way
through the crowd with no gentle elbow, hand on his gun, displeasure
ready to explode from his mouth. The baggage-man asked advice on
accepting the proffered box, with fare and a half ticket attached as in
the case of a corpse.
The conductor remarked, with terrible sarcasm, that the corpse was the
noisiest one he ever had encountered, even in that cursed and benighted
and seven times outcast hole. He knocked on the box and demanded of the
occupant an account of himself, and the part he was bearing in this
pleasant little episode, this beautiful little joke.
Seth lifted up his muffled voice to say that it was no joke, at least to
him. He explained his identity and denounced his captors, swearing
vengeance to the last eyebrow. The conductor faced the crowd with
disdainful severity.
What were they trying to play off on him, anyhow? Who did they suppose
he was? Maybe that was fun in Ascalon, but his company wasn't going to
carry no man from nowhere against his will and be sued for it. Burn him
and box up the ashes, boil him and bottle the soup; reduce him by any
comfortable means they saw fit, according to their humane way, fetch him
there in any guise but that of a living man, and the company would haul
him to Hades if they billed him to that destination.
But not in his present shape and form; not as a living, swearing,
suit-threatening man. Take him to hell out of there, the conductor
ordered in rising temper. Don't insult him and his road by coming around
there to make them a part in their idle, life-wasting, time-gambling,
blasted to the seventh depth of Hades tricks.
The baggage-man closed the door, the conductor gave the signal to pull
out, and the train departed, leaving Seth Craddock on the truck, the
rather shamed and dampened citizens standing around. They concluded they
would have to hang him, after all their trouble for a more romantic,
picturesque, and unusual exit. And hanging was such a common, ordinary
way of getting rid of a distasteful man that the pleasure was taken out
of their day.
Judge Thayer was firmly against hanging. He ordered the undertaker to
open the box, which he did with fear and trembling, seeing in a future
hour the vengeance of Seth Craddock descending on his solemn head.
Craddock, sweat-drenched and weak from his rebellion and the heat of his
close quarters, sat up with scarcely a breath left in him for a curse.
Judge Thayer delivered him to Morgan, with instructions to lock him up.
The city calaboose was an institution apart from the county jail. Due to
some past rivalry between the county and city officials, the palatial jail
was closed to offenders against the lowly and despised-by-the-sheriff
town ordinances. So, out of its need, the city had built this little
house with bars across the one small window, and a barred door formed of
wagon tires to close outside the one of wood.
No great amount of business ever had been done in this calaboose, for
minor infractions of the law were not troubled with in that town. If
there ever was anybody left over from a shooting he usually went along
about his business or his pleasure until the coroner's jury assembled
and let him off. The last man confined in the calaboose had stolen a
bottle of whisky, a grave and reprehensible offense which set all the
town talking and speculating on the proper punishment. This poor bug had
made a fire of his hay bedding in the night, and perished as miserably
as everybody said he deserved. The charred boards in one corner still
attested to his well-merited end.
Morgan was not at all confident of the retaining powers of the
calaboose, neither was he greatly concerned. He believed that if
Craddock could break out he would make a streak away from Ascalon,
hooked up at high speed, never to return. It was not in the nature of a
man humbled from a high place, mocked by the lowly, derided by those
whom he had oppressed, contemned by the false friends he had favored, to
come back on an errand of revenge. The job was too general in a case
like Craddock's. He would have to exterminate most of the town.
They left him in the calaboose with whatever reflections were his. The
window was too high in the wall for anybody on the outside to see in, or
for Craddock, tall as he was, to see anything out of it but the sky.
Public interest had fallen away since he was neither to be shipped out
nor hanged, only locked up like a whisky thief. Only a few boys hung
around the calaboose, which stood apart in the center of at least half
an acre of ground, as if ashamed of its office in a community that used
it so seldom when it was needed so often.
Morgan returned to the square for his horse, rather dissatisfied now
with the day's developments. It was going to be troublesome to have this
fellow on his hands. Judge Thayer should not have interfered with the
last decree of public justice. It would have been over with by now.
Rhetta Thayer was in the door of the newspaper office. She came to the
edge of the sidewalk as Morgan approached, leading his horse. She did
not reflect the public satisfaction from her handsome face and troubled
eyes that Ascalon in general enjoyed over Craddock's humiliation. Morgan
wondered why.
"I asked too much of you, Mr. Morgan," she said, coming at once to the
matter that clouded her honest eyes.
"You couldn't ask too much of me," he returned, with no unction of
flattery, but the cheerfully frank expression of an ingenuous heart.
"I didn't realize the disadvantage you would be under, I didn't know
what I expected of you when I urged you into this. Meeting that
desperate man with a rope instead of a gun!"
"You didn't know I was going to meet him with a rope," he said.
He stood before her, hat in hand, wholesomely honest in his homely
ruggedness, a flush of embarrassment tinging his face. The sun in his
short hair seemed laughing, picking out little flecks of gold as mica
flakes in the sea waves turn and flash.
"You might have been killed! When I saw him throw his hand to his gun!
Oh! it was terrible!"
"So you're the editor now?" he said, cheerfully, trying to turn her from
this disturbing subject.
"My heart jumped clear out of my mouth when you threw your rope!"
"It came over and helped me," he said, in manner sincere and grave.
A little flame of color lifted in her pale cheek. She looked at the
dusty road, her hand pressed to her bosom as if to make certain that the
truant heart had come back to her like a dove to its cote out of the
storm. She looked up presently, and smiled a bit; looked down again, the
hot blood writing a confession in her face.
"I hope it did," she said.
Morgan felt himself in such a suffocation of strange delight he could
find no word that seemed the right word, and left it to silence, which,
perhaps was best. He looked at the road, also, as if he would search
with her there for grains of gold, or for lost hearts which leap out of
maidens' breasts, in the white dust marked by many feet.
Together they looked up, faces white, breath faltering on dry lips. So
the fire leaps in a moment such as this and enwraps the soul. It is no
mystery, it is no process of long distillation. In a moment; so.
"Here are his guns," said he, his voice trembling as if it strained in
leaping the subject that lay in its door to go back to the business of
the day.
"His guns!" she repeated after him, shuddering at the thought.
"Hang them over your desk--you might need them, now you're the editor."
She accepted them from his hand, but dubiously, holding them far out
from contact with her dress as something unclean. Morgan reproached
himself for offering her these instruments which had sent so many men
to sudden, undefended death. He reached to relieve her hand.
"Let me do it for you, Miss Thayer."
"No," she denied him, putting down her qualm, clutching the heavy belt
firmly. "It is a notable trophy, a great distinction you're giving me,
Mr. Morgan. I'm afraid you'll think I'm a coward," smiling wanly as she
lifted her face.
"You're not afraid to edit the paper. That seems to me the most
dangerous job in town."
"Most dangerous job in town!" she reproved him, giving him to understand
very plainly that she could name one attended by greater perils.
"They've only killed _one_ editor, so far."
"Can you shoot?" he asked, as seriously concerned as if the fate of
editors in Ascalon darkened over her already.
"Everybody in this town can shoot," she sighed. "It's every boy's
ambition to own and carry a pistol, and most of them do."
"I hope you'll never have to defend the independence of the press with
arms," he said, making a small pleasantry of it. "More than likely
they're gentlemen enough to let you say whatever you want to, and make
no kick."
"The _Headlight_ is going to be an awful joke with Riley Caldwell and me
getting it out. But I'm not going to try to please anybody. That way I
may please them all."
"It sounds like the sensible way. Have you edited before?"
"I used to help Mr. Smith, the editor they killed. That was in the
summer vacation, just. I taught school the rest of the time."
"You must have been the busiest person in town," he said, with pride in
her activities as if they had touched his own life long ago.
"I'm a poor stick of an editor, I'm afraid, though--I seem to be all
mussed up with legal notices and this sudden flood of news. And I can't
set type worth a cent!"
"Just let the news go," he suggested, not without concern for the part
he might bear in her chronicle of late events in Ascalon.
"Let the news go!" She censured him with her softly chiding eyes. "I
wish I could write like Mr. Smith--I'd wake this town up! Poor man, his
coat is hanging in the office by the desk, so suggestive of him it makes
me cry. I haven't had the heart to take it away--it would seem like
expelling his spirit from the place. He was a slender, gentle little
man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to
shoot him down that way."
"You're right; I met him," Morgan said, remembering Dell Hutton among
the wagons, his smoking gun in his hand.
"Sneaking little coward!"
"Well, he'll hardly sling his gun down on you," Morgan reflected, as if
he communed with himself, yet thinking that Hutton scarcely would be
beyond even that.
"Hardly," she replied, in abstraction. "What are you going to do with
that old brigand you've got locked in the calaboose?"
"I expect we'll turn him loose in the morning. There doesn't seem to be
anything we can hold him for, guilty as he is."
"If he'll leave, and never come back," doubtfully. "I'm glad now it
turned out the way it did, I'm so thankful you didn't have to--that you
came through _without blood on your hands_!"
"It would have been a calamity the other way," he said.
When Morgan went his way presently, leaving her in the door of the
little boxlike newspaper office, from where she gave him a parting
smile, it was with a revised opinion of the day's achievements. He felt
peculiarly exalted and satisfied. He had accomplished something, after
all.
Whatever this was, he did not confess, but he smiled, and felt renewed
with a lifting gladness, as he went on to the livery barn, his horse at
his heels.
CHAPTER XVIII
A BONDSMAN BREATHES EASIER
There was a little ripple, more of mirth than excitement or concern, in
Ascalon next morning when it became known that Seth Craddock had kicked
a hole in the burned corner of the calaboose and leaked out of it into
the night.
Let him go; it was as well that way as any, they said, since it relieved
them at once of the charge of his keep and the trouble of disposing of
him in the end. He never would come back to that town, let him ravage in
other parts of the world as he might. What the town had lost in
notoriety by his going would be offset by the manner of his degradation,
already written at length by the local correspondent of the _Kansas City
Times_ and sent on to be printed with a display heading in a prominent
position in that paper and copied by other papers all over the land.
Seth Craddock and his reign were behind the closed door of the past,
through which he was not likely to kick a hole and emerge again, after
his manner of going from the calaboose. That matter off the town's mind,
it ranged itself along the shady side of the street to watch the present
contest between the law and those who lived beyond it.
Up to this point it appeared that the law was going to have it according
to its mandate. Peden made no attempt to open his place on the night
following Craddock's deposition, the lesser lights following his
virtuous example.
But there was in this quiescent confidence, in this lull almost
threatening, something similar to the impertinent repression of an
incorrigible child who yields to authority immediately above him,
knowing that presently it will be overruled. Something was clouding up
to break over Ascalon; the sleepiest in the town was aware of that.
How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and
explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely
tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that
Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance,
but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although
friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.
Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of
hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force,
when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite
the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was
to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.
Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours
in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the
arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and
having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the
pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls
than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line
concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the _Headlight_ during that
time.
In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of
this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and
growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged
to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle
were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks
ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a
barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its
blind-striking hand.
On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta
Thayer stopped Morgan as he was passing the _Headlight_ office at the
beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that
she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some passing terror had
opened their windows.
"He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully,
facing him just inside the door.
"Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful assurance in
his words. "I can assure you I was at no time in any danger."
"Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on
her quick-coming breath.
"It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had
heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it--I never
stepped in front of him anywhere."
"That woman in the tent--the rustler's wife--told me--she told me just
a little while ago. Oh! if he--if he'd have hit you!"
"The kids all came running out of the tent--I thought he'd hit one of
them," Morgan said, humorously, thinking only to calm her great
agitation and quiet her friendly--if there could be no dearer
interest--concern.
"It was Peden got him to do it," she declared.
"Peden? Why should Hutton go out to do that fellow's gunning?"
"Dell Hutton's gambling the county's money, he killed Mr. Smith because
he charged him with it! Pa knows it, pa's on his bond, and if he keeps
on losing the county funds there on Peden's game we'll have to make it
good. It will take everything we've got--if he keeps on."
"That's bad, that's mighty bad," Morgan said, deeply concerned,
curiously awakened to the inner workings of things in Ascalon. "Still, I
don't see what connection I have in it, why he'd want to take a shot at
me on the quiet that way."
"He shoots from behind, he shot Mr. Smith in the back, and it was at
night, besides. Don't you see how it was? Peden must have bribed him to
do it, promised to make good his losses, or something like that."
"Plain as a wagon track," Morgan said.
"I don't know why I ever got you into this tangle," she lamented, "I
don't know what made me so selfish and so blind."
"It's just one more little complication in Ascalon's sickness," he
comforted her, "it doesn't amount to beans. The poor little fool was so
scared that morning he could hardly lift his gun. He'll never make
another break."
"If I only thought he wouldn't! He's as treacherous as a snake, you
can't tell where he's sneaking to bite you. Give it up, Mr. Morgan,
won't you, please?" She turned to him suddenly, appealing with her eyes,
with her wistful lips, with every line of her sympathetic, anxious face.
"Give it up?" he repeated, her meaning not quite clear.
"The office, I mean. Surely, as I coaxed you into taking it, I've got a
right to ask you to give it up. You've done what you took the place to
do, you've got Craddock out of it and away from here. Your work's done,
you can quit now with a good conscience and no excuse to anybody."
"Why," said Morgan, reflectively, "I don't believe I could quit right
now, Miss Rhetta. There's something more to come, it isn't quite
finished yet."
"There's a great deal more to come, the end of all this fighting and
killing and grinning treachery never will come!" she said, in great
bitterness. "What's the use of one man putting his life against all this
viciousness? There's no cure for the curse of Ascalon but time. Let it
go, Mr. Morgan--I beg you to give it up."
Morgan took the hand that she reached out to him in her appeal. The
great fervor of her earnest heart had drawn the blood away from it,
leaving it cold. He clasped it, tightly, to warm it in his big palm, and
spoke comfortingly, yet he would not, could not, tell her that he would
give over the office and leave the town to its devices. The work he had
begun on her account, at her appeal, was not finished. He wanted to give
her a peace that would make permanent the placidity of her eyes such as
had warmed his heart during those three days. But he could not tell her
that.
"If it goes on," she said, sad that he would not yield to her appeal,
"you'll have to--you'll have to--do what the rest of them have done. And
I don't want you to do that, Mr. Morgan. I want you to keep clean."
"As it must be, so it will be," he said. "But I don't see any reason why
I can't keep on the way I've started. There's nobody doing any shooting
here now."
"They're only waiting," she said.
"I'll have to watch them a little longer, then," he told her; "somebody
might shoot your windows out."
He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its
sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a
little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back.
"He's over there in the courthouse now--that's his office where you see
the light--trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know,"
she declared.
Morgan left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town
according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he
watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on
his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to
hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and
considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him,
guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.
Rhetta Thayer, leaving the _Headlight_ office at nine o'clock, saw two
men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk
of starlight and early night. She paused on her way, wondering, and her
wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in
the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell
Hutton. The other she had no need to name.
When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of
the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood
surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. And
when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of gratitude rose
out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in
the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was
holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.
CHAPTER XIX
THE CURSE OF BLOOD
Sensitive as a barometer to every variation, every shading, in public
sentiment and sympathy, Morgan patroled the town nightly until the
streets were deserted. Night by night he felt, rather than saw, the
growing insolence of the pale feeders on the profits of vice, the
confidence in some approaching triumph gleaming in their furtive eyes.
None of the principals, few of the attendant vultures, had left Ascalon.
The sheriff had returned from his excursion after cattle thieves, and,
contrary to the expectation of anybody, had brought one lean and hungry,
hound-faced man with him and locked him up in jail.
But the sheriff was taking no part in the new city marshal's campaign in
the town, certainly not to help him. If he worked against him in the way
his fat, big-jowled face proclaimed that it was his habit to work, no
evidence of it was in his manner when he met Morgan. He was a friendly,
puffy-handed man, loud in his hail and farewell to the riders who came
in from the far-off cow camps to see for themselves this wide-heralded
reformation of the godless town of Ascalon.
These visitors, lately food for the mills of the place, walked about as
curiously as fowls liberated in a strange yard after long confinement in
a coop. They looked with uncomprehending eyes on the closed doors of
Peden's famous temple of excesses; they turned respectful eyes on Morgan
as he passed them in his silent, determined rounds. And presently, after
meeting the white-shirted, coatless dealers, lookout men, _macquereaux_,
they began to have a knowing look, an air of expectant hilarity. After a
little they usually mounted and rode away, laughing among themselves
like men who carried cheerful tidings to sow upon the way.
In that manner Ascalon remained closed five nights, nobody contesting
the authority of the new marshal, not a shot fired in the streets. On
the afternoon of the sixth day an unusual tide of visitors began to set
in to this railroad port of Ascalon. By sundown the hitching rack around
the square was packed with horses; Dora Conboy told Morgan she never had
waited on so many people before in her hotel experience.
At dusk Morgan brought his horse from the livery stable, mounted with
his rifle under the crook of his knee. At nine o'clock Peden threw open
his doors, the small luminaries which led a dim existence in his
effulgence following suit, all according to their preconcerted plan.
There was a shout and a break of wild laughter, a scramble for the long
bar with its five attendants working with both hands; a scrape of
fiddles and a squall of brass; a squeaking of painted and bedizened
drabs, who capered and frisked like mice after their long inactivity.
And on the inflow of custom and the uprising of jubilant mirth, Peden
turned his quick, crafty eyes as he stood at the head of the bar to
welcome back to his doors this golden stream.
Close within Peden's wide door, one on either hand, two vigilant
strangers stood, each belted with two revolvers, each keeping a hand
near his weapons. One of these was a small, thin-faced white rat of a
man; the other tall, lean, leathery; burned by sun, roughened by
weather. A shoot from the tree that produced Seth Craddock he might have
been, solemn like him, and grim.
Dell Hutton, county treasurer, cigar planted so far to one corner of his
wide thin mouth that wrinkles gathered about it like the leathery folds
of an old man's skin, came to Peden where he stood at the bar.
"All's set for him," he said, drawing his eyes small as he peered around
through the fast-thickening smoke.
"Let him come!" said Peden, watching the door with expectant, vindictive
eyes.
The news of Peden's defiance swept over the town like a taint on the
wind. Not only that Peden had opened his doors to the long-thirsting
crowd gathered by the advertised news of a big show for that night, but
that he had posted two imported gun-fighters inside his hall with
instructions to shoot the city marshal if he attempted to interfere.
With the spread of this news men began to gather in front of Peden's to
see what the city marshal was going to do, how he would accept this
defiance, if he meant to accept it, and what the result to him would be.
Judge Thayer came down to the square without his alpaca coat, his
perturbation was so great, looking for Morgan, talking of swearing in a
large number of deputies to uphold the law.
This was received coldly by the men of Ascalon. Upholding the law was
the city marshal's business, they said. If he couldn't do it alone, let
the law drag; let it fall underfoot, where it seemed the best place for
it in that town, anyhow. So Judge Thayer went on, looking around the
square for Morgan, not finding him, nor anybody who had seen him within
the last half hour.
Rhetta was working late in the _Headlight_ office, preparing for the
weekly issue of the paper. This disquieting news had come in at her door
like the wave of a flood. She had no thought of work from that moment,
only to stand at the door listening for the dreaded sound of shooting
from the direction of Peden's hall.
Judge Thayer found her standing in the door when he completed his search
around the square, his heart falling lower at every step.
"He's gone! Morgan's deserted us!" he said.
"Gone!" she repeated in high scorn. "He'll be the last to go."
"I can't find him anywhere--I've hunted all over town. Nobody has seen
him. I tell you, Rhetta, he's gone."
"I wish to heaven he would go! What right have we got to ask him to give
his life to stop the mean, miserable squabbles of this suburb of hell!"
"I think you'd better run along home now--Riley will go with you. Why,
child, you're cold!"
He drew her into the office, urging her to put on her bonnet and go.
"I'll stay here and see it out," she said. "Oh, if he would go, if he
would go! But he'll never go."
She threw herself into the chair beside her littered desk, hands
clenched, face white as if she bore a mortal pain, only to leap up again
in a moment, run to the door, and listen as if she sought a voice out of
the riotous sound.
Judge Thayer had none of this poignant concern for Morgan's welfare. He
was not a little nettled over his failure to find the marshal, and that
officer's apparent shunning of duty in face of this mocking challenge to
his authority.
"Why, Rhetta, you wanted him to take the office, you urged him to," he
reminded her. "I don't understand this sudden concern for the man's
safety in disregard of his oath and duty, this--this--unaccountable----"
"I didn't know him then--I didn't _know_ him!" she said, in piteous low
moan.
Judge Thayer looked at her with a sudden sharp turning of the head, as
if her words had expressed something beyond their apparent meaning. He
came slowly to the door, where he stood beside her a little while in
silence, hand upon her shoulder tenderly.
"I'll look around again," he said, "and come back in a little while."
Meanwhile, in Peden's place the celebrants at the altar of alcohol were
rejoicing in this triumph of personal liberty. Where was this man-eating
city marshal? What had become of that knock-kneed horse wrangler from
Bitter Creek they had heard so much about? They drank fiery toasts to
his confusion, they challenged him in the profane emphasis of scorn.
Upon what was his fame based? they wanted to be told. The mere
corraling of certain stupid drunk men; the lucky throw of a rope. _He_
never had killed a man!
With the mounting of their hastily swilled liquor the hilarious patrons
of Peden's hall became more contemptuous of the city marshal. His
apparent avoidance of trouble, his unaccountable absence, his failure to
step up and meet this challenge from Peden, became a grievance against
him in their inflamed heads.
They had counted on him to make some kind of a bluff, to add something
either of tragedy or comedy to this big show. Now he was hiding out, and
they resented it in the proper spirit of men deprived of their rights.
They began to talk of going out to find him, of dragging him from his
hole and starting a noise behind him that would scare him out of the
country.
Peden encouraged this growing notion. If Morgan wouldn't bring his show
there, go after him and make him stand on his hind legs like a dog.
After a few more drinks, after a dance, after another stake on the
all-devouring tables of chance. They turned to these diversions in the
zest of long abstinence, in the redundant vitality of youth, mocking all
restraint, insolent of any reckoning of circumstance or time.
Peden distended with satisfaction to see the free spending, the free
flinging of money into his games. A little virtuous recess seemed to be
profitable; it was like giving a horse a rest. His two guards waited at
the door, his lookout at the faro table swept the hall from his high
chair with eyes keen to mark any hostile invasion. Morgan never could
come six feet inside his door.
Well satisfied with himself and the beginning of that night's business,
exceedingly comfortable in the thought that this defiance of the law
would bring a newer and wider notoriety to himself and the town of which
he was the spirit, Peden sauntered among the boisterous merrymakers on
his floor.
Dancers were worming and shuffling in close embrace, couples breaking
out of the whirl now and then to rush to the bar; players stood deep
around the tables; men reached over each other's shoulders to take their
drinks from the bar. All was haste and hilarity, all a crowding of
pleasure with hard-pursuing feet, a snatching at the elusive thing with
rough boisterous hands, with loud laughter, with wild yells.
Pleasure, indeed, seemed on the flight before these coarse revelers, who
pursued it blindfold down the steeps of destruction unaware.
Peden shouldered his way through the throng toward the farther end of
the long bar, nodding here with a friendly smile, stopping now and then
to shake hands with some specially favored patron, throwing commands
among his female entertainers from his cold, hard, soulless eyes as he
passed along.
And in that sociable progression down his thronging hall, ten feet from
the farther end of his famous bar, Peden came face to face with Morgan,
as grim as judgment among the crowd of wastrels and women of poisoned
lips, who fell back in breathless silence to let him pass.
Morgan was carrying his rifle; his pistol hung at his side. The big
shield of office once worn by Seth Craddock was pinned on the pocket of
his shirt; his broad-brimmed hat threw a shadow over his stern face.
Peden stopped with a little start of withdrawal at sight of Morgan,
surprised out of his poise, chilled, perhaps, at the thought of the long
pistol shot between this unexpected visitor and the hired killers at his
front door, the way between them blocked by a hundred revelers.
So, this was the cunning of this range wolf, to come in at his back door
and fall upon him in surprise! Peden's resentment rose in that second of
reflection with the dull fire that spread in his dark face. He flung his
hand to his revolver, throwing aside the skirt of his long coat.
"Let your gun stay where it is," Morgan quietly advised him. "Get these
people out of here, and close this place."
"Show me your authority!" Peden demanded, scouting for a moment of
precious time.
The musicians in the little orchestra pit behind Morgan ceased playing
on a broken note, the shuffle of dancing feet stopped short. Up the long
bar the loud hilarity quieted; across the hall the clash of pool balls
cut sharply into the sudden stillness. As quickly as wind makes a rift
in smoke the revelers fell away from Morgan and Peden, leaving a fairway
for the shooting they expected to begin at the door. Peden stood as he
had stopped, hand upon his gun.
Morgan stepped up to him in one long, quick stride, rifle muzzle close
against Peden's broad white shirt front. In that second of hesitant
delay, that breath of portentous bluff, Morgan had read Peden to the
roots. A man who had it in him to shoot did not stop at anybody's word
when he was that far along the way.
"Clear this place and lock it up!" Morgan repeated.
The temperature of the crowded hall seemed to fall forty degrees in the
second or two Morgan stood pushing his rifle against Peden's breastbone.
Those who had talked with loud boasts, picturesque threats, high-pitched
laughter, of going out to find this man but a little while before, were
silent now and cold around the gills as fish.
Morgan was watching the two men at the front door while he held Peden up
those few seconds. He knew there was no use in disarming Peden, to turn
him loose where he could get fifty guns in the next two seconds if he
wanted them. He believed, in truth, there was not much to fear from this
fellow, who depended on his hired retainers to do his killing for him.
So, when Peden, watching Morgan calculatively, shifted a little to get
himself out of line so he would not stand a barrier between his
gun-slingers and their target and longer block the opening of operations
to clear the hall of this upstart, Morgan let him go. Then, with a
sudden bound, Peden leaped across into the crowd.
A moment of strained waiting, quiet as the empty night, Morgan standing
out a fair target for any man who had the nerve to pull a gun. Then a
stampede in more of sudden fear than caution by those lined up along
the bar, and the two hired killers at the front of the house began to
shoot.
Morgan pitched back on his heels as if mortally hit, staggered, thrust
one foot out to stay his fall. He stood bracing himself in that manner
with out-thrust foot, shooting from the hip.
Three shots he fired, the roar of his rifle loud above the lighter sound
of the revolvers. With the third shot Morgan raised his gun. In the
smoke that was settling to the floor the taller of the gunmen lay
stretched upon his face. The other, arms rigidly at his sides, held a
little way from his body, head drooping to his chest, turned dizzily two
or three times, spinning swiftly in his dance of death, gave at the
knees, settled down gently in a strange, huddled heap.
Dead. Both of them dead. The work of one swift moment when the blood
curse fell on this new, quick-handed marshal of Ascalon.
There was a choking scream, and a woman's cry. "Look out! look out!"
Peden, on the fringe of a crowd of shrinking, great-eyed women, ghastly
in the painted mockery of their fear, fired as Morgan turned. Morgan
blessed the poor creature who was woman enough in her debauched heart to
cry out that warning, as the breath of Peden's bullet brushed his face.
Morgan could not defend himself against this assault, for the coward
stood with one shoulder still in the huddling knot of women, and fired
again. Morgan dropped to the floor, prone on his face as the dead man
behind him.
Peden came one cautious step from his shelter, leaning far over to see,
a smile of triumph baring his gleaming teeth; another step, while the
crowd broke the stifling quiet with shifted feet. Morgan, quick as a
serpent strikes, raised to his elbow and fired.
Morgan had one clear look at Peden's face as he threw his arms high and
fell. Surprise, which death, swift in its coming had not yet overtaken,
bulged out of his eyes. Surprise: no other emotion expressed in that
last look upon this life. And Peden lay dead upon his own floor, his hat
fallen aside, his arms stretched far beyond his head, his white cuffs
pulled out from his black coat sleeves, as if he appealed for the mercy
that was not ever for man or woman in his own cold heart.
CHAPTER XX
UNCLEAN
Earl Gray came down the street hatless, the big news on his tongue.
Rhetta Thayer, in the door of the _Headlight_ office, where she had
stood in the pain of one crucified while the shots sounded in Peden's
hall, stopped him with a gasped appeal.
Dead. Peden and the gun-slingers he had brought there to kill Morgan;
any number of others who had mixed in the fight; Morgan himself--all
dead, the floor covered with the dead. That was the terrible word that
rolled from Gray's excited tongue. And when she heard it, Rhetta put out
her hands as one blind, held to the door frame a moment while the blood
seemed to drain out of her heart, staring with horrified eyes into the
face of the inconsequential man who had come in such avid eagerness to
tell this awful tale.
People were hastening by in the direction of Peden's, scattered at
first, like the beginning of a retreat, coming then by twos and threes,
presently overflowing the sidewalk, running in the street. Rhetta stood
staring, half insensible, on this outpouring. Riley Caldwell, the young
printer, rushed past her out of the shop, his roached hair like an
Algonquin's standing high above his narrow forehead, his face white as
if washed by death.
Impelled by a desire that was commanding as it was terrifying, moved by
a hope that was only a shred of a raveled dream, Rhetta joined the
moving tide that set toward Peden's door. Dead--Morgan was dead! Because
she had asked him, he had set his hand to this bloody task. She had sent
him to his death in her selfish desire for security, in her shrinking
cowardice, in her fear of riot and blood. And he was dead, the light was
gone out of his eyes, his youth and hope were sacrificed in a cause that
would bring neither glory nor gratitude to illuminate his memory.
She began to run, out in the dusty street where he had marched his
patrol that first night of his bringing peace to Ascalon; to run, her
feet numb, her body numb, only her heart sentient, it seemed, and that
yearning out to him in a great pain of pity and stifling labor of
remorse. It was only a little way, but it seemed heavy and long, impeded
by feet that could not keep pace with her anguish, swift-running to
whisper a tender word.
The lights were bright in Peden's hall, a great crowd leaned and
strained and pushed around its door. There were some who asked her
kindly to go away, others who appealed earnestly against her looking
into the place, as Rhetta pushed her way, panting like an exhausted
swimmer, through the crowd.
Nothing would turn her; appeals were dim as cries in drowning ears.
Gaining the door, she paused a moment, hands pressed to her cheeks, hair
fallen in disorder. Her eyes were big with the horror of her thoughts;
she was breathless as one cast by breakers upon the sand. She looked in
through the open door.
Morgan was standing like a soldier a little way inside the door, his
rifle carried at port arms, denying by the very sternness of his pose
the passage of any foot across that threshold of tragedy. There was
nothing in his bearing of a wounded man. Beyond him a few feet lay the
bodies of the two infamous guards who had been posted at the door to
take his life; along the glistening bar, near its farther end, Peden
stretched with face to the floor, his appealing hands outreaching.
A gambling table had been upset, chairs strewn in disorder about the
floor, when the rabble was cleared out of the place. Only Morgan
remained there with the dead men, like a lone tragedian whose part was
not yet done.
Rhetta looked for one terrifying moment on that scene, its tragic detail
impressed on her senses as a revelation of lightning leaps out of the
blackest night to be remembered for its surrounding terror. And in that
moment Morgan saw her face; the horror, the revulsion, the sickness of
her shocked soul. A moment, a glance, and she was gone. He was alone
amidst the blood that the curse of Ascalon had led his hand to pour out
in such prodigality in that profaned place.
Long after the fearful waste of battle had been cleared from Peden's
floor, and the lights of that hall were put out; long after the most
wakeful householder of Ascalon had sought his bed, and the last horseman
had gone from its hushed streets, Morgan walked in the moonlight,
keeping vigil with his soul. The curse of blood had descended upon him,
and she whose name he could speak only in his heart, had come to look
upon his infamy and flee from before his face.
Time had saved him for this excruciating hour; all his poor adventures,
slow striving, progression upward, had been designed to culminate in the
mockery of this night. Fate had shaped him to his bitter ending, drawing
him on with lure as bright as sunrise. And now, as he walked slowly in
the moonlight, feet encumbered by this tragedy, he felt that the essence
had been wrung out of life. His golden building was come to confusion,
his silver hope would ring its sweet chime in his heart no more. From
that hour she would abhor him, and shrink from his polluted hand.
He resented the subtle indrawing of circumstance that had thrust him in
the way of this revolting thing, that had thrust upon him this infamous
office that carried with it the inexorable curse of blood. Softly,
against the counsel of his own reason, he had been drawn. She who had
stared in horror on the wreckage of that night had inveigled him with
gentle word, with appeal of pleading eye.
This resentment was sharpened by the full understanding of his
justification, both in law and in morals, for the slaying of these
desperate men. Duty that none but a coward and traitor to his oath would
have shunned, had impelled him to that deed. Defense of his life was a
justification that none could deny him. But she had denied him that. She
had fled from the lifting of his face as from a thing unspeakably
unclean.
He could not chide her for it, nor arraign her with one bitter thought.
She had hoped it would be otherwise; her last word had been on her best
hope for him in a place where such hope could have no fruition--that he
would pass untainted by the bloody curse that fell on men in this place.
It could not be.
Because he had taken Seth Craddock's pistol away from him on that first
day, she had believed him capable of the superhuman task of enforcing
order in Ascalon without bloodshed. Sincere as she had been in her
desire to have him assume the duties of peace officer, she had acted
unconsciously as a lure to entangle him to his undoing.
Very well; he would clean up the town for her as she had looked to him
to do, sweep it clear of the last iniquitous gun-slinger, the last
slinking gambler, the last drab. He would turn it over to her clean,
safe for her day or night, no element in it to disturb her repose. At
what further cost of life he must do this, he could not then foresee,
but he resolved that it should be done. Then he would go his way,
leaving his new hopes behind him with his old.
Although it was a melancholy resolution, owing to its closing provision,
it brought him the quiet that a perturbed mind often enjoys after the
formation of a definite plan, no matter for its desperation. Morgan went
to the hotel, where Tom Conboy was still on duty smoking his cob pipe in
a chair tilted back against a post of his portico.
"Well, the light's out up at Peden's," said Conboy, feeling a new and
vast respect for this man who had proved his luck to the satisfaction of
all beholders in Ascalon that night.
"Yes," said Morgan, wearily, pausing at the door.
"They'll never be lit again in this man's town," Conboy went on, "and
I'm one that's glad to see 'em go. Some of these fellers around town was
sayin' tonight that Ascalon will be dead in the shell inside of three
weeks, but I can't see it that way. Settlers'll begin to come now, that
hall of Peden's'll make a good implement store, plenty of room for
thrashin' machines and harvesters. I may have to put up my rates a
little to make up for loss in business till things brighten up, but I'd
have to do it in time, anyhow."
"Yes," said Morgan, as listlessly as before.
"They say you made a stand with that gun of yours tonight that beat
anything a man ever saw--three of 'em down quicker than you could strike
a match! I heard one feller say--man! look at that badge of yours!"
Conboy got up, gaping in amazement. Morgan had stepped into the light
that fell through the open door, passing on his way to bed. The metal
shield that proclaimed his office was cupped as if it had been held
edgewise on an anvil and struck with a hammer. Morgan hastily detached
the badge and put it in his pocket, plainly displeased by the discovery
Conboy had made.
"Bullet hit it, square in the center!" Conboy said. "It was square over
your heart!"
"Keep it under your hat!" Morgan warned, speaking crossly, glowering
darkly on Conboy as he passed.
"No niggers in Ireland," said Conboy, knowingly; "no-o-o niggers in
Ireland!"
Morgan regretted his oversight in leaving the badge in place. He had
intended to remove it, long before. As he went up the complaining stairs
he pressed his hand to the sore spot over his heart where the bullet
almost had driven the badge into his flesh. Pretty sore, but not as sore
as it was deeper within his breast from another wound, not as sore as
that other hurt would be tomorrow, and the heavy years to come.
CHAPTER XXI
AS ONE THAT IS DEAD
"I feel like I share his guilt," said Rhetta, voice sad as if she had
suffered an irreparable loss.
"He's not guilty," said Violet, stoutly, standing in his defense.
Rhetta had fled from Ascalon that morning, following the terrible night
of Morgan's sanguinary baptism. Racked by an agony of mingled remorse
for her part in this tragedy and the loss of some valued thing which she
would not bring her heart to acknowledge, only moan over and weep, and
bend her head to her pillow through that fevered night, she had taken
horse at sunrise and ridden to Stilwell's ranch, for the comfort of
Violet, whose sympathy was like balm to a bruise. Rhetta had come
through the night strained almost to breaking. All day she had hidden
like one crushed and shamed, in Stilwell's house, pouring out to Violet
the misery of her soul.
Now, at night, she was calmer, the haunting terror of the scene which
rose up before her eyes was drawing off, like some frightful thing that
had stood a menace to her life. But she felt that it never would dim
entirely from her recollection, that it must endure, a hideous picture,
to sadden her days until the end.
The two girls had gone to the river, where the moonlight softened the
desert-like scene of barren bars, and twinkled in the ripples of shallow
water which still ran over against the farther shore. They were sitting
near the spot where Morgan had laved his bruised feet in the river not
many nights past. A whippoorwill was calling in the tangle of
cottonwoods and grapevines that grew cool and dark on a little island
below them, its plaint as sad as the mourner's own stricken heart.
"I begged him to give up the office and let things go," said Rhetta,
pleading to mitigate her own blame, against whom no blame was laid.
"You'd have despised him for it if he had," said Violet.
"But he wouldn't do it, and now this has happened, and he's a man-killer
like the rest of them. Oh it's terrible to think about!"
"Not like the rest of them," Violet corrected, in her firm, gentle way.
"He had to stand up like a man for what he was sworn to do, or run like
a dog. Mr. Morgan wouldn't run. Right or wrong, he wouldn't run from any
man!"
"No," said Rhetta, sadly, "he wouldn't run."
"You talk like you wanted him to!"
"I don't think I would," said Rhetta.
"Then what _do_ you expect of a man?" impatiently. "If he stands up and
fights he's either got to kill or be killed."
"Don't--don't, Violet! It seems like killing is all I hear--the sound of
those guns--I hear them all the time, I can't get them out of my ears!"
"Suppose," said Violet, looking off across the runlet sparkling,
gurgling like an infant across the bar, "it was him you saw when you
looked in there, instead of the others. You'd have been satisfied then,
I suppose?"
"Violet! how can you say such awful things!"
"Well, somebody had to be killed. Do you suppose Mr. Morgan killed them
just for fun?"
"They say, they were talking all over town that night--last night--and
saying the same thing this morning, that he didn't give them a show,
that he just turned his rifle on them and killed them before he knew
whether they were going to shoot or not!"
"Well, they lie," said Violet, with the calmness of conviction.
"I suppose he had a right to do what he did, but he doesn't seem like
the same man to me now. I feel like I'd lost something--some friendship
that I valued, I mean, Violet--you know what I mean."
"I know as well as anything," said Violet, smiling to herself, head
turned away, the moonlight on her good, kind face.
"I feel like somebody had died, and that he--they--that he----"
"And you ought to be thankful it isn't so!" said Violet, sharply, "but I
don't believe you are."
"I never want to see him again, I'll always think of him standing there
with that terrible gun in his hands, those dead men around him on the
floor!"
"You may have to go to him on your knees yet, and I hope to God you will
Rhetta Thayer!" Violet said.
"If you'd seen somebody--somebody that you--that was--if you'd seen him
like I saw him, you wouldn't blame me so," Rhetta defended, beginning
again to cry, and bend her head upon her hands and moan like a mother
who had lost a child.
Violet was moved out of her harshness at once. She put her arm around
the weeping girl, whose sorrow was too genuine to admit a doubt of its
great depth, and consoled her with soft words.
"And he looked so big to me, and he was so _clean_, before that," Rhetta
wailed.
"He's bigger than ever, he's as blameless as a lamb," said Violet.
"After a little while you'll see it different, he'll be the same to
you."
"I couldn't touch his hand!" said Rhetta, shuddering at the thought.
"Never mind," said Violet, soothingly; "never mind."
Violet said no more, but took Rhetta by the hand, and it was wet with
tears from her streaming cheeks. There was peace in the night around
them, for all the turmoil there might be in human hearts, for night had
eased the throbbing, drouth-cursed earth of its burning, and called the
trumpeters of the greenery out along the riverside.
"I'm afraid he'll come," said Rhetta by and by.
"Why should he come?" asked Violet, stroking back the other's hair.
"He's got one of your horses--I'm afraid he'll come to bring it home."
"You only hope he will," said Violet, in her assured, calm way.
"Violet!" But there was not so much chiding in the word as a cry of
pain, a confession of despair. He would not come; and she knew he would
not come.
CHAPTER XXII
WHINERS AT THE FUNERAL
Joe Lynch, the bone man, stopped at the well in the public square to
pour water on his wagon tires. A man was pestered clean out of his
senses by his tires coming off, his felloes shrinking up like a fried
bacon rind in that dry weather, Joe said. It beat his time, that drouth.
He had been through some hot and dry spells in the Arkansaw Valley, but
never one as dry and hot as this.
He told Morgan this as he poured water slowly on his wheels to swell the
wood and tighten the tires, there at the town well in the mid-morning of
that summer day. It was so hot already, the ceaseless day wind blowing
as if it trailed across a fire, that one felt shivers of heat go over
the skin; so hot that the heat was bitter to the taste, and shade was
only an aggravation.
This was almost a week after Morgan's forceful assertion of the law's
supremacy in Ascalon, when Peden and his assassins fell in their
insolence. It seemed that day as if Ascalon itself had fallen with
Peden, and the blood of life had drained out of its body. There was a
quietude over it that seemed the peace of death.
"I never thought, the day I hauled you into this town," said Joe, his
high rasping voice harmonizing well with his surroundings, like a
katydid on a dead limb, "you'd be the man to put the kibosh on 'em and
close 'em up like you done. I never saw the bottom drop out of no place
as quick as it's fell out of this town, and I've saw a good many go up
in my day. The last of them gamblers pulled out a couple of days ago, I
hauled his trunk over to the depot. He went a cussin', and he pulled the
hole in after him, I guess, on all the high-kickin' this town'll ever
do. Well, I ain't a carin'; I've been waitin' my time."
"You were wiser than some of them, you knew it would come," Morgan said,
glad to meet this bone-gathering philosopher in the desert he had made
of Ascalon, and stand talking with him, foot on his hub in friendly way.
"Not so much bones," said Joe reflectively, as if he had weighed the
possibilities long ago and now found them coming out according to
calculation, "as bottles. Thousands of bottles, every boy in this town's
out a pickin' up bottles for me. I reckon I'll have a couple of carloads
of nothing but bottles. Oh-h-h, they'll be _some_ bones, but the
skeleton of this town is bottles. That's why I tell 'em it never will
pick up no more. You've got to build a town on something solider'n a
bottle if you want it to stand up."
"I believe you," Morgan said.
"You've worked yourself out of a job. They won't no more need a marshal
here'n they will a fish net."
Morgan shook his head, got out his pipe, struck a match on the bleached
forehead of a buffalo skull in Joe's wagon.
"No. I'm leaving town in a week or two--when I make sure it _is_ dead,
that they'll never come back and start the games again."
"They never will," said Joe, shaking a positive head. "Peden was the
guts of this town; it can't never be what it was without him. So you're
goin' to leave the country, air you?"
"Yes."
"Give up that fool notion you had about raising wheat out here on this
pe-rairie, heh?"
"Gave it up," Morgan replied, nodding in his solemn, expressive way.
"Well, you got _some_ sense hammered into you, anyhow. I told you right
at the jump, any man that thought he could farm in this here country
should be bored for the simples. Look at that range, look at them cattle
that's droppin' dead of starvation and want of water all over it. Look
at them cattlemen shippin' out thousands of head that ain't ready for
market all along this railroad every day. This range'll be as bare of
stock by fall, I tell you, as the pa'm of my hand's bare of hairs.
Bones? I'll have more bones to pick up than ever was in this country
before. Ascalon ain't all that's dead--the whole range's gone up.
This'll clean 'em all out. It's the hottest summer and the longest dry
spell that ever was."
"It couldn't be much worse."
"Worse!" Joe looked up from his pouring in his reprovingly surprised
way, stopping his dribbling stream on the wagon wheel. "You hang around
here a month longer and see what worse is! I'm goin' to begin pickin' up
bones over on Stilwell's range in about a week; I'm givin' them wolves
and buzzards time to clean 'em up a little better. About then you'll see
the cattlemen begin to fight for range along the river where their
stock can eat the leaves off of the bushes and find a bunch of bluestem
once in a while that ain't frizzled and burnt up. You'll begin to see
the wolf side to some of these fellers in this country then."
Joe rumbled on to the car that he was loading, his tires being tight
enough to hold him that far. Morgan sauntered down the shady side of the
street, meeting few, getting what ease he could out of life with his
pipe. He had put off his cowboy dress only that morning, feeling it out
of place in the uneventful quiet of the town. He had not carried his
rifle since the night of his battle in Peden's hall. Today he was
beginning to consider leaving off his revolver. A pocketknife for
whittling would be about all the armament a man would need in Ascalon
from that time forward.
Earl Gray was leaning on one long leg in the door of his drug-store, oil
on his fluffy brown hair. He was melancholy and downcast, plainly
resentful in his bearing toward Morgan as the contriver of this business
stagnation. He swept his hand around the emptiness of the town as Morgan
drew near, giving voice to his contemplation.
"Look at it--not a dime been spent around this square this morning! I
ain't sold but one box of pills in two days! If it wasn't for the little
trade in t'backer and cigars of a night when the cowboys come in, I'd
have to lock up and leave. I will anyhow--I can see it a-comin'."
Morgan leaned against the building close by the door, the indolence of
the day over him. There was nothing to do but hear the dying town's
complaint. He was not a doctor; he had nothing to prescribe. He realized
that the merchants had been hit hard by this sudden paralysis. It would
not have been so much like disaster if the town had been left to die in
its own way, as time and change would have attended to more slowly.
Morgan could not tell Druggist Gray, whose trade in pills had come to a
standstill; he could not tell the hardware merchant, whose traffic in
firearms and ammunition had fallen away; he could not explain to the
proprietor of the Santa Fé café, or any of the other merchants of the
town who had come to regret their one spasm of virtue, induced by fear,
that he had not considered either their prosperity or their loss when he
closed up the saloons and gambling-houses and drove the proscribed of
the law away. They were squealing now, exactly as he had known they
would squeal in spite of their assurance before the event. Let them
squeal, let them stagnate, let dust settle on their wares that no man
came to buy.
For the security of somebody's sleep, for the tranquillity of somebody's
dreams; for the peace of two brown eyes, for the safety of a short
little white hand, strong and comforting just to see--for these, for
these alone, he had closed up the riotous places and swept away like a
purging fire the chaff and pestilence of Ascalon. He could not tell them
this. Even her he could not tell.
Earl Gray, giving off perfume to the hot winds, was pursuing his
complaint.
"The undertaker's packin' up to leave, goin' to ship his stock today. I
wish I could go with him, but a man's got to have a place to light
before he starts out with a drug stock."
"I don't suppose anybody's sorry to see him go," Morgan said. "I think
it's a good sign."
"They'll bury each other, as I told him, and they'll drug each other
with mullein tea, as I told him the other day," Gray said,
acrimoniously. "Yes, and they'll be eatin' each other before spring! I'd
like to know what they're goin' to live on, the few that's left in this
town--a little cow-punchin', a little clerkin' in the courthouse and
gittin' jury and witness fees. That won't keep no town alive."
"Judge Thayer's got a big colonization project going that looks good, he
says. If he puts it through things will begin to pick up."
"Them Mennonites, I guess. They ain't the kind of people a man wants to
see come in here--whiskers all over 'em, never sell 'em a cake of
shavin' soap or a razor from Christmas to doomsday. Them fellers don't
shave, they never shave; they grow up from the cradle with whiskers all
over 'em."
"They'll need horse liniment, and stuff like that."
"There might be a livin' here for a drug-store if settlers begun to come
in," Gray admitted, picking up a little hope. "They say this sod gives
off fevers and chills when it's broke up. Something poison in it."
Tom Conboy was on the sidewalk before his door, casting his eyes up and
down the street as if on the lookout for somebody that owed him a bill.
He was in bed when Morgan left the hotel on his early round, and there
was a look about him still of fustiness and the cobwebs of sleep.
"If a man was to take a sack of meal and empty it, and spread the sack
down flat, he'd have something like this man's town's got to be," Conboy
complained. "Dead, not a breath left in it. I saw a couple of buzzards
sailin' around over the square a while ago. I've been lookin' to see
them light on the courthouse tower."
"It is a little quiet, but they all say it will begin to pick up in a
day or two," Morgan prevaricated, with a view to reeling him out, having
no other diversion.
"I don't know what it's goin' to pick up on," Conboy sighed. "Two for
breakfast outside of the regulars. I used to have twenty to thirty-five
up to a week ago."
"Court will convene next month," Morgan reminded him by way of cheer.
"It'll bring a few," Conboy allowed, "not many, and all of them big
eaters. You don't make anything off of a man that rides thirty or forty
miles before breakfast when you sit him down to a twenty-five cent
meal."
Morgan said he was not a hotel man, but it seemed pretty plain even to
him that there could be no wide border of profit in any such
transaction.
"No, it was those night-working men, dealers, bartenders, and that
crowd, that were the light and profitable eaters. A man that drinks
heavy all night don't get up with a thirty-mile appetite in him next
day. Well, they're gone; they'll never come back to this man's town."
"You were one of the men that wanted the town cleaned up."
"No niggers in Ireland, now, Morgan--no-o-o niggers in Ireland!"
Conboy made a warning of his peculiar expression, as if he halted Morgan
on ground that was dangerous to advance over as far as another word. It
was impressive, almost threatening, given in his deep voice, with grave
eye and face suddenly stern, but Morgan knew that it was all on the
outside.
"Cowboys don't any more than hit the ground here till they hop on their
horses and leave," Conboy continued. "Nothing to entertain them, no
interest for a live man in a dead town, where the only drink he can get
is out of the well. There was just three horses tied along the square
last night, where there used to be fifty or a hundred. I'll have to
leave this man's town; I can't stand the pressure."
"A man with a little nerve ought to swallow his present losses for his
future gains," Morgan said, beginning to grow tired of this whining.
"If I could see any future gains comin' my way I'd gamble on them with
any man," Conboy returned with some spirit. "I'm goin' over to Glenmore
this afternoon and see what it looks like there. That's the comin' town,
it seems to me; good crops over there in the valley, no cattle starvin'.
They may bend the railroad around to touch that town, too--they're
talkin' of it. That's sure to happen if Glenmore wins the county seat
this fall. Then you'll see skids put under every house in this town and
moved over there. Ascalon will be a name some of us old-timers will
remember twenty years from now, and that's all."
"If Judge Thayer and the railroad colonization agent put through a big
deal they've got going, I don't see why this town shouldn't pick up
again on a healthy business foundation," Morgan said.
"Them Pennsylvania Dutch?" Conboy scoffed. "They're not the kind of
people that ever stay in a hotel, they carry their blankets with 'em and
flop down under their wagons like Indians. When they come to town they
bring a basket of grub along, they don't spend money for a meal in any
man's hotel. You put Pennsylvania Dutch into this country and there'll
never be another coroner's jury called!"
Morgan knocked the ashes out of his short, clubby little pipe, put it in
his shirt pocket behind his badge, and went on. He paused at the door of
the _Headlight_ office to look within, hoping to see a face that had
been missing since the night of his great tragedy. Only Riley Caldwell,
the printer, was there, working furiously, as if fired by an ambition
that Ascalon, dead or alive, could not much longer contain. The
droop-shouldered alpaca coat once worn by the editor now dead, hung
beside the desk, like the hull he had cast when he took flight away from
the troubles of his much-harassed life.
Only the day before Judge Thayer had told Morgan that Rhetta was still
at Stilwell's ranch, whither she had gone to compose herself after the
strain of so much turmoil. Morgan could only feel that she had gone
there to avoid him, shrinking from the sight of his face.
There was not much warmth in Morgan's reception by the business men of
Ascalon around the square that morning, hot as the weather was. It
seemed as if some messenger had gone before him crying his coming, as a
jaybird goes setting up an alarm from tree to tree before the squirrel
hunter in the woods.
Earnest as their solicitations had been for him to assume the office of
marshal, voluble as their protestations in the face of fear and
insecurity of life and property that they would accept the result
without a whimper, there were only a few who stood by their pledges like
men. These were the merchants of solider character, whose dealings were
with the cattlemen and homesteaders. The hope of these merchants was in
the coming of more homesteaders, according to Judge Thayer's dream. They
were the true patriots and pioneers.
While these few commended Morgan's stringent application of the letter
and spirit of the state and town laws, their encouragement was only a
flickering candle in the general gloom of the place. Morgan knew the
grunters were saying behind his back that he had gone too far, farther
than their expectations or instructions. All they had expected of him
was that he knock off the raw edges, suppress the too evident, abate the
promiscuous banging around of guns by every bunch of cowboys that
arrived or left, and to cut down a little on the killing, at least
confine it to the unprofitable class.
They admitted they didn't want the cowboys killed off the way Craddock
had been doing it, giving the town a bad name. But to shut the saloons
all up, to go and shoot Peden down that way and kill the town with him,
that was more than they had given him license for. So they growled
behind his back, afraid of him as they feared lightning, without any
ground for such fear in the world.
Judge Thayer appeared to be the only man in town who was genuinely happy
over the result of Morgan's sweeping out the encumbering rubbish that
blocked the country's progress by its noisome notoriety. But through all
the judge's glow of gratitude for duty well done, Morgan was conscious
of a peculiar aloofness, not exactly fear such as was unmistakable in
many others, but a withdrawing, as if something had fallen between them
and changed their relations man to man.
Morgan knew that it was the blood of slain men. He was to this man, and
to another of far greater consequence to Morgan's peace and happiness,
like a pitcher that had been defiled.
Judge Thayer's friendliness was unabated, but it was the sort of
friendliness that did not offer the hand, or touch the arm when walking
by Morgan's side, as in the early hours of their acquaintance. Useful
this man, to the work that must be done in this place to make it fit,
and safe, and secure for property and life, but unclean. That was what
Judge Thayer's attitude proclaimed, as plainly as printed words.
This morning when Judge Thayer encountered Morgan on the street, not far
from the little catalpa tree that was having a bitter struggle against
wind and drouth, he invited the city marshal to accompany him to his
office. News that would tickle his ears, he said; big news.
The biggest of this big news was that the railroad company was going to
establish a division point there at once. The railroad officials had
given Judge Thayer to understand, directly, that this decision had come
as a result of the town waking up and shedding its leprous skin. They
felt that it would be a safe place for their employees to live now, with
the pitfalls closed, the temptations removed. And the credit, Judge
Thayer owned, was Morgan's alone.
But there was more news. The eastern immigration agents of the railroad
were spreading the news of Ascalon's pacification with gratifying
result. Already parties of Illinois and Indiana farmers, who had been
looking to that country for a good while, were preparing to come out and
scout for locations.
"They're getting tired of farming that high-priced land, Morgan. They're
wearing it out, it costs them more for fertilizers than they take off of
it. They're coming here, where a man can plow a furrow forty miles long,
we tell them--and it's the gospel truth, a hundred miles, or two hundred
if he wanted to--and never hit a stump."
Judge Thayer got up at that point, and stood in his door looking at the
dull sky sullen with heat; looking at the glimmer that rose like
impalpable smoke from the hard surface of the cracked, baked earth.
"But I wish we could get a good rain before they begin to come," he
sighed, "and I think--" cautiously, with a sly wink at Morgan--"we're
going to get it. I've got a man here right now working on it, along
scientific principles, Morgan--entirely scientific."
"A rainmaker?" said Morgan, his incredulity plain in his tone.
"He came to me highly recommended by bankers and others in Nebraska,
where he undoubtedly brought rain, and in Texas, where the proof is
indisputable. But I'm doing it solely on my own account," Judge Thayer
hastened to explain, "carrying the cost alone. He's under contract to
bring a copious rain not later than seven days from today."
"What's the bill?" Morgan asked, amused by this man's eager credulity.
"One hundred dollars on account, four hundred to be paid the day he
delivers the rain--provided that he delivers it within the specified
time. I've bound him up in a contract."
"I think he'll win," said Morgan, drily, looking meaningly at the murky
sky.
"It's founded on science, pure science, Morgan," Judge Thayer declared,
warmly. "I'm telling you this in confidence, not another soul in town
knows it outside of my own family. We'll keep it a pleasant secret--I
want to give the farmers and cattlemen of this valley the present of a
surprise. When the proper time comes I'll announce the responsible
agency, I'll show that crowd over at Glenmore where the progressive
people of this county live, I'll prove to the doubters and knockers
where the county seat belongs!"
"It's a great scheme," Morgan admitted. "How does the weather doctor
work?"
"Chemicals," Judge Thayer whispered, mysteriously; "sends up vapors day
and night, invisible, mainly, but potent, causing, as near as I can
come to it from his explanation--which is technical and thoroughly
scientific, Morgan--" this severely, as if to rebuke the grin that
dawned on Morgan's face. "Causing, as near as I can come to it, a
dispersion of the hot belt of atmosphere, this superheated belt that
encircles the globe in this spot like a flame of fire, causing a break
in this belt, so to speak, drilling a hole in it, bringing down the
upper frigid air."
Judge Thayer looked with triumph at Morgan when he delivered this,
sweating a great deal, as if the effort to elucidate this scientific
man's methods of conspiring against nature to beat it out of a rain were
equal to a ten-mile walk in the summer sun.
"Yes, sir," said Morgan, with more respect in his voice and manner than
he felt. "And then what happens?"
"Why, when the cold and the hot currents meet, condensation is the
natural result," said the judge. "Plain, simple, scientific as a
fiddle."
"Just about," said Morgan.
Judge Thayer passed it, either ignoring it as a fling beneath the notice
of a scientific man, or not catching the note of ridicule.
"He's at work in my garden now," he said, "sending up his invisible
vapors. I want to center the downpour from the heavens over this
God-favored spot, right over this God-favored spot of Ascalon."
CHAPTER XXIII
ASCALON CURLS ITS LIP
It was the marvel and regret of people who made their adventures
vicariously, and lived the thrill of them by reading the newspapers,
that Ascalon had come to a so sudden and unmistakable end of its
romance. For a little while there was hope that it might rise against
this Cromwell who had reached out a long arm and silenced it; for a few
days there was satisfaction in reading of this man's exploits in this
wickedest of all wicked towns, for newspapers sent men to study him, and
interview him, and write of his conquest of Ascalon on the very battle
ground.
Little enough they got out of Morgan, who met them kindly and talked of
the agricultural future of the country lying almost unpeopled beyond the
notorious little city's door. Such as they learned of his methods of
taming a lawless community they got from looser tongues than the city
marshal's.
Even from Chicago and St. Louis these explorers among the fallen temples
of adventure came, some of them veterans who had talked with Jesse James
in his day but recently come to a close. They waited around a few days
for the shot that would remove this picturesque crusader, not believing,
any more than the rest of the world, including Ascalon itself, believed
that this state of quiescence could prevail without end.
While they waited, sending off long stories by telegraph to their
papers every night, they saw the exodus of the proscribed begin,
increase, and end. The night-flitting women went first, urged away by
the necessities of the flaccid fish which lived upon their shame. The
gamblers and gamekeepers followed close behind.
A little while the small saloon-keepers who had nosed the floor and
licked up the crumbs which fell from Peden's bar hung around, hoping
that it was a flurry that would soon subside. They had big eyes for
future prosperity, the overlord being now out of the way, and talked
excitedly among themselves, even approached Morgan through an emissary
with proposals of a handsome subsidy.
But when they saw a Kansas City gambler come and strip Peden's hall of
its long bar and furnishings, of its faro tables and doctored roulette
wheels, load them all on a car and ship them to his less notorious but
safer town, they knew it was the end. Ascalon had fallen with its most
notable man, never to rise up again.
The last of the correspondents left on the evening of the day that Judge
Thayer set the rainmaker to work. He sent the obituary of Ascalon, as he
believed, ahead of him by wire.
Not that Ascalon was as dead as it appeared on the surface, or the
gamblers would make it out to be. True, the undertaker's business had
gone, and he with it; Druggist Gray's trade in the bromides and
restoratives in demand after debauches, and repairs for bunged heads
after the nightly carousels, had fallen away to nothing; the Elkhorn
hotel and the Santa Fé café were feeding few, and the dealers in
vanities and fancies, punctured hosiery, lacy waists, must pack up and
follow those upon whom they had prospered.
But there was as much business as before in lumber and hardware,
implements, groceries, and supplies for the cattle ranches and the many
settlers who were arriving without solicitation or proclamation and
establishing themselves to build success upon the ruins of failure left
by those who had gone before.
It was only the absence of the wastrels and those who preyed upon them,
and the quiet of nights after raucous revelry, that made the place seem
dead. Ascalon was as much alive as any town of its kind that had no more
justification for being in the beginning. It had more houses than it
could use now, since so many of its population had gone; empty stores
were numerous around the square, and more would be seen very soon. The
fair was over, the holiday crowd was gone. That was all.
Rhetta Thayer came back the same evening the last correspondent faced
away from Ascalon. Morgan saw her in the _Headlight_ office, where she
worked late that night to overtake her accumulated affairs, her pretty
head bent over a litter of proofs. Her door stood open as he passed, but
he hastened by softly, and did not return that way again.
He felt that she had gone away from Ascalon on his account, fearful that
she would meet him with blood fresh upon his hands. The attitude of
Judge Thayer was but a faint reflection of her own, he was sure. It was
best that they should not meet again, for blood had blotted out what
had seemed the beginning of a tender regard between them. That was at an
end.
During the next few days little was seen of Morgan in Ascalon. When he
was not riding on long excursions into the outlying country he could
have been found, if occasion had arisen demanding his presence on the
square, in the station agent's office at the depot. There he spent hours
hearing the little agent, whose head was as bald as a grasshopper's,
nothing but a pale fringe from ear to ear at the back of his neck,
recount the experiences that had fallen in his way during his
five-years' occupancy of that place.
This period covered the most notorious history of the town. In that
time, according to the check the agent had kept on them, no fewer than
fifty-nine men had met violent death on the street and in the caves of
vice in Ascalon. This man also noted keenly every arrival in these slack
days, duly reporting them all to Morgan, for whom he had a genuine
friendship and respect. So there was little chance of anybody slipping
in to set a new brewing of trouble over the dying embers of that
stamped-out fire.
Morgan avoided the _Headlight_ office, for there was a sensitive spot in
his heart that Rhetta's abhorrence of him hurt keenly. But more than
that he had the thought of sparing her the embarrassment of a meeting,
even of his shadow passing her door.
Twice he saw her at a distance in the street, and once she stood waiting
as if to speak to him. But the memory of her face at Peden's door that
night was with him always; he could not believe she would seek a
meeting out of a spontaneous and honest desire to see him. Only because
their lives were thrown together for a little while in that dice-box of
fate, and avoidance seemed studied and a thing that might set foolish
tongues clapping, she paused and looked his way as if waiting for him to
approach. She was serving convention, not with a wish of her heart. So
he believed, and turned the other way.
Cattlemen from the range at hand, and several from Texas who had driven
their herds to finish on the far-famed Kansas grass for the fall market,
were loading great numbers of cattle in Ascalon every day. The drouth
was driving them to this sacrifice. Lean as their cattle were, they
would be leaner in a short time.
This activity brought scores of cowboys to town daily. Under the old
order business would have been lively at night, when most of the
herdsmen were at leisure. As it was, they trooped curiously around the
square, some of them who had looked forward on the long drive to a
hilarious blowout at the trail's end resentfully sarcastic, but the
greater number humorously disposed to make the most of it.
Sober, these men of the range were very much like reservation Indians in
town on a holiday. They walked slowly around and around the square,
looking at everything closely, saying little, to dispose themselves
along the edge of the sidewalk after a while and smoke. There were no
fights, nobody let off a gun. When Morgan passed them on his quiet
rounds, they nudged each other, and looked after him with low comments,
for his fame had gone far in a little while.
These men had no quarrel with Morgan, disappointed of their revelry,
thirsty after their long waiting, sour as some of them were over finding
this oasis of their desert dry. They only looked on him with silent
respect. Nobody cared to provoke him; it was wise to give the road when
a fellow met that man. So they talked among themselves, somewhat
disappointed to find that Morgan was not carrying his rifle about with
him these peaceful days, unusual weapon for a gun-fighting man in that
country.
In this way, with considerable coming and going through its doors, yet
all in sobriety and peace, Ascalon passed the burning, rainless summer
days. But not without a little cheer in the hard glare of the parching
range, not without a laugh and a chuckle, and a grin behind the hand.
The town knew all about the rainmaker at work behind the shielding rows
of tall corn in Judge Thayer's garden. An undertaking of such scope was
too big to sequester in any man's back yard.
Whether the rainmaker believed in his formula, or whether he was a plain
fraud who was a little sharper on weather conditions than most men, and
good on an estimate of a drouth's duration, he seemed to be doing
something to earn his money. Day and night he kept something burning in
a little tin stove with a length of pipe that came just above the corn,
sending up a smoke that went high toward the cloudless sky before the
wind began to blow in the early morning hours, and after it ceased at
evening, after its established plan. During the day this smoke dispersed
very generally over town, causing some coughing and sneezing, and not a
little swearing and scoffing.
Sulphur, mainly, the doctor and Druggist Gray pronounced the chemical to
be. It was a sacrilege, the Baptist preacher declared, an offering to
Satan, from the smell of it, rather than a scientific assault upon the
locked heavens to burst open the windows and let out a dash of rain. If
the effort of the mysterious stranger brought anything at all, it would
bring disaster, the preacher declared. A cyclone, very likely, and
lightning, in expression of the Almighty's wrath.
Those who did not accept it wrathfully, as the preacher, or resentfully,
as Druggist Gray, from whom the experimenter bought none of his
chemicals, or humorously, as the doctor and many of higher intelligence,
had a sort of sneaking hope that something might come of it. If the rain
man could stir up a commotion and fetch a soaker, it would be the
salvation of that country. The range would revive, streams would flow,
water would come again into dry wells, and the new farmers who had come
in would be given hope to hang on another year and by their trade keep
Ascalon from perishing utterly.
But mainly the disposition was to laugh. Judge Thayer was a well-meaning
man, but easy. He believed he was bringing a doctor in to cure the
country's sickness, where all of his hopes were staked out in town lots,
when he had brought only a quack. A hundred dollars, even if the faker
made no more, was pretty good pay for seven days' work, they said. A
dollar's worth of sulphur would cover his expenses. And if it happened
to turn out a good guess, and a rain did blow up on time, Judge Thayer
was just fool enough to give the fellow a letter that would help him put
his fraud through in another place.
It did not appear, as the days passed, that the rainmaker was driving
much of a hole in the hot air that pressed down upon that tortured land.
No commotion was apparent in the upper regions, no cloud lifted to cut
off for an hour the shafts of the fierce sun. Ascalon lay panting,
exhausted, dry as tow, the dust of driven herds blowing through its
bare, bleak streets.
Gradually, as dry burning day succeeded the one in all particulars like
it that had gone before, what little hope the few had in Judge Thayer's
weather doctor evaporated and passed away. Those who had scoffed at the
beginning jeered louder now, making a triumph of it. The Baptist
preacher said the evil of meddling in the works of the Almighty was
becoming apparent in the increasing severity of the hot wind. Ascalon,
for its sins past and its sacrilege of the present, was to writhe and
scorch and wither from the face of the earth.
For all this, interest in the rainmaker's efforts did not lax. People
sniffed his smoke, noting every change in its flavor, and pressed around
Judge Thayer's garden fence trying to get a look at the operations.
Judge Thayer was not a little indignant over the scoffings and
denunciations, and this impertinent curiosity to pry upon what he gave
them to understand was his own private venture.
Keep off a safe distance from this iniquitous business, he warned with
sarcasm; don't lean on the fence and risk the wrath of the Almighty.
Let the correction of Providence fall on his own shoulders, which had
been carrying the sins of Ascalon a long time; don't get so close as to
endanger their wise heads under the blow. At the same time he gave them
to understand that if any rain came of the efforts of his weather doctor
it would be his, the judge's, own private and individual rain, wrung
from denying nature by science, and that science paid for by the judge's
own money.
The scoffers laughed louder at this, the sniffers wrinkled their noses a
little more. But the Baptist preacher only shook his head, the hot wind
blowing his wide overalls against his thin legs.
Morgan stood aloof from doubters, hopers, scoffers, and all, saying no
word for or against the rainmaker. Every morning now he took a ride into
the country, to the mystification of the town, coming back before the
heat mounted to its fiercest, always on hand at night to guard against
any outbreak of violence among the visitors.
There were not a few in town who watched him away each morning in the
hope that something would overtake him and prevent his return; many more
who felt their hearts sink as he rode by their doors with the fear that
each ride would be his last. Out there in the open some enemy might be
lying behind a clump of tangled briars. These women's prayers went with
the city marshal as he rode.
On a certain morning Morgan overtook Joe Lynch, driving toward town with
his customary load of bones. Morgan walked his horse beside Joe's wagon
to chat with him, finding always a charm of originality and rather more
than superficial thinking about the old fellow that was refreshing in
the intellectual stagnation of the town.
"Is that rain-crow feller still workin' over in town?" Joe inquired as
soon as greetings had passed.
"I suppose he is, I don't believe his seven days are up yet."
"This is his sixth, I'm keepin' notches on him. I thought maybe he'd
skinned out. Do you think he'll be able to fetch it?"
"I hope he can, but I've got my doubts, Joe."
"Yes, and I've got more than doubts. Science is all right, I reckon, as
fur as I ever heard, but no science ain't able to rake up clouds in the
sky like you'd rake up hay in a field and fetch on a rain. Even if they
did git the clouds together, how're they goin' to split 'em open and let
the rain out?"
"That would be something of a job," Morgan admitted.
"You've got to have lightnin' to bust 'em, and no science that ever was
can't make lightnin', I'm here to tell you, son. If some feller _did_
happen on how it was done, what do you reckon'd become of that man?"
"Why, they do make it, Joe--they make it right over at Ascalon, keep it
in jars under that table at the depot. Didn't you ever see it?"
"That ain't the same stuff," Joe said, with high disdain, almost
contempt. "Wire lightnin' and sky lightnin' ain't no more alike than
milk's like whisky. Well, say that science _did_ make up a batch of sky
lightnin'--but I ain't givin' in it can be done--how air they goin' to
git up to the clouds, how're they goin' to make it do the bustin' at the
right time?"
"That's more than I can tell you, Joe. It's too deep for me."
"Yes, or any other man. They'd let it go all at once and cause a
waterspout, that's about what they'd do, and between a waterspout and a
dry spell, give me the dry spell!"
"I never was in one, but I've seen 'em tearin' up the hills."
"Then you know what they air. It'd suit me right up to the han'le if
this feller could bring a rain, for I tell you I never saw so much
sufferin' and misery as these settlers are goin' through out here on
this cussid pe-rairie right now. Some of these folks is haulin' water
from the river as much as thirty mile!"
"I notice all the creeks and branches are dry. But it's only a little
way to plenty of water all over this country if they'll dig. Some of
them have put down wells during this dry spell and hit all the water
they need. There's a sheet of water flowing under this country from the
mountains in Colorado."
"Oh, you git out!"
"Just the same as the Arkansas River, only spread out for miles," Morgan
insisted. "A drouth here doesn't mean anything to that water supply;
I've been riding around over this country trying to show people that.
Most of them think I'm crazy--till they dig."
"I don't guess you're cracked yit," Joe allowed, "but you will be if you
stay in this country. If it wasn't for the bones you wouldn't find me
hangin' around here--I'd make for Wyoming. They tell me there's any
amount of bones that's never been touched up in that country."
"I noticed several other wagons out gathering bones. They'll soon clean
them up here, Joe."
"They're all takin' to it," Joe said, with the resentment of a man who
feels competition, "hornin' in on my business, what's mine by rights of
bein' the first man to go into it in this blame country. Let 'em--let
'em run their teams down scourin' around after bones--I'll be here to
pick up the remains of 'em all. I was here first, I've stuck through the
rushes of them fellers that's come into this country and dried up, and
I'll be here when this crowd of 'em dries up. Them fellers haul in bones
and trade 'em at the store for flour and meal, they don't git half out
of 'em what I do out of mine, and they're hurtin' the business, drivin'
it down to nothin'."
"Hotter than usual this morning," Morgan remarked, not so much
interested in bones and the competition of bones.
"Wind's dying down; I noticed that some time ago. Goin' to leave us to
sizzle without any fannin'. Ruther have it that way, myself. This
eternal wind dries a man's brains up after a while. I'd say, if I was
anywhere else, it was fixin' up to rain."
"Or for a cyclone."
"Too late in the season for 'em," Joe declared, not willing to grant
even that diversion to the drouth-plagued land of bones.
Joe reverted to the bones; he could not keep away from bones. There was
not much philosophy in him today, not much of anything but a plaint and
a denunciation of competition in bones. Morgan thought the wind must be
having its effect on Joe's brains; they seemed to be so hydrated that
morning they would have rattled against his skull. Morgan considered
riding on and leaving him, at the risk of giving offense, dismissing the
notion when they rose a hill and looked down on Ascalon not more than a
mile away.
"I believe there's a cloud coming up over there," said Morgan, pointing
to the southwest.
"Which?" said Joe, rousing as briskly as if he had been doused with a
bucket of water. "Cloud? No, that ain't no cloud. That's dust. More wind
behind that, a regular sand storm. Ever been through one of 'em?"
"In Nebraska," Morgan replied, with detached attention, watching what he
still believed to be a cloud lifting above the hazy horizon.
"Nothin' like the sand storms in this country," Joe discounted, never
willing to yield one point in derogative comparison between that land
and any other. "Feller told me one time he saw it blow sand so hard here
it started in wearin' a knot hole in the side of his shanty in the
evenin', and by mornin' the whole blame shack was gone. Eat them boards
up clean, that feller said. Didn't leave nothin' but the nails. But I
always thought he was stretchin' it a little," Joe added, not a gleam of
humor to be seen anywhere in the whole surface of his wind-dried face.
"That's a cloud, all right," Morgan insisted, passing the reduction by
attrition of the settler's shack.
"Cloud?" said Joe, throwing up his head with renewed alertness. He
squinted a little while into the southwest. "Bust my hub if it _ain't_ a
cloud! Comin' up, too--comin' right along. Say, do you reckon that
rain-crow feller brought that cloud up from somewheres?"
"He didn't have anything to do with it," Morgan assured him, grinning a
little over the quick shift in the old man's attitude, for there was awe
in his voice.
"No, I don't reckon," said Joe thoughtfully, "but it looks kind of
suspicious."
The cloud was lifting rapidly, as summer storms usually come upon that
unprotected land, sullen in its threat of destruction rather than
promise of relief. A great dark fleece rolled ahead of the green-hued
rain curtain, the sun bright upon it, the hush of its oncoming over the
waiting earth. No breath of wind stirred, no movement of nature
disturbed the silent waiting of the dusty land, save the lunging of
foolish grasshoppers among the drooping, withered sunflowers beside the
road as the travelers passed.
"I'm goin' to see if I can make it to town before she hits," said Joe,
lashing out with his whip. "Lordy! ain't it a comin'!"
"I think I'll ride on," said Morgan, feeling a natural desire for
shelter against that grim-faced storm.
The oncoming cloud had swept its flank across the sun before Morgan rode
into town, and in the purple shadow of its threat people stood before
their houses, watching it unfold. In Judge Thayer's garden--it was the
house Morgan had fixed on that first morning of his exploration--the
rainmaker was firing up vigorously, sending up a smoke of such density
as he had not employed in his labors before. This black column rose but
a little way, where it flattened against the cool current that was
setting in ahead of the storm, and whirled off over the roofs of Ascalon
to mock the scoffers who had laughed in their day.
Morgan stabled his horse and went to the square, where many of the
town's inhabitants were gathered, all faces tilted to watch the storm.
Judge Thayer was there, glorifying in the success of his undertaking,
sparing none of those who had mocked him for a sucker and a fool. A cool
breath of reviving wind was moving, fresh, sweet, rain-scented; as
hopeful, as life-giving, as a reprieve to one chained among faggots at
the stake of intolerance.
"It looks like you're going to win, Judge," Morgan said.
"Win? I've won! Look at it, pourin' rain over at Glenmore, the advance
of it not three miles from here! It'll be here inside of five minutes,
rainin' pitchforks."
But it did not happen so. The rain appeared to have taken to dallying on
the way, in spite of the thickening of clouds over Ascalon. Straining
faces, green-tinted in the gloomy shadow of the overhanging cloud,
waited uplifted for the first drops of rain; the dark outriders of the
storm wheeled and mingled, turned and rolled, low over the dusty roofs;
lightning rived the rain curtain that swept the famished earth, so near
at hand that the sensitive could feel it in their hair; deep thunder
sent its tremor through the ground, jarring the windows of Ascalon that
had looked in their day upon storms of human passion which were but
insect strife to this.
Yet not a drop of rain fell on roof, on trampled way, on waiting face,
on outstretched hand, in all of Ascalon.
Judge Thayer was seen hurrying from the square, making for home and the
weather doctor, who was about to let the rain escape.
"He's goin' to head it off," said one of the scoffers to Morgan,
beginning to feel a return of his exultation.
"It's goin' to miss us," said Druggist Gray, his head thrown back, his
Adam's apple like an elbow of stovepipe in his thin neck.
"We may get a good shower out of one end of it," Conboy still hoped,
pulling for the rain as he might have boosted for a losing horse.
"Nothing more than a sprinkle, if that much," said the station agent,
shaking his head, which he had bared to the cool wind.
"He's got him firin' up like he was tryin' to hive a swarm of bees," one
reported, coming from the seat of scientific labors.
"It's breakin', it's passin' by us--we'll not get a drop of it!"
So it appeared. Overhead the swirling clouds were passing on; in the
distance the thunder was fainter. The wind began to freshen from the
track of the rain, the pigeons came out of the courthouse tower for a
look around, light broke through the thinning clouds.
Not more than a mile or two southward of Ascalon the rain was falling in
a torrent, the roar of it still quite plain in the ears of those whose
thirst for its cooling balm was to be denied. The rain was going on,
after soaking and reviving Glenmore, which place Judge Thayer would have
given a quarter of his possessions to have had it miss.
A mockery, it seemed, a rebuke, a chastisement, the way nature conducted
that rain storm. Judge Thayer urged the rainmaker to his greatest
efforts to stop it, turn it, bring it back; smoke green and black went
up in volumes, to stream away on the cool, refreshing wind. Sulphur and
rosin and pitch were identified in that smoke as surely as the spectrum
reveals the composition of the sun. But the wind was against the
rainmaker; nature conspired to mock him before men as the quack that he
was.
The gloom of storm cleared from the streets of Ascalon, the worn and
tired look came back into faces that had been illumined for a little
while with hope. Farther away, fainter, the thunder sounded, dimmer the
murmur of the withdrawing rain.
The cool wind still blew like whispered consolation for a great, a
pangful loss, but it could not soften the hard hearts of those who had
stood with lips to the fountain of life and been denied. The people
turned again to their pursuits, their planning, their gathering of
courage to hold them up against the blaze of sun which soon must break
upon them for a parching season again. The dust lay deep under their
feet, gray on their roofs where shingles curled like autumn leaves in
the sun. The rainmaker sent up his vain, his fatuous, foolish,
infinitesimal breath of smoke. The rain went on its way.
"Aw, hell!" said Ascalon, in its derisive, impious way; "Aw, hell!"
CHAPTER XXIV
MADNESS OF THE WINDS
Ascalon's temper was not improved by the close passing of the rain,
which had refreshed but a small strip of that almost limitless land. The
sun came out as hot as before, the withering wind blew from the
southwest plaguing and distorting the fancy of men. Everybody in town
seemed sulky and surly, ready to snap at a word. The blight of
contention and strife seemed to be its heritage, the seed of violence
and destruction to be sown in the drouth-cursed soil.
The judgment of men warped in that ceaseless wind, untempered by green
of bough overhead or refreshing turf under foot. There was no justice in
their hearts, and no mercy. Morgan himself did not escape this infection
of ill humor that rose out of the hard-burned earth, streamed on the hot
wind, struck into men's brains with the rays of the penetrating sun. Not
conscious of it, certainly, any more than the rest of them in Ascalon
were aware of their red-eyed resentment of every other man's foot upon
the earth. Yet Morgan was drilled by the boring sun until his view upon
life was aslant. Resentment, a stranger to him in his normal state, grew
in him, hard as a disintegrated stone; scorn for the ingratitude of
these people for whom he had imperiled his life rose in his eyes like a
flame.
More than that, Morgan brooded a great deal on the defilement of blood
he had suffered there, and the alienation, real or fancied, that it had
brought of such friends as he valued in that town. By an avoidance now
unmistakably mutual, Morgan and Rhetta Thayer had not met since the
night of Peden's fall.
One thing only kept Morgan there in the position that had become
thankless in the eyes of those who had urged it upon him in the
beginning. That was the threatened vengeance of Peden's friends. He was
giving them time to come for their settlement; he felt that he could not
afford to be placed in the light of one who had fled before a threat.
But it seemed to him, on the evening of the second day after the rain
storm's passing, that he had waited long enough. The time had come for
him to go.
There were a few cowboys in town that evening, and these as quiet as
buzzards on a fence as they sat along the sidewalk near the hotel
smoking their cigarettes. The wind had fallen, leaving a peace in the
ears like the cessation of a hateful turmoil. There was the promise of a
cool night in the unusual clearness of the stars. Morgan rode away into
the moonless night, leaving the town to take care of its own dignity and
peace.
Morgan's thought was, as he rode away into the early night, to return
Stilwell's horse, come back to Ascalon next day, resign his office and
leave the country. Not that his faith in its resources, its future
greatness and productivity when men should have learned how to subdue
it, was broken or changed. His mind was of the same bent, but
circumstances had revised his plans. There was with him always, even in
his dreams, a white, horror-stricken face looking at him in the pain of
accusation, repulsion, complete abhorrence, where he stood in that place
of blood.
This was driving him away from the hopes he had warmed in his heart for
a day. Without the sweet flower he had hoped to fend and enjoy, that
land would be a waste to him. He could not forget in going away, but
distance and time might exorcise the spirit that attended him, and dim
away the accusing pain of that terrified face.
Ascalon's curse of blood had descended to him; it was no mitigation in
her eyes that he had slain for her. But he had brought her security.
Although he had paid the tremendous price, he had given her nights of
peace.
Even as this thought returned to him with its comfort, as it came always
like a cool breath to preserve his balance in the heat and turmoil of
his regret and pain, Rhetta Thayer came riding up the dim road.
Her presence on that road at night was a greater testimonial to her
confidence in the security he had brought to Ascalon and its borders
than her tongue might have owned. She was riding unattended where, ten
days ago, she would not have ventured with a guard. It gave Morgan a
thrill of comfort to know how completely she trusted in the security he
had given her.
"Mr. Morgan!" she said, recognizing him with evident relief. Then,
quickly, in lively concern. "Who's looking after things in town
tonight?"
"I left things to run themselves," he told her quietly, but with
something in his voice that said things might go right or wrong for any
further concern he had of them.
"Well," she said, after a little silence, "I don't suppose you're needed
very much."
"That's what the business men are saying," he told her, sarcasm in his
dry tone.
"I don't mean it that way," she hastened to amend. "You've done us a
great service--we'll never be able to pay you----"
"There isn't any pay involved," he interposed, almost roughly. "That's
what's worrying those nits around the square, they say they can't carry
a marshal's pay with business going to the devil since the town's
closed. Somebody ought to tell them. There never will be any bill."
"You're too generous," she said, a little spontaneous warmth in her
voice.
"Maybe I can live it down," he returned.
"It's such a lovely cool night I couldn't stay in," she chatted on,
still laboring to be natural and at ease, not deceiving him by her
constraint at all, "after such a hard day fussing with that old paper.
We missed an issue the week--last week--we're getting out two in one
this time. Why haven't you been in? you seem to be in such a hurry
always."
"I wanted to spare you what you can't see in the dark," he said, the
vindictive spirit of Ascalon's insanity upon him.
"What I can't see in the dark?" she repeated, as if perplexed.
"My face."
"You shouldn't say that," she chided, but not with the hearty sincerity
that a friend would like to hear. "Are you going back to town?"
"I'll ride with you," he granted, feeling that for all her friendly
advances the shadow of his taint lay between them.
They were three miles or more from town, the road running as straight as
a plumbline before them. A little way they jogged on slowly, nothing
said. Rhetta was the first to speak.
"What made you run away from me that day I wanted to speak to you, Mr.
Morgan?"
"Did you want to, or were you just--_did_ you want to speak to me that
day, Miss Thayer?" Morgan's heart began to labor, his forehead to sweat,
so hard was the rebirth of hope.
"And you turned right around and walked off!"
"You can tell me now," he suggested, half choking on the commonplace
words, the tremor of his springing hope was so great.
"I don't remember--oh, nothing in particular. But it looks so strange
for us--for you--to be dodging me--each other--that way, after we'd
_started_ being friends before everybody."
"Only for the sake of appearances," he said sadly. "I hoped--but you ran
away and hid for a week, you thought I was a monster."
Foolish, perhaps, to cut down the little shoot of hope again, when a
gentle breath, a soft word, might have encouraged and supported it. But
it was out of his mouth, the fruit of his brooding days, in his
resentfulness of her injustice, her ingratitude for his sacrifice, as
he believed. He saw her turn from him, as if a revulsion of the old
feeling swept her.
"Don't judge me too harshly, Mr. Morgan," she appealed, still looking
away.
Morgan was melted by her gentle word; the severity of the moment was
dissolved in a breath.
"If we could go on as we began," he suggested, almost pleading in his
great desire.
"Why, aren't we?" she asked, succeeding well, as a woman always can in
such a situation, in giving it a discouraging artlessness.
"You know how they're kicking and complaining all around the square
because I've shut up the town, ruined business, brought calamity to
their doors as they see it?"
"Yes, I know."
"They forget that they came to me with their hats in their hands and
asked me to do it. Joe Lynch says the hot wind has dried their reason up
like these prairie springs. I believe he's right. But I didn't shut the
town up for them, I didn't go out there with my gun like a savage and
shoot men down for them, Miss Thayer. If you knew how much you were----"
"Don't--don't--Mr. Morgan, please!"
"I think there's something in what Joe Lynch says about the wind," he
told her, leaning toward her, hand on the horn of her saddle. "It warps
men, it opens cracks in their minds like the shrunk lumber in the houses
of Ascalon. I think sometimes it's getting its work in on me, when I'm
lonesome and disappointed."
"You ought to come in and talk with me and Riley sometimes."
"I've often felt like going to them, whining around about the town being
killed," he went on, pursuing his theme as if she had not spoken, "and
telling them they didn't figure in my calculations at the beginning nor
come in for any of my consideration at the end--if this is the end.
There was only one person in my thoughts, that one person was Ascalon,
and all there was in it, and that was you. When I took the job that day,
I took it for you."
"Not for me alone!" she hastened to disclaim, as one putting off an
unwelcome responsibility, unfriendly denial in her voice.
"For you, and only you," he told her, earnestly. "If you knew how much
you were to me----"
"Not for me alone--I was only one among all of them," she said, spurring
her horse in the vehemence of her disclaimer, causing it to start away
from Morgan with quick bound. She checked it, waiting for him to draw up
beside her again. "I'd hate to think, Mr. Morgan--oh, you can't want me
alone to take the responsibility for the killing of those men!"
Morgan rode on in silence, head bent in humiliation, in the sad
disappointment that fell on him like a blow.
"If it could have been done, if I could have brought peace and safety to
the women of Ascalon without bloodshed, I'd have done it. I wanted to
tell you, I tried to tell you----"
"Don't--don't tell me any more, Mr. Morgan--please!"
She drew across the road, widening the space between them as she spoke.
Perhaps this was due to the unconscious pressure on the rein following
her shrinking from his side, from the thought of his touch upon her
hand, but it wounded Morgan's humiliated soul deeper than a thousand
unkind words.
"No, I'll never tell you," he said sadly, but with dignity that made the
renunciation noble.
Rhetta seemed touched. She drew near him again, reaching out her hand as
if to ease his hurt.
"It was different before--before _that night_! you were different, all
of us, everything. I can't help it, ungrateful as I seem. You'll forgive
me, you'll understand. But you were _different_ to me before then."
"Yes, I was different," Morgan returned, not without bitterness in his
slow, deep, gentle voice. "I never killed a man for--I never had killed
a man; there was no curse of blood on my soul."
"Why is it always necessary to kill in Ascalon?" she asked, wildly,
rebelliously. "Why can't anything be done without that horrible ending!"
"If I knew; if I had known," he answered her, sadly.
"Forgive me, Mr. Morgan. You know how I feel about it all."
"I know how you feel," he said, offering no word of forgiveness, as he
had spoken no word of reminder where a less generous soul might have
spoken, nor raised a word of blame. If he had a thought that she must
have known when she urged him to the defense of the defenseless in
Ascalon, what the price of such guardianship must be, he kept it sealed
in his heart.
They rode on. The lights of Ascalon came up out of the night to meet
their eyes as they raised the last ridge. There Morgan stopped, so
abruptly that she rode on a little way. When he came up to her where she
waited, he was holding out his hand.
"Here is my badge--the city marshal's badge," he said. "If you can bear
the thought of touching it, or touch it without a thought, I wish you
would return it to Judge Thayer for me. I'm not needed in Ascalon any
longer, I'm quitting the job tonight. Good-bye."
Morgan laid the badge in her hand as he spoke the last word, turned his
horse quickly, rode back upon their trail. Rhetta wheeled her horse
about, a protest on her lips, a sudden pang in her heart that clamored
to call him back. But no cry rose to summon him to her side, and Morgan,
gloomy as the night around him, went on his way.
But the lights of Ascalon were blurred as if she looked on them through
a rain-drenched pane when Rhetta faced again to go her way alone, the
marshal's badge clutched in her hand. Remorse was roiling in her breast;
the corrosive poison of regret for too much said, depressed her generous
heart.
If he had known how to accomplish what he had wrought without blood, he
had said; if he had known. Neither had she known, but she had expected
it of him, she had set him to the task with an unreasonable condition.
Blood was the price. Ascalon exacted blood, always blood.
The curse of blood, he had said, was on his soul, his voice trembling
with the deep, sad vibration that might have risen from a broken heart.
Yes, there was madness in the wind, in the warping sun, in the hard
earth that denied and mocked the dearest desires of men. It had struck
her, this madness that hollowed out the heart of a man like a worm,
leaving it an unfeeling shell.
Rhetta had time for reflection when she reached home, and deeper
reflection than had troubled the well of her remorse as she rode. For
there in the light of her room she saw the bullet-mark on the dented
badge, which never had come quite straight for all Morgan's pains to
hammer out its battle scars. A little lead from the bullet still clung
in the grooves of letters, unmistakable evidence of what had marred its
nickled front.
Conboy had regarded Morgan's warning to keep that matter under his hat,
for he had learned the value of silence at the right time in his long
experience in that town. Nobody else knew of the city marshal's close
escape the night of his great fight. The discovery now came to Rhetta
Thayer with a cold shudder, a constriction of the heart. She stared with
newly awakened eyes at the badge where it lay in her palm, her pale
cheeks cold, her lips apart, shocked by the sudden realization of his
past peril as no word could have expressed.
Hot thoughts ran in thronging turmoil through her brain, thoughts before
repressed and chilled in her abhorrence of that flood of blood. For her
he had gone into that lair of murderous, defiant men, for her he had
borne the crash of that ball just over his heart. For there he had worn
the badge--just over his honest heart. Perhaps because she had thought
his terrible work had been unjustified, as the spiteful and vicious
told, she had recoiled from him, and the recollection of him standing on
grim guard among the sanguinary wreckage of that awful place. If he had
known any other way, he had said; if he had known!
Not for the mothers of Ascalon, of whom he had spoken tenderly; not for
the men who came cringing to beg their redemption from the terror and
oppression of the lawless at his hand. Not for them. But for her. So he
had said not half an hour past.
But he had said no word to remind her where reminder was needed, not an
accusation had he uttered where accusation was so much deserved, that
would bring back to her the plain, hard fact that it was at her earnest
appeal he had undertaken the regeneration of that place.
On the other hand, he had spoken as if he had assumed the task
voluntarily, to give her the security that she now enjoyed. She had sent
him to this work, expecting him to escape the curse of blood that had
fallen. But she had not shown him the means. And when it fell on him,
saddening his generous heart, she had fled like an ingrate from the
sight of his stern face. Now he was gone, leaving her to the
consideration of these truths, which came rushing in like false
reserves, too late.
She put out the light and sat by the open window, the scarred badge
between her hands, warming it tenderly as if to console the hurt he had
suffered, wondering if this were indeed the end. This evidence in her
hand was like an absolution; it left him without a stain. The
justification was there presented that removed her deep-seated
abhorrence of his deed. In defense of his own life he had struck them
down. His life; most precious and most dear. And he was gone.
Was this, indeed, the end? For her romance that had lifted like a bright
flower in an unexpected place for a little day, perhaps; for Ascalon,
not the end. Something of unrest, as an impending storm, something of
the night's insecurity, troubled her as she sat by the window and told
her this. The sense of peace that had made her nights sweet was gone; a
vague terror seemed growing in the silent dark.
This feeling attended her when she went to bed, harassed her sleep like
a fever, woke her at early dawn and drew her to the window, where she
leaned and listened, straining to define in the stillness the thing that
seemed to whisper a warning to her heart.
There was nothing in the face of nature to account for this; not a cloud
was on the sky. The town, too, lay still in the mists of breaking
morning, its houses dim, its ways deserted. Alarm seemed unreasonable,
but her heart quivered with it, and shrunk within her as from a chilling
wind. There was no warder at the gate of Ascalon; the sentry was gone.
Rhetta turned back to her bed, neither quieted of her indefinable
uneasiness nor inclined to resume her troubled sleep. After a little
while she rose again, and dressed. Dread attended her, dread had brooded
on her bosom while she slept uneasily, like a cat breathing its poisoned
breath into her face.
Dawn had widened when she went to the window again, the mist that clung
to the ground that morning in the unusual coolness was lifting. A
horseman rode past the corner at the bank, stopped his horse in the
middle of the street, turned in his saddle and looked around the quiet
square.
Other riders followed, slipping in like wolves from the range, seven or
eight of them, their horses jaded as if they had been long upon the
road. Cowboys in with another herd to load, she thought. And with the
thought the first horseman, who had remained this little while in the
middle of the street gazing around the town, rode up to the hitching
rack beside the bank and dismounted. Rhetta gasped, drawing back from
the window, her heart jumping in sudden alarm.
Seth Craddock!
There could be no mistaking the man, slow-moving when he dismounted,
tall and sinewy, watchful as a battered old eagle upon its crag. With
these ruffians at his back, gathered from the sweepings of no knowing
how many outlawed camps, he had come in the vengeance that had gathered
like a storm in his evil heart, to punish Ascalon and its marshal for
his downfall and disgrace.
CHAPTER XXV
A SUMMONS AT SUNRISE
Three horses were standing in Stilwell's yard, bridle reins on the
ground, as three horses had stood on the morning that Morgan first found
his tortured way to that hospitable door. In the house the Stilwell
family and Morgan were at breakfast, attended by Violet, who bore on
biscuits and ham to go with the coffee that sent its cheer out through
the open door as if to find a traveler and lead him to refreshment.
Behind the cottonwoods along the river, sunrise was about to break.
"I'm gittin' so I can't wake up of a morning when I sleep in a house,"
Stilwell complained, his broad face radiating humor. "I guess I'll have
to take the blankets ag'in, old lady."
"I guess you can afford to sleep till half-past three in the morning
once in a while," Mrs. Stilwell said complacently. "Why, Mr. Morgan,
that man didn't sleep under a roof once a month the first five or six
years we were on this range! He just laid out like a coyote anywhere
night overtook him, watchin' them cattle like they were children. Now,
what's come of it!"
This last bitter note, ranging back to their recent loss from Texas
fever, took the cheer out of Stilwell's face. A brooding cloud came over
it; his merry chaff was stilled.
"Yes, and Drumm'll pay for them eight hundred head of stock he killed
for us, if I have to trail him to his hole in Texas!" Fred declared.
"Suit or no suit, that man's goin' to pay."
"I don't like to hear you talk that way, honey," his mother chided.
"Suit!" Fred scoffed; "what does that man care about a suit? He'll never
show his head in this country any more, the next drive he makes he'll
load west of here and we'll never know anything about it. There's just
one way to fix a man like him, and I know the receipt that'll cure _his_
hide!"
"If he ever drives another head of stock into this state I'll hear of
it, and I'll attach him. It'll be four or five years before the
railroad's built down into that country, he'll have to drive here or
nowheres. I'll set right here on this range till he comes."
"Did the rain strike any of your range?" Morgan inquired, eager to turn
them away from this gloomy matter of loss and revenge.
"Yes, we got a good soakin' over the biggest part of it. Plenty of water
now, grass jumpin' up like spring. It's the purtiest country, Cal, a man
ever set eyes on after a rain."
"And in the spring," said Mrs. Stilwell, wistfully.
"And when the wild roses bloom along in May," said Violet. "There's no
place in the world as pretty as this country then."
"I believe you," Morgan told them, nodding his head in undivided assent.
"Even dry as it is around Ascalon and that country north, it gets hold
of a man."
"You buy along on the river here somewhere, Cal, and put in a nice
little herd. It won't take you long to make a start, and a good start.
This country ain't begun to see the cattle it will----"
"Somebody comin'," said Violet, running to the door to see, a plate of
hot biscuits in her hand.
"Seems to be in a hurry for this early in the day," Stilwell commented,
listening to the approach of a galloping horse. He was not much
interested; horsemen came and went past that door at all hours of the
day and night, generally in a gallop.
"It's Rhetta!" Violet announced from the door, turning hurriedly to put
the plate of biscuits on the table, where it stood before unheeding
eyes.
"Rhetta?" Mrs. Stilwell repeated, getting up in excitement. "I wonder
what----"
Rhetta was at the door, the dust of her arrival making her indistinct to
those who hurried from the unfinished breakfast to learn the cause of
this precipitous visit. Morgan saw her leaning from the saddle, her
loosely confined hair half falling down.
"Is Mr. Morgan here?" she inquired.
The girl's voice trembled, her breath came so hard Morgan could hear its
suspiration where he stood. It was evident that she labored under a
tremendous strain of anxiety, arising out of a trouble that Morgan was
at no loss to understand. Yet he remained in the background as Stilwell
and Fred crowded to the door.
"Why, Rhetty! what's happened?" Stilwell inquired, hurrying out,
followed by his wife and son. Violet was already beside her perturbed
visitor, looking up into her terror-blanched face.
"Oh, they've come, they've come!" Rhetta gasped.
"Who?" Stilwell asked, mystified, laying hold of her bridle, shaking it
as if to set her senses right. "Who's come, Rhetty?"
"I came for Mr. Morgan!" she panted, as weak, it seemed, as a wounded
bird. "I thought he came here--he had your horse."
"He's here, honey," Mrs. Stilwell told her, consoling her like a hurt
child.
Morgan did not come forward. He stood as he had risen from his chair at
the table, one hand on the cloth, his head bent as if in a travail of
deepest thought. The shaft of tender new sunlight reaching in through
the open door struck his shoulders and breast, leaving his face in the
shadow that well suited the mood darkening over his soul like a storm. A
thousand thoughts rose up and swirled within him, a thousand harsh
charges, a thousand seeds of bitterness. Rhetta, leaning to peer under
the lintel of the low door, could see him there, and she reached out her
hand, appealing without a word.
"He is here, honey," Mrs. Stilwell repeated, assuringly, comfortingly.
"Tell him--tell him--Craddock's come!" Rhetta said.
"Craddock?" said Stilwell, pronouncing the name with inflection of
surprise. "Oh, I thought something awful had happened to somebody." He
turned with the ease of indifference in his manner, to go back and
finish his meal. "Well, didn't you look for him to come back? I knew all
the time he'd come."
Morgan lifted his head. The sun, broken by Rhetta's shadow, brightened
on the floor at his feet, and spread its beam upon his breast like a
golden stole. The old wound on his check bone was a scar now, irregular,
broad from the crude surgery that had bound it but illy. Its dark
disfigurement increased the somber gravity of his face, sunburned and
wind-hardened as any ranger's who rode that prairie waste. From where he
stood Morgan could not see the girl's face, only her restless hand on
the bridle rein, the brown of her riding skirt, the beginning of white
at her waist.
"There ought to be men enough in Ascalon to take care of Craddock,"
Violet said.
"He's not alone, some of those Texas cowboys are with him," Rhetta
explained, her voice firmer, her words quicker. "Mr. Morgan is still
marshal--he gave me his badge, but please tell him I didn't--I forgot to
turn it in with his resignation."
"I don't see that it's Cal's fight this time, Rhetty," Stilwell said.
"He's done enough for them yellow pups over in Ascalon, to be yelped at
and cussed for savin' their dirty hides."
"They're looking for him, they think he's hiding!"
"Well, let 'em look. If they come over here they'll find him--Cal ain't
makin' no secret of where he's at. And they'll find somebody standin'
back to back with him, any time they want to come." Stilwell's
resentment of Ascalon's ingratitude toward his friend was plainer in his
mouth than print.
"They're going to burn the town to drive him out!" Rhetta said, gasping
in the terror that shook her heart.
"I guess it'll be big enough to hold all the people that's in it when
they're through," said Stilwell, unfeelingly.
"Here's his badge," said Rhetta, offering it frantically. "Tell him he's
still marshal!"
"Yes, you can come for him--now!" said Violet, accusingly. "I told
you--you remember now what I told you!"
"O Violet, Violet! If you knew what I've paid for that--if you knew!"
"Not as much as you owe him, if it was the last drop of blood in your
heart!" said Violet. And she turned away, and went and stood by the
door.
"They'll burn the town!" Rhetta moaned. "Oh, isn't anybody going to help
me--won't you call him, Violet?"
"No," said Violet. "He can hear you--he'll come if he wants to--if he's
fool enough to do it again!"
"Violet!" her mother cautioned.
"How many are with him?" Fred inquired.
"Seven or eight--I didn't see them all. Pa's collecting a posse to guard
the bank--they're going to rob it!"
"They're welcome to all I've got in it," Stilwell said. "You better come
in and have a cup of coffee, Rhetty, before----"
"The one they call the Dutchman's there, and Drumm----"
"Drumm?" Fred and his father spoke like a chorus, both of them jumping
to alertness.
"And some others of that gang Mr. Morgan drove out of town. They were
setting the hotel afire when I left!"
Stilwell did not wait for all of it. He was in the house at a jump,
reaching down his guns which hung beside the door. Close after him Fred
came rushing in, snatching his weapons from the buffalo horns on the
wall.
"I'm goin' to git service on that man!" Stilwell said. "Are you goin'
with us, Cal?"
But Cal Morgan did not reply. He went to the bedroom where he had slept,
took up his gun, stood looking at it a moment as if considering
something, snatched his hat from the bedpost and turned back, buckling
his belt. Mrs. Stilwell and Violet were struggling with husband and
brother to restrain them from rushing off to this battle, raising a
turmoil of pleading and protesting at the door.
As Morgan passed Stilwell, who was greatly impeded in his efforts to
buckle on his guns by his wife's clinging arms and passionate pleadings
to remain at home, Fred broke away from his sister and ran for the
kitchen door.
"Let Drumm go--let all of them go--let the cattle go, let everything go!
none of it's worth riskin' your life for!" Stilwell's affectionate good
wife pleaded with him.
"Now, Mother, I'm not goin' to git killed," Morgan heard Stilwell say,
his very assurance calming. But the poor woman, who perhaps had
recollections of past battles and perils which he had gone through,
burst out again, weeping, and clung to him as if she could not let him
go.
Morgan paused a moment at the threshold, as if reconsidering something.
Violet, who had stood leaning her head on her bent arm, weeping that
Fred was rushing to throw his life away, lifted her tearful face,
reached out and touched his arm.
"Must you go?" she asked.
For reply Morgan put out his hand as if to say farewell. She took it,
pressed it a moment to her breast, and ran away, choked on the grief she
could not utter. Morgan stepped out into the sun.
Rhetta Thayer stood at the door, a little aside, as if waiting for him,
as if knowing he would come. She was agitated by the anxious hope that
spoke out of her white face, but restrained by a fear that could not
hide in her wide-straining eyes. She moved almost imperceptibly toward
him, her lips parted as if to speak, but said nothing.
As Morgan lifted his hand to his hat in grave salute, passing on, she
offered him the badge of his office which she had held gripped in her
hand. He took it, inclining his head as in acknowledgment of its safe
keeping through the night, and hastened on to one of the horses that
stood dozing on three legs in the early sun.
As he left her, Rhetta followed a few quick steps, a cry rising in her
heart for him to stay a moment, to spare her one word of forgiveness out
of his grim, sealed lips. But the cry faltered away to a great, stifling
sob, while tears rose hot in her eyes, making him dim in her sight as he
threw the rein over the horse's head, starting the animal out of its
sleep with a little squatting jump. She stood so, stretching out her
hands to him, while he, unbending in his stern answer to the challenge
of duty, unseeing in the hard bitterness of his heart, swung into the
saddle and rode away.
Rhetta groped for her saddle, blind in her tears. Morgan was hidden by
the dust that hung in the quiet morning behind him as she mounted and
followed.
Half a mile or so along the road, Fred passed her, bending low as he
rode, as if his desire left the saddle and carried him ahead of his
horse; a little while, and Stilwell thundered by, leaving her last and
alone on that road leading to what adventures her heart shrunk in her
bosom to contemplate.
Ahead of her the smoke of Ascalon's destruction rose high.
CHAPTER XXVI
IN THE SQUARE AT ASCALON
Morgan had time for a bitter train of reflection as he rode, never
looking behind him to see who came after. Whether Stilwell would yield
to his wife's appeal and remain at home, whether Fred could be bent from
his fiery desire to be avenged on the author of their calamity, he took
no trouble to surmise. He only knew that he, Calvin Morgan, was rushing
again to combat at the call of this girl whose only appeal was in the
face of dreadful peril, whose only service was that of blood.
She had come again, this time like a messenger bearing a command, to
call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put
down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty
which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the
smoke of the burning town.
So he told himself as he galloped on, but never believing for a moment
in the core of his heart that it was true. Deep within him there was a
response to a more tender call than the stern trumpeting of duty--the
answer to an appeal of remorseful eyes, of a pleading heart that could
not bear the shame of the charge that he was hiding and afraid. For her,
and his place of honor in her eyes, he was riding to Ascalon that hour.
Not for Ascalon, and those in it who had snarled at his heels. For her,
not the larger duty of a sworn officer of the law riding to defend and
protect the lives and property under his jurisdiction.
Morgan pulled up his horse at the edge of town, to consider his
situation. He had left Stilwell's in such haste, and in the midst of
such domestic anguish, that he had neglected to bring one of the
rancher's rifles with him. His only weapon was his revolver, and the
ammunition at his belt was scant, due to the foolish security of the
days when he believed Seth Craddock never would return. He must pick up
a gun somewhere, and ammunition.
There was some scattered shooting going on in the direction of the
square, but whether the citizens were gathering to the defense of the
town, or the raiders were firing admonitory shots to keep them indoors,
Morgan could not at that distance tell. He rode on, considering his most
urgent necessity of more arms, concluding to ride straight for Judge
Thayer's house and borrow his buffalo rifle.
He swung into the road that led past Judge Thayer's house, which
thoroughfare entered the square at the bank corner, still about a
quarter of a mile away. As he came round the turn of the road he saw, a
few hundred yards ahead of him, a man hurrying toward the square with a
gun in his hand. A spurt of speed and Morgan was beside him, leaning
over, demanding the gun.
It was the old man who had jumped out of his reverie on the morning of
Morgan's first return to Ascalon, and menaced him with the crook of his
hickory stick. The veteran was going now without the comfort of his
stick, making pretty good time, eager in the rousing of fires long
stilled in his cooling heart. He began trotting on when he recognized
Morgan, shouting for him to hurry.
"Lend me your gun, Uncle John--I left mine in the hotel," Morgan said.
"Hell, what'll I do then?" said Uncle John, unwilling to give it up.
Morgan was insistent. He commandeered the weapon in the name of the law.
That being the case, Uncle John handed it up to him, with a word of
affection for it, and a little swearing over his bad luck.
It was a double-barreled buffalo rifle, a cap-and-ball gun of very old
pattern, belonging back in the days of Parkman and the California Trail,
and the two charges which it bore were all that Morgan could hope to
expend, for Uncle John carried neither pouch nor horn. But Morgan was
thankful for even that much, and rode on.
A little way ahead a man, hatless, wild-haired, came running out from
his dooryard, having witnessed Morgan's levying on Uncle John's gun and
read his reason for it. This citizen rushed into the road and offered a
large revolver, which Morgan leaned and snatched from his hand as he
galloped by. But it hadn't a cartridge in its chambers, and its caliber
was not of Morgan's ammunition. Still, he rode on with it in his hand,
hoping that it might serve its turn.
Morgan galloped on toward the square, where a great volume of smoke hid
the courthouse and all of the town that lay before the wind. He hoped to
meet somebody there with a gun worth while, although he had no
immediate plan for pitching into the fight and using it. That must be
fixed for him by circumstances when he confronted them.
Women and children stood in the dooryards watching the fire that was
cutting through the thin-walled buildings on that side of the
square--the hotel side--as if they were strawboard boxes. They were
silent in the great climax of fear; they stood as people stand,
straining and waiting, watching the approach of a tornado, no safety in
flight, no refuge at hand. There was but one man in sight, and he was
running like a jack rabbit across the staked ground behind Judge
Thayer's office, heading for the prairie. It was Earl Gray, the
druggist. He was covering sixteen feet at a jump. When he saw Morgan
galloping into the town, Gray stopped, darted off at an angle as if he
were going on some brave and legitimate excursion, and disappeared.
The Elkhorn hotel was well under way of destruction, its roof already
fallen, its thin walls bending inward, perforated in a score of places
by flames. The head of the street was unguarded; Morgan rode on and
halted at the edge of the square.
Smoke blotted out everything in the square, except for a little shifting
by the rising wind which revealed the courthouse, the pigeons in wild
flight around the tower. There was not a man in sight, neither raider
nor defender. Across on the other side of the square, as if they
defended that part from being set on fire, the citizens were doing some
shooting with rifles, even shotguns, as Morgan could define by the
sound. The raiders were there, for they were answering with shot and
yell.
Morgan caught the flutter of a dress at the farther corner of the
bank--a little squat brick building this was--where some woman stood and
watched. He rode around, and at the sound of his approach a gun-barrel
was trained on him, and a familiar fair head appeared, cheek laid
against the rifle stock in a most determined and competent way.
"Dora! don't shoot!" Morgan shouted. In a moment he was on the ground
beside her, and Dora Conboy was handing him his own rifle, pride and
relief in her blue eyes.
"I knew you'd come, I told them you'd come!" she said.
"How did you save it--what are you doing here, Dora?" he asked in
amazement.
"I was layin' for Craddock! If he'd 'a' come around that corner--but it
was you!"--with a sigh of relief.
"Have you got any shells, Dora?"
"No, I didn't have time to grab anything but your gun--I run to your
room when they set the hotel afire and drove us out."
"You're the bravest man in town!" he praised her, patting her shoulder
as if she were a very little girl, indeed. "Where are they all?"
"They've locked Riley, and Judge Thayer, and all the men that's got a
fight in 'em up in jail with the sheriff. Pa got away--he's over there
where you hear that shootin'--but he can't hit nothin'!" Dora said, in
hopeless disgust.
Morgan saw with relief that the magazine of his rifle was full, and a
shot in the barrel. He took Dora by the hand, turning away from his
haste to mount as if it came to him as an after-thought to thank her for
this great help.
"There's going to be a fight, Dora," he said. "You'd better get behind
the bank, and keep any of the women and children there that happen
along. You're a brave, good little soul, I'll never forget you for what
you've done for me today. Please take care of this gun--it belongs to
Uncle John."
He was up in the saddle with the last word, and gone, galloping into the
pitchy black smoke that swirled like a turgid flood from burning Ascalon
across the square.
Morgan's thought was to locate the raiders' horses and cut them off, if
it should be that some of the rascals were still on foot setting fires,
as it seemed likely from the smell of kerosene, that they were. It would
increase his doubtful chances to meet as many of them on foot as
possible. This was his thought.
He made out one mounted man dimly through the blowing smoke, watching in
front of the Santa Fé café, but recently set on fire. This fellow
doubtless was stationed there on the watch for him, Morgan believed,
from the close attention he was giving the front door of the place, out
of which a volume of grease-tainted smoke rolled. He wondered, with a
little gleam of his saving humor, what there was in his record since
coming to Ascalon that gave them ground for the belief that it was
necessary to burn a house to bring him out of it to face a fight.
Morgan rode on a little way across the square, not twenty yards behind
this raider, the sound of his horse silenced in the roar of fire and
growing wind. The heat of the place was terrific; burning shingles
swirled on the wind, coals and burning brands fell in a rain all over
the square. At the corner of the broad street that came into the square
at Peden's hall, another raider was stationed.
The citizens who were making a weak defense were being driven back, the
sound of firing was behind the stores, and falling off as if the raiders
pressed them hard. Morgan quickly concluded that Craddock and the rest
of the outfit were over there silencing this resistance, probably in the
belief that he was concerned in it.
This seemed to be his moment for action, yet arresting any of them was
out of the question, and he did not want to be the aggressor in the
bloodshed that must finish this fiendish morning's work. Hopeless as his
situation appeared, justified as he would have been in law and reason
for opening fire without challenge, he waited the further justification
of his own conscience. They had come looking for him; let them find him
here in their midst.
Fire was rising high among the stripped timbers of Peden's hall, purging
it of its debauchery and blood. On the rising wind the flames were
licking up Gray's drug-store, the barber shop beside it, the newspaper
office, the Santa Fé café and the incidental small shops between them
and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little while would
suffice to see their obliteration, a little longer to witness the
destruction of the town if the wind should carry the coals and blazing
shingles to other roofs, dry as the sered grasses of the plain.
The sound of this fire set by Seth Craddock in celebration of his return
to Ascalon was in Morgan's ears like the roar of the sea; the heat of it
drew the tough skin of his face as he rode fifty yards from it into the
center of the square. There he stopped, his rifle across his breast,
waiting for the discovery.
The man in the street near Peden's was the first to see and recognize
him as he waited there on his horse in the pose of challenge, in the
expectant, determined attitude of defense. This fellow yelled the alarm
and charged, breakneck through the smoke, shooting as he came.
Morgan fired one shot, offhand. The charging horse reared, stood so a
moment as rigidly as if fixed by bronze in that pose, its rider leaning
forward over its neck. Then, in whatever terrible pang that such sudden
stroke of death visits, it flung itself backward, the girths snapping
from its distended belly. The rider was flung aside, where Morgan saw
him lying, head on one extended arm, like a dog asleep in the sun.
The others came whooping their triumphant challenge and closed in on
Morgan then, and the battle of his life began.
How many were circling him as he stood in the center of the square, or
as close to the center as he could draw, near the courthouse steps,
Morgan did not know. Some had come from behind the courthouse, others
from the tame fight with the citizens back of the stores not yet on
fire.
The dust that rose from their great tumult of charge and galloping
attack, mingling with the smoke that trailed the ground, was Morgan's
protection and salvation. Nothing else saved him from almost immediate
death in the fury of their assault.
Morgan fired at the fleeting figures as they moved in obscurity through
this stifling cloud, circling him like Indians of the plains, shouting
to each other his location, drawing in upon him a little nearer as they
rode. He turned and shifted, yet he was a target all too plain for
anything he could do to lessen his peril.
A horse came plunging toward him through the blinding swirl, plain for a
flash of wild-flying mane and tossing rein, its saddle empty, fleeing
from the scene of fire-swept conflict as if urged on by the ghost of the
rider it had lost.
Bullets clipped Morgan's saddle as the raiders circled him in a wild
fête of shots and yells. One struck his rifle, running down the barrel
to the grip like a lightning bolt, spattering hot lead on his hand;
another clicked on the ornament of the Spanish bit, frightening his
horse, before that moment as steady as if at work on the range. The
shaken creature leaped, bunching its body in a shuddering knot. Blood
ran from its mouth in a stream.
A shot ripped through the high cantle of the saddle; one seared Morgan's
back as it rent his shirt. The horse leaped, to come down stiff-legged
like an outlaw, bleeding head thrust forward, nose close to the ground.
Then it reared and plunged, striking wildly with fore feet upon the
death-laden air.
In leaping to save himself from entanglement as the creature fell,
Morgan dropped his rifle. Before he could recover himself from the
spring out of the saddle, the horse, thrashing in the paroxysm of death,
struck the gun with its shod fore foot, snapping the stock from the
barrel.
Dust was in Morgan's eyes and throat, smoke burned in his scorched
lungs. The smell of blood mingling with dust was in his nostrils. The
heat of the increasing fire was so great that Morgan flung himself to
the ground beside his horse, with more thought of shielding himself from
that torture than from the inpouring rain of lead.
How many were down among the raiders he did not know; whether the people
had heard the noise of this fight and were coming to his assistance, he
could not tell. Dust and smoke flew so thick around him that the
courthouse not three rods away, was visible only by dim glimpses; the
houses around the square he could not see at all.
The raiders flashed through the smoke and dust, here seen in a rift for
one brief glance, there lost in the swathing pall that swallowed all but
their high-pitched yells and shots. Morgan was certain of only one thing
in that hot, panting, brain-cracking moment--that he was still alive.
Whether whole or hurt, he did not know, scarcely considered. The marvel
of it was that he still lived, like a wolf at the end of the chase
ringed round by hounds. Lived, lead hissing by his face, lead lifting
his hair, lead knocking dirt into his eyes as he lay along the carcass
of his horse, his body to the ground like a snake.
Morgan felt that it would be his last fight. In the turmoil of smoke and
dust, his poor strivings, his upward gropings out of the dark; his glad
inspirations, his thrilling hopes, must come to an obscure end. It was a
miserable way to die, nothing to come out of it, no ennobling sacrifice
demanding it to lift a man's name beyond his day. In the history of this
violent place, this death-struggle against overwhelming numbers would be
only an incident. Men would say, in speaking of it, that his luck failed
him at last.
Morgan discovered with great concern that he had no cartridges left but
those in the chambers of his revolver. He considered making a dash for
the side of the square not yet on fire, where he might find support, at
least make a further stand with the arms and ammunition every
storekeeper had at hand.
As these thoughts swept him in the few seconds of their passing, Morgan
lay reserving his precious cartridges. The momentary suspension of his
defense, the silence of his rifle's defiant roar, which had held them
from closing in, perhaps led his assailants to believe him either dead
or disabled. They also stopped shooting, and the capricious wind, now
rising to a gale as it rushed into the fiery vacuum, bent down and
wheeled away the dust and smoke like a curtain suddenly drawn aside.
Craddock and such of his men as were left out of that half-minute
battle were scattered about the square in a more or less definite circle
around the spot where Morgan lay behind his horse, the nearest to him
being perhaps thirty yards away. The citizens of the town who had been
resisting the raiders, had come rushing to the square at the diversion
of the fight to that center. These began firing now on the raiders from
windows and doors and the corners of buildings. Craddock sent three of
his men charging against this force, now become more courageous and
dangerous, and with two at his side, one of whom was the Dutchman, he
came riding over to investigate Morgan's situation.
Morgan could see the Dutchman's face as he spurred on ahead of the
others. Pale, with a pallor inborn that sun and wind could not shade, a
wide grin splitting his face, the Dutchman came on eagerly, no doubt in
the hope that he would find a spark of conscious life in Morgan that he
could stamp out in some predesigned cruelty.
The Dutchman was leaning forward as he rode, revolver lifted to throw
down for a quick shot. When he had approached within two lengths of his
horse, Morgan lifted himself from the ground and fired. The Dutchman
sagged over the horn of his saddle like a man asleep, his horse
galloping on in panic. As it passed Morgan the Dutchman pitched from the
saddle, drug a little way by one encumbered foot, the frantic horse
plunging on. Fred Stilwell, closely followed by his father, came riding
into the square.
Morgan leaped to his feet, new hope in him at sight of this friendly
force. Craddock's companion turned to meet Fred with the fire of two
revolvers. One of the three sent a moment before to dislodge the
citizens, turned back to join this new battle.
Morgan had marked this man as Drumm from the beginning. He was a florid,
heavy man, his long mustache strangely white against the inflamed
redness of his face. He carried a large roll covered with black oilcloth
behind his saddle.
Morgan wasted one precious cartridge in a shot at this man as he passed.
The raider did not reply. He was riding straight to meet Stilwell and
Fred, to whom Craddock also turned his attention when he saw Morgan's
rifle broken on the ground. It was as if Craddock felt him out of the
fight, to be finished at leisure.
Morgan left his dubious shelter of the fallen horse and ran to meet his
friends, hoping to reach one of them and replenish his ammunition. Fred
Stilwell was coming up with the wind, his dust blowing ahead of him on
the sweeping gale. At his first shot the man who had left Craddock's
side to attack him pitched from his saddle, hands thrown out before him
as if he dived into eternity. The next breath Fred reeled in his saddle
and fell.
The man with the oilcloth roll at his saddle yelled in exultation,
lifting his gun high in challenge to Stilwell, who rode to meet him. A
moment Stilwell halted where Fred lay, as if to dismount, then galloped
furiously forward to avenge his fall. The two raiders who had gone
against the townsmen, evidently believing that the battle was going
against them, spurred for the open country.
Craddock was bearing down on Morgan, the fight being apportioned now
man to man. Morgan heard Stilwell's big gun roaring when he turned to
face Craddock, vindictive, grim, who came riding upon him with no word
of challenge, no shout of triumph in what seemed his moment of victory.
Morgan was steady and unmoved. The ground was under his feet, his arm
was not disturbed by the rock of a galloping horse. He lifted his weapon
and fired. Craddock's horse went down to its knees as if it had struck a
gopher hole, and Craddock, horseman that he was, pitched out of the
saddle and fell not two yards from Morgan's feet.
In falling, Craddock dropped his gun. He was scrambling for it when
Morgan, no thought in him of mercy, threw his weapon down for the
finishing shot. The hammer clicked on an empty shell. And Craddock, on
hands and knees, agile as a bear, was reaching one long hairy arm to
clutch his lost gun.
Morgan threw himself headlong upon the desperado, crushing him flat to
the ground. With a sprawling kick he sent Craddock's gun far out of
reach, and they closed, with the weapons nature had given them, for the
last struggle in the drama of their lives.
The stage was empty for them of anything that moved, save only
Craddock's horse, which Morgan's last shot, confident as he was when he
aimed it, had no more than maimed with a broken leg. To the right of
them Fred Stilwell lay, his face in the dust, his arms outspread, his
hat close by; on the other hand the Dutchman's body sprawled, his legs,
flung out as if he had died running. And near this unsightly wreckage of
a worthless wretch Morgan's horse stretched, in the lazy posture of an
animal asleep in a sunny pasture.
Behind them the fire that was eating one side of the square away rose
and bent, roared and crackled, sighed and hissed, flinging up long
flames which broke as they stabbed into the smoke. Morgan felt the fire
hot on his neck as he bent over Craddock, throwing the strain of every
tendon to hold the old villain to the ground.
Craddock writhed, jointless as a snake, it seemed, under the grip of
Morgan's hand at his spiney throat, squirmed and turned and fought to
his knees. They struggled and battled breast to breast, until they stood
on their feet, locked in a clinch out of which but one of them, Morgan
was determined, should come a living man.
Morgan had dropped his empty revolver when he flung himself on Craddock.
There was no inequality between them except such as nature had given in
the strength of arm and back. They swayed in silent, terrible
determination each to have the other's life, and Morgan had a glimpse,
as he turned, of women and children watching them from the corner near
the bank, huddled groups out of which he knew many a hope went out for
his victorious issue.
Craddock was a man of sinews as hard as bow strings; his muscles were
like dried beef. Strong as Morgan was, he felt that he was losing
ground. Then, by some trick learned perhaps in savage camps, Craddock
lifted him, and flung him with stunning force against the hard ground.
There they rolled, clawing, striking, grappling at each other's
throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they
rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled
until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped
for it in the star-shot agony of sinewy fingers choking out his life.
His empty gun. It seemed that he grasped it in delirium, and struck with
it in the blindness of hovering death.
When Morgan staggered to his feet there was blood in his mouth; the
sound of the fiery turmoil around him was hushed in the roar of blood in
his ears. He stood weakly a moment, looking at the pistol in his hand.
The blow he had laid along Craddock's head had broken the cylinder pin.
Meditatively Morgan looked at it again, then threw it down as an
abandoned and useless thing. It fell close by where Craddock lay, blood
running from a wound on his temple.
CHAPTER XXVII
ABSOLUTION
Morgan stood looking down on the man whom he had overcome in the climax
of that desperate hour, wondering if he were dead. He did not stoop to
investigate; from where he stood no sign of life disturbed Craddock's
limp body. Morgan was thinking now that they would say of him in Ascalon
that luck had been with him to the last.
Not prowess, at any rate; he did not claim to that. Perhaps luck was as
good a name as any for it, but it was something that upheld his hand and
stimulated his wit in crises such as he had passed in Ascalon that
eventful fortnight.
A band of men came around the corner past Peden's hall, now only a
vanishing skeleton of beams, bringing with them the two raiders who had
attempted to escape by that avenue to the open prairie. The two were
still mounted, the crowd that surrounded them was silent and ominous.
Morgan waited until they came up, when, with a sign toward Craddock,
which relinquished all interest in and responsibility for him to the
posse comitatus, he turned away to hasten to Fred Stilwell's side.
Tom Conboy had reached the fallen youth--he was little more than a
boy--and was kneeling beside him, lifting his head.
"God! they killed a woman over there--and a man!" Conboy said.
"Is he dead?" Morgan inquired, his voice hoarse and strange.
"He's shot through the lung, he's breathin' through his back," Conboy
replied, shaking his head sadly. "But I've seen men live shot up worse
than Fred is," he added. "It takes a big lot of lead to kill a man
sometimes."
"We must carry him out of this heat," Morgan said.
They carried him across the square to that part of the business front
the fire had not yet leaped over to and taken, and laid him in a little
strip of shade in front of the harness store. Conboy hurried off to see
if he could find the doctor.
Morgan wadded a handkerchief against the wound in Fred's back, whence
the blood bubbled in frothy stream at every weak inspiration, and let
him down gently upon that insufficient pad to wait the doctor, not
having it in his power to do more. He believed the poor fellow would die
with the next breath, and looked about to see if Stilwell were in sight.
Stilwell was nowhere to be seen, his pursuit of Drumm having led him
far. But approaching Morgan were five or six men carrying guns, their
faces clouded with what seemed an unfriendly severity.
"We want to have a word or two with you over in the square," one of them
said.
Morgan recognized all of them as townsmen. He looked at them in
undisguised surprise, completely lost for the meaning of the blunt
request.
"All right," he said.
"The doctor will be here in a minute, he's gone for his case," one of
them volunteered.
Relieved by the word, Morgan thanked him, and returned with them to the
place where a growing crowd of men stood about Seth Craddock and the two
prisoners who had been taken in their attempt to escape. Craddock was
sitting on the ground, head drooping forward, a man's knee at his back.
And Earl Gray, a revolver in his hand, no hat on, his hair flying forty
ways, was talking.
"If he'd 'a' been here tendin' to duty under his oath, in place of
skulkin' out and leavin' the town wide open to anybody that wanted to
set a match to it, this thing wouldn't 'a' happened, I tell you,
gentlemen. Look at it! look at my store, look at the _ho_-tel, look at
everything on that side of the square! Gone to hell, every stick of it!
And that's the man to blame!"
Gray indicated Morgan with a thrust of his gun, waving one hand
dramatically toward the ruin. A sound, more a growl than a groan, ran
through the crowd, which now numbered not fewer than thirty or forty
men.
The sight of the destruction was enough, indeed, to make them growl, or
even groan. Everything on that side of the square was leveled but a few
upstanding beams, the fire was rioting among the fallen rafters, eating
up the floors that had borne the trod of so many adventurous feet. The
hotel was a ruin, Gray's store only a recollection, the little shops
between it and Peden's long, hollow skeleton of a barn already coals.
Men, women, and children were on the roofs of buildings across the
street from Peden's, pouring precious water over the fires which sprang
from falling brands. It seemed that this shower of fire must overwhelm
them very soon, and engulf the rest of the business houses, making a
clean sweep of everything but the courthouse and the bank. The
calaboose, in its isolation, was still safe.
"Where was you last night?" Gray demanded, insolence in his narrow face
as he turned again to Morgan, poking out with his gun as if to vex the
answer from him as one prods a growl from a dog.
"None of your ---- business!" Morgan replied, rising into a rage as
sudden as it was unwise, the unworthiness of the object considered. He
made a quick movement toward Gray as he spoke, which brought upon him
the instant restraint of many hands.
"You don't grab no gun from nobody here!" one said.
"Why wasn't you here attendin' to business when that gang rode in this
morning?" one at Morgan's side demanded. It was the barber; his shop was
gone, his razors were fused among the ashes.
Morgan ignored him, regretting at once the flash of passion that had
betrayed him into their hands. For they were madmen--mad with the
torture of hot winds and straining hopes that withered and fell; mad
with their losses of that day, mad with the glare of sun of many days,
and the stricken earth under their bound and sodden feet; mad with the
very bareness of their inconsequential lives.
Seth Craddock heaved up to his knees, struggled to his feet with quick,
frantic lumbering, like a horse clambering out of the mire. He stood
weaving, his red eyes watching those around him, perhaps reading
something of the crowd's threat in the growl that ran through it,
beginning in the center as it died on the edge, quieting not at all. His
hat was off, dust was in his hair, a great welted wound was black on his
temple, the blood of it caked with dust on his face.
The two prisoners on horseback, one of them wounded so badly his life
did not seem worth a minute's reprieve, were pulled down; all were
bunched with Morgan in the middle of the mob. Gray began again with his
denunciation, Morgan hearing him only as the wind, for his attention was
fixed on the activities of Dell Hutton, working with insidious swiftness
and apparent success among the mob.
Hutton did not look at Morgan as he passed with low word from man to
man, sowing the poison of his vindictive hate against this man who had
compelled him to be honest once against his bent. A moment Hutton paused
in conference with the blacksmith, and that man came forward now,
silenced Gray with a word and pushed him aside.
The blacksmith was a knotty short man of Slavic features, a cropped
mustache under his stubby nose. His shop was burning in the ruin of that
tragic morning; the blame of it was Morgan's. Others whose business
places had been erased in the fire were recognized by Morgan in the
crowd. The proprietor of the Santa Fé café, the cobbler, the Mexican who
sold tamales and chili--none of them of any consequence ordinarily, but
potent of the extreme of evil now, merged as they were into that
unreasoning thing, the mob.
There were murmured suggestions, rejections; talk of the cross-arms on
the telegraph poles, which at once became determined, decisive. Men
pushed through the press with ropes. Seth Craddock looked across at
Morgan, and cursed him. One of the prisoners, the unwounded man, a youth
no older than Fred Stilwell, began to beg and cry.
Morgan had not been alarmed up to the moment of his seeing Hutton
inflaming the crowd against him, for the mob was composed of men whose
faces were for the greater part familiar, mild men in their way, whom
the violence in which they had lived had passed and left untouched. But
they held him with strong hands; they were making ready a noose to throw
over his head and strangle his life out in the shame that belongs to
murderers and thieves.
This had become a matter beyond his calculation; this should not be.
There were guns in men's hands all about him where guns did not belong.
Morgan threw his determination and strength into a fling that cleared
his right arm, and began a battle that marked for life some of them who
clung to him and tried to drag him down.
They were crushing him, they were overwhelming him. Only a sudden jerk
of the head, a dozen determined, silent men hanging to him, saved
Morgan's neck from the flung rope. The man who cast it cursed; was
drawing it back with eager haste to throw again, when Rhetta Thayer
came.
She came pushing through the mad throng about Morgan, he heard her
command to clear the way; she was beside him, the mystery of her swift
passage through the mob made plain. Seth Craddock's guns, given her as a
trophy of that day when Morgan lassoed the meat hunter, were in her
hands, and in her eyes there was a death warrant for any wretch that
stood in her way. She gave the weapons to Morgan, her breathing audible
over the hush that fell in the failing of their cowed hearts.
"Drop your guns!" Morgan commanded.
There was a panic to comply. Steel and nickel, ivory handle, old navy
and new Colt's, flashed in the sun as they were dropped in the little
open space at Morgan's feet.
"Clear out of here!"
Morgan's sharp order was almost unnecessary. Those on the edge of the
crowd were beginning already to sneak off; a little way, looking back
over shoulders, and they began to run. They dispersed like dust on the
wind, leaving behind them their weapons which would identify them for
the revenge this terrible, invincible, miraculously lucky man might come
to their doors and exact.
The thought was terrifying. They did not stop at the margin of the
square to look back to see if he pressed his vengeance at their heels.
Only the shelter of cyclone cellar, sequestered patches of corn, the
willows along the distant river, would give them the respite from the
terror of this outreaching hand necessary to a full, free breath.
The sheriff had released himself from jail, with Judge Thayer and the
valorous Riley Caldwell, and twenty or more others who had been locked
up with them. The sheriff, humiliated, resentful, red with the anger
that choked him--for it was safe now to be as angry as he could lash
himself--came stalking up to where Morgan held Craddock and the
unwounded raider off from the tempting heap of weapons thrown down by
the mob. The sheriff began to abuse Craddock, laying to him all the
villainy of ancestry and life that his well-schooled tongue could shape.
Morgan cut him off with a sharp word.
"Take these men and lock them up!"
"Yes, sir, Mr. Morgan, you bet your life I'll lock 'em up!" the sheriff
agreed.
"Hold them for a charge of arson and murder," Judge Thayer commanded
sternly. "And see that you _do_ hold them!"
Judge Thayer came on to where Morgan stood, the surrendered weapons at
his feet, Rhetta beside him, pride higher than the heavens in her eyes.
"I can't apologize for them, I can't even try," said the judge, with a
humility in his word and manner quite new and strange, indicating the
members of the fast-scattering mob. He made himself as small as he felt
by his way of approaching this man who had pitched his life like a coin
of little value into the gamble of that tragic day.
"Never mind trying--it's only an incident," Morgan told him, full of
another thought.
"I'll see that he locks Craddock and the other two up safe, then I'll
have these guns picked up for evidence. I'm going to lay an information
against every man of them in that mob with the prosecuting attorney!"
"Let them go, Judge Thayer--I'd never appear against them," Morgan said.
Judge Thayer appeared to be dazed by the events of that day, crowded to
their fearful climax of destruction of property and life. He was lacking
in his ready words, older, it seemed, by many years, crushed under the
weight of this terrible calamity that had fallen on his town. He went
away after the sheriff, leaving Morgan and Rhetta, the last actors on
the stage in the drama of Ascalon's downfall, alone.
Beyond them the fire raged in the completion of the havoc that was far
beyond any human labor to stay. The heat of it was scorching even where
they stood; coals, blazing fragments, were blown about their feet on the
turbulent wind. The black-green smoke still rose in great volume,
through which the sun was red. On the flank of the fire those who
labored to confine its spread shouted in the voice of dismay. It was an
hour of desolation; it was the day of doom.
"Thank you for my life," said Morgan. "I've put a new valuation on it
since you've gone to so much trouble to save it."
"Don't speak cynically about it, Mr. Morgan!" she said, hurt by his
tone.
"I'm not cynical," he gravely assured her. "My life wasn't worth much to
me this morning when I left Stilwell's. It has acquired a new value
now."
All this time Morgan had stood holding Seth Craddock's big revolvers in
his hands, as if he distrusted the desolation of the fire-sown square.
Now he sheathed one of them in his holster, and thrust the other under
his belt. His right hand was bleeding, from wounds of the bullet that
had struck his rifle-barrel and sprayed hot lead into his flesh, and
from the blows he had dealt in his fury amongst the mob.
Rhetta put out her hand and took his, bleeding and torn and
battle-maimed as it was, and lifted it tenderly, and nestled it against
her cheek.
"Dear, brave hand!" she said.
"You're not afraid of it now!" he wondered, putting out his free hand as
if he offered it also for the absolution of her touch.
"It was only the madness of the wind," she told him, the sorrow of her
penance in her simple words.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SUNSET
Evening saw the fires of Ascalon subdued and confined. With the falling
of the wind the danger of the disaster spreading to embrace the entire
town decreased almost to safety, although the wary, scorched townsmen
stood watch over the smoldering coals which lay deep where the principal
part of Ascalon lately stood.
Fred Stilwell had been taken to Judge Thayer's house, where his mother
and Violet attended him. The doctor said youth and a clean body would
carry him through. As for Drumm, whose bullet had brought the young man
down, his horse with the black saddle-roll had stood hitched to Judge
Thayer's fence until evening, when the sheriff came with a writ of
attachment in Stilwell's favor and took it away. Drumm's body was lying
on a board in the calaboose, diverted for that dark day in Ascalon's
history into a morgue.
The sheriff reported that the Texas cattleman had carried more than
fifty thousand dollars in currency behind his saddle. That was according
to the custom of the times, and usage of the range, where many a man's
word was as good as his bond, but no man's check was as good as money.
Tom Conboy was already hiring carpenters to rebuild the hotel, his eye
full of the business that would come to his doors when the railroad
shops were running, and the trainmen of the division point were there
to be housed and fed. Dora and Riley had been wandering around town all
afternoon, very much like two pigeons looking for a place to nest.
And so evening found peace in Ascalon, after all its tragedy and pain.
Calvin Morgan and Rhetta Thayer stood at the bank corner at sunset,
looking down the square where the great gap in its front made the scene
unfamiliar. Morgan's disabled hand was bandaged; there was a cross of
surgical tape on his chin, closing a deep cut where some citizen had
tapped him with a revolver in the last fight of that tumultuous day.
Little groups of desolate, disheartened people stood along the line of
hitching racks; dead coals, which the wind had sown as living fire over
the square, littered the white dust. Morgan had taken off his badge of
office, having made a formal resignation to Judge Thayer, mayor of the
town. Nobody had been sworn in to take his place, for, as Judge Thayer
had said, it did not appear as if any further calamity could be left in
store among the misfortunes for that town, except it might be an
earthquake or a cyclone, and a city marshal, even Morgan, could not fend
against them if they were to come.
"You have trampled your place among the thorns," said Rhetta.
"It looks like I've pulled a good deal down with me," he returned,
viewing the seat of fire with a softening of pity in his grave face.
"All that deserves to rise will rise again," she said in confidence.
"It's a good thing it burned--it's purged of its old shame and old
monuments of corruption. I'm glad it's gone."
There was a quiet over the place, as if the heart of turbulence had been
broken and its spirit had taken flight. In the southwest, in the faces
of the two watchers at the margin of this ruin, a vast dark cloud stood
like a landfall rising in the mariner's eye out of the sea. It had been
visible since four o'clock, seeming to hesitate as if nature intended
again to deny this parched and suffering land the consolation of rain.
Now it was rising, already it had overspread the sunset glow, casting a
cool shadow full of promise over the thirsting prairie wastes.
"It will rain this time," Rhetta prophesied. "It always comes up slowly
that way when it rains a long time."
"A rain will work wonders in this country," he said, his face lifted to
the promise of the cloud.
"And wisdom and faith will do more," she told him, her voice tender and
low.
"And love," said he, voice solemn as a prophet's, yet gentle as a
dove's.
"And love," she whispered, the wind, springing like an inspiration
before the rain, lifting her shadowy hair.
Joe Lynch came driving into the stricken square down the road beside
them, bringing a load of bones.
"Had to burn the town to fetch a rain, huh?" said Joe, his ghostly dry
old face tilted to catch the savor of the wind. So saying, he drove on,
and paused not in his labor of off-bearing the waste of failure that
must be cleared for the new labor of wisdom, faith, and love.
* * * * *
Thirty years will do for a cottonwood what two centuries will do for an
oak. Thirty years had built the cottonwoods of great girth, and lifted
them in dignity high above the roof of Calvin Morgan's white farmhouse,
his great barns and granaries. Elm trees, bringing their blessings of
wide-spreading branch more slowly, led down a broad avenue to the white
manse with its Ionian portico. Over the acres of smooth, luxuriant green
lawn, the long shadows of closing day reached like the yearning of men's
unfinished dreams.
Before the house a broad roadway, smooth as a city boulevard, ran
straight to the bright, clean, populous city where Ascalon, with its
forgotten shame and tragedies, once stood. And far and away, over the
swell of gentle ridge, into the dip of gracious valley, spread the
benediction of growing wheat. Wisdom and faith and love had worked their
miracle. This land had become the nation's granary; it was a land
redeemed.
* * * * *
Under the giant cottonwoods, gray-green of leaf as the desert grasses
were gray-green in the old cattle days, the brown walls, the low roof,
of a sod house stood, the lawn clipped smooth around its humble door,
lilac clumps green beside its walls, sweet honeysuckle clambering over
its little porch. And there came, in the tender last beams of the
setting sun, a man and woman to its door.
Not old, not bent, not gnarled by the rack of blind-groping, undirected
toil, for such of the chosen out of nature's nobility are never old.
Hair once dark as woodland shadows was shot with the sunlight of many
years; hair once bright as the mica tossed by joyous waves upon a sunny
beach was whitened now by the unmelting snows of winters numbered
swiftly in the brief calendar of man. But shoulders were unbent by the
burdens which they had borne joyously, and their feet went quickly as
lovers' to a tryst.
This little sod house stood with all its old-time furnishings, like a
shrine, and on this day, which seemed to be an anniversary, it had been
brightened with vases of flowers. This man and this woman, not old,
indeed, entered and stood within its door, where the light was dimming
through the little window high in the thick wall. The man crossed the
room, and stood where a belt with holsters hung upon the wall. She drew
near him, and lifted his great hand, and nestled it against her cheek.
"Old Seth Craddock's guns," he said, musing as on a recurring memory.
"His guns!" she murmured, drawing closer into the shadow of his
strength.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Transcriber's Notes:
1. The author's consistent use of a lower-case letter following an
exclamation point or a question mark inside quoted dialect has
been retained.
2. Punctuation has been changed to contemporary standards.
3. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
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