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Trail's End

by George W. Ogden · English · Gutenberg #20712 · 494,157 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Trail's End

Author: George W. Ogden

Illustrator: P. V. E. Ivory


        
Release date: February 28, 2007 [eBook #20712]
                Most recently updated: January 1, 2021

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 strippin

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