Chief of Police,Kansas City, Missouri.
Chief of Police,
Kansas City, Missouri.
That was the consignee of the strangest shipment ever billed out of Ascalon. People wondered what the chief of police would do with his gift. They wished him well of it, with all their hearts.
Meantime Seth Craddock, with the blood of eight men on his hands, was making more noise in the coffin box than a sack of cats. It was a most undignified way for a man of his sanguinary reputation to accept this humiliation at the hands of a public that he had outraged. A mule in a box stall could not have made a greater clatter with heels againstplanks than the fallen city marshal of Ascalon drummed up with his on the stout end of the coffin box. He cursed as he kicked, and called in muffled voice on the friends of his brief day of power to come and set him free.
But the sycophants who had hung to his heels like hand-fed dogs when power glorified him like a glistening garment and exalted him high above other men, turned out as all time-servers and cowardly courtiers always finish when the object of their transitory adulation falls with his belly in the dust. They sneered, they jeered, they turned white-shirted coatless backs upon his box with derisive, despising laughter on their night-pale faces. Seth Craddock was a mighty man as long as he had a license to walk about and slay, but fastened up in a box like a corpse for shipment at the rate of the dead, he was only a hull and an empty husk of a man.
They said he was a coward; they had known it all along. It called for a coward to shoot men down like rabbits. That was not the way of a brave and worthy man. This great moral conclusion they reached readily enough, Seth Craddock securely caged before them. If Morgan's rope had missed its mark, if a snarl had shortened it a foot; if Craddock had been a second sooner in starting to draw his gun, this wave of moral exaltation would not have descended upon Ascalon that day.
There was some concern over the holding quality of the box. People feared Craddock might burst out of it before going far, and return against them for the reckoning so volubly threatened. The undertaker quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help ifhescrewed him shut in that most competent container of the mortal remains of man.
Thus assured, the citizens carried the box in festive spirit, with more charity and kindness toward old Seth than he deserved, and stood it on end in the shadow of the depot. There was an auger hole on a level with Seth's eye, through which he could glower out for his last look on Ascalon, and the people who gathered around to deride him and triumph in his overthrow.
Through this small opening Seth cursed them, checking such of them off by name as he recognized, setting them down in his memory for the vengeance he declared he would return speedily and exact. There he stood, like Don Quixote in his cage, his red eye to the hole, swearing as terribly as any man that marched in that hard-boiled army in Flanders long ago.
Those who had been awed by his grim silence in the days when he ruled above all law in Ascalon, were surprised now by his volubility. Under provocation Craddock could say as much as the next man, it appeared. Unquestionably, he could express his limited thoughts in words luridly strange. He wearied of this arraignment at last, and subsided. Long before the train came he lapsed into his natural blue sulkiness, remaining as quiet behind his auger hole as one ready for the grave.
They loaded Craddock on a truck when the train from the west whistled, trundled him down the platform and posted him ready to load in the baggage-car, attended by a large, jubilant crowd. There was so much hilarity in this gathering for a funeral, indeed, and so much profanity, denunciation, and threat issuing out of the coffin box—for Seth broke out again the minute they moved him—that the baggage-man aboard the train demurred on receiving the shipment. He closed the door against the eager citizens who mounted the truck to shove the box aboard, leaving only opening enough for him to stand flatwise in and shout up the platform to the conductor.
This conductor was a notable man in his day on that pioneer railroad. He was a bony, irascible man, fiery of face, with a high hook nose that had been smashed to one side in some battle when he was construction foreman in his days of lowly beginning. He wore a pistol strapped around his long coat, which garment was braided and buttoned like an ambassador's, and he was notable throughout the land of cattle and cards as a man who could reach far and hit hard. If Seth Craddock had applied to him for instruction in invective and profanity, veteran that he was he would have been put at the very foot of the primer class.
Now this mighty man came striding down the platform, thrusting his way through the crowd with no gentle elbow, hand on his gun, displeasure ready to explode from his mouth. The baggage-man asked advice on accepting the proffered box, with fare and a half ticket attached as in the case of a corpse.
The conductor remarked, with terrible sarcasm, that the corpse was the noisiest one he ever had encountered, even in that cursed and benighted and seven times outcast hole. He knocked on the box and demanded of the occupant an account of himself, and the part he was bearing in this pleasant little episode, this beautiful little joke.
Seth lifted up his muffled voice to say that it was no joke, at least to him. He explained his identity and denounced his captors, swearing vengeance to the last eyebrow. The conductor faced the crowd with disdainful severity.
What were they trying to play off on him, anyhow? Who did they suppose he was? Maybe that was fun in Ascalon, but his company wasn't going to carry no man from nowhere against his will and be sued for it. Burn him and box up the ashes, boil him and bottle the soup; reduce him by any comfortable means they saw fit, according to their humane way, fetch him there in any guise but that of a living man, and the company would haul him to Hades if they billed him to that destination.
But not in his present shape and form; not as a living, swearing, suit-threatening man. Take him to hell out of there, the conductor ordered in rising temper. Don't insult him and his road by coming around there to make them a part in their idle, life-wasting, time-gambling, blasted to the seventh depth of Hades tricks.
The baggage-man closed the door, the conductor gave the signal to pull out, and the train departed, leaving Seth Craddock on the truck, the rather shamed and dampened citizens standing around. They concluded they would have to hang him, after all their trouble for a more romantic, picturesque, and unusual exit. And hanging was such a common, ordinary way of getting rid of a distasteful man that the pleasure was taken out of their day.
Judge Thayer was firmly against hanging. He ordered the undertaker to open the box, which he did with fear and trembling, seeing in a future hour the vengeance of Seth Craddock descending on his solemn head. Craddock, sweat-drenched and weak from his rebellion and the heat of his close quarters, sat up with scarcely a breath left in him for a curse. Judge Thayer delivered him to Morgan, with instructions to lock him up.
The city calaboose was an institution apart from the county jail. Due to some past rivalry between the county and city officials, the palatial jail was closed to offenders against the lowly and despised-by-the-sheriff town ordinances. So, out of its need, the city had built this little house with bars across the one small window, and a barred door formed of wagon tires to close outside the one of wood.
No great amount of business ever had been done in this calaboose, for minor infractions of the law were not troubled with in that town. If there ever was anybody left over from a shooting he usually went along about his business or his pleasure until the coroner's jury assembled and let him off. The last man confined in the calaboose had stolen a bottle of whisky, a grave and reprehensible offense which set all the town talking and speculating on the proper punishment. This poor bug had made a fire of his hay bedding in the night, and perished as miserably as everybody said he deserved. The charred boards in one corner still attested to his well-merited end.
Morgan was not at all confident of the retaining powers of the calaboose, neither was he greatly concerned. He believed that if Craddock could break out he would make a streak away from Ascalon, hooked up at high speed, never to return. It was not in the nature of a man humbled from a high place, mocked by the lowly, derided by those whom he had oppressed, contemned by the false friends he had favored, to come back on an errand of revenge. The job was too general in a case like Craddock's. He would have to exterminate most of the town.
They left him in the calaboose with whatever reflections were his. The window was too high in the wall for anybody on the outside to see in, or for Craddock, tall as he was, to see anything out of it but the sky. Public interest had fallen away since he was neither to be shipped out nor hanged, only locked up like a whisky thief. Only a few boys hung around the calaboose, which stood apart in the center of at least half an acre of ground, as if ashamed of its office in a community that used it so seldom when it was needed so often.
Morgan returned to the square for his horse, rather dissatisfied now with the day's developments. It was going to be troublesome to have this fellow on his hands. Judge Thayer should not have interfered with the last decree of public justice. It would have been over with by now.
Rhetta Thayer was in the door of the newspaper office. She came to the edge of the sidewalk as Morgan approached, leading his horse. She did not reflect the public satisfaction from her handsome face and troubled eyes that Ascalon in general enjoyed over Craddock's humiliation. Morgan wondered why.
"I asked too much of you, Mr. Morgan," she said, coming at once to the matter that clouded her honest eyes.
"You couldn't ask too much of me," he returned, with no unction of flattery, but the cheerfully frank expression of an ingenuous heart.
"I didn't realize the disadvantage you would be under, I didn't know what I expected of you when I urged you into this. Meeting that desperate man with a rope instead of a gun!"
"You didn't know I was going to meet him with a rope," he said.
He stood before her, hat in hand, wholesomely honest in his homely ruggedness, a flush of embarrassment tinging his face. The sun in his short hair seemed laughing, picking out little flecks of gold as mica flakes in the sea waves turn and flash.
"You might have been killed! When I saw him throw his hand to his gun! Oh! it was terrible!"
"So you're the editor now?" he said, cheerfully, trying to turn her from this disturbing subject.
"My heart jumped clear out of my mouth when you threw your rope!"
"It came over and helped me," he said, in manner sincere and grave.
A little flame of color lifted in her pale cheek. She looked at the dusty road, her hand pressed to her bosom as if to make certain that the truant heart had come back to her like a dove to its cote out of the storm. She looked up presently, and smiled a bit; looked down again, the hot blood writing a confession in her face.
"I hope it did," she said.
Morgan felt himself in such a suffocation of strange delight he could find no word that seemed the right word, and left it to silence, which, perhaps was best. He looked at the road, also, as if he would search with her there for grains of gold, or for lost hearts which leap out of maidens' breasts, in the white dust marked by many feet.
Together they looked up, faces white, breath faltering on dry lips. So the fire leaps in a moment such as this and enwraps the soul. It is no mystery, it is no process of long distillation. In a moment; so.
"Here are his guns," said he, his voice trembling as if it strained in leaping the subject that lay in its door to go back to the business of the day.
"His guns!" she repeated after him, shuddering at the thought.
"Hang them over your desk—you might need them, now you're the editor."
She accepted them from his hand, but dubiously, holding them far out from contact with her dress as something unclean. Morgan reproached himself for offering her these instruments which had sent so many men to sudden, undefended death. He reached to relieve her hand.
"Let me do it for you, Miss Thayer."
"No," she denied him, putting down her qualm, clutching the heavy belt firmly. "It is a notable trophy, a great distinction you're giving me, Mr. Morgan. I'm afraid you'll think I'm a coward," smiling wanly as she lifted her face.
"You're not afraid to edit the paper. That seems to me the most dangerous job in town."
"Most dangerous job in town!" she reproved him, giving him to understand very plainly that she could name one attended by greater perils. "They've only killedoneeditor, so far."
"Can you shoot?" he asked, as seriously concerned as if the fate of editors in Ascalon darkened over her already.
"Everybody in this town can shoot," she sighed. "It's every boy's ambition to own and carry a pistol, and most of them do."
"I hope you'll never have to defend the independence of the press with arms," he said, making a small pleasantry of it. "More than likely they're gentlemen enough to let you say whatever you want to, and make no kick."
"TheHeadlightis going to be an awful joke with Riley Caldwell and me getting it out. But I'm not going to try to please anybody. That way I may please them all."
"It sounds like the sensible way. Have you edited before?"
"I used to help Mr. Smith, the editor they killed. That was in the summer vacation, just. I taught school the rest of the time."
"You must have been the busiest person in town," he said, with pride in her activities as if they had touched his own life long ago.
"I'm a poor stick of an editor, I'm afraid, though—I seem to be all mussed up with legal notices and this sudden flood of news. And I can't set type worth a cent!"
"Just let the news go," he suggested, not without concern for the part he might bear in her chronicle of late events in Ascalon.
"Let the news go!" She censured him with her softly chiding eyes. "I wish I could write like Mr. Smith—I'd wake this town up! Poor man, his coat is hanging in the office by the desk, so suggestive of him it makes me cry. I haven't had the heart to take it away—it would seem like expelling his spirit from the place. He was a slender, gentle little man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to shoot him down that way."
"You're right; I met him," Morgan said, remembering Dell Hutton among the wagons, his smoking gun in his hand.
"Sneaking little coward!"
"Well, he'll hardly sling his gun down on you," Morgan reflected, as if he communed with himself, yet thinking that Hutton scarcely would be beyond even that.
"Hardly," she replied, in abstraction. "What are you going to do with that old brigand you've got locked in the calaboose?"
"I expect we'll turn him loose in the morning. There doesn't seem to be anything we can hold him for, guilty as he is."
"If he'll leave, and never come back," doubtfully. "I'm glad now it turned out the way it did, I'm so thankful you didn't have to—that you came throughwithout blood on your hands!"
"It would have been a calamity the other way," he said.
When Morgan went his way presently, leaving her in the door of the little boxlike newspaper office, from where she gave him a parting smile, it was with a revised opinion of the day's achievements. He felt peculiarly exalted and satisfied. He had accomplished something, after all.
Whatever this was, he did not confess, but he smiled, and felt renewed with a lifting gladness, as he went on to the livery barn, his horse at his heels.
CHAPTER XVIIIA BONDSMAN BREATHES EASIER
There was a little ripple, more of mirth than excitement or concern, in Ascalon next morning when it became known that Seth Craddock had kicked a hole in the burned corner of the calaboose and leaked out of it into the night.
Let him go; it was as well that way as any, they said, since it relieved them at once of the charge of his keep and the trouble of disposing of him in the end. He never would come back to that town, let him ravage in other parts of the world as he might. What the town had lost in notoriety by his going would be offset by the manner of his degradation, already written at length by the local correspondent of theKansas City Timesand sent on to be printed with a display heading in a prominent position in that paper and copied by other papers all over the land.
Seth Craddock and his reign were behind the closed door of the past, through which he was not likely to kick a hole and emerge again, after his manner of going from the calaboose. That matter off the town's mind, it ranged itself along the shady side of the street to watch the present contest between the law and those who lived beyond it.
Up to this point it appeared that the law was going to have it according to its mandate. Peden made no attempt to open his place on the night following Craddock's deposition, the lesser lights following his virtuous example.
But there was in this quiescent confidence, in this lull almost threatening, something similar to the impertinent repression of an incorrigible child who yields to authority immediately above him, knowing that presently it will be overruled. Something was clouding up to break over Ascalon; the sleepiest in the town was aware of that.
How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance, but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.
Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force, when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.
Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in theHeadlightduring that time.
In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its blind-striking hand.
On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta Thayer stopped Morgan as he was passing theHeadlightoffice at the beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some passing terror had opened their windows.
"He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully, facing him just inside the door.
"Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful assurance in his words. "I can assure you I was at no time in any danger."
"Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on her quick-coming breath.
"It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it—I never stepped in front of him anywhere."
"That woman in the tent—the rustler's wife—told me—she told me just a little while ago. Oh! if he—if he'd have hit you!"
"The kids all came running out of the tent—I thought he'd hit one of them," Morgan said, humorously, thinking only to calm her great agitation and quiet her friendly—if there could be no dearer interest—concern.
"It was Peden got him to do it," she declared.
"Peden? Why should Hutton go out to do that fellow's gunning?"
"Dell Hutton's gambling the county's money, he killed Mr. Smith because he charged him with it! Pa knows it, pa's on his bond, and if he keeps on losing the county funds there on Peden's game we'll have to make it good. It will take everything we've got—if he keeps on."
"That's bad, that's mighty bad," Morgan said, deeply concerned, curiously awakened to the inner workings of things in Ascalon. "Still, I don't see what connection I have in it, why he'd want to take a shot at me on the quiet that way."
"He shoots from behind, he shot Mr. Smith in the back, and it was at night, besides. Don't you see how it was? Peden must have bribed him to do it, promised to make good his losses, or something like that."
"Plain as a wagon track," Morgan said.
"I don't know why I ever got you into this tangle," she lamented, "I don't know what made me so selfish and so blind."
"It's just one more little complication in Ascalon's sickness," he comforted her, "it doesn't amount to beans. The poor little fool was so scared that morning he could hardly lift his gun. He'll never make another break."
"If I only thought he wouldn't! He's as treacherous as a snake, you can't tell where he's sneaking to bite you. Give it up, Mr. Morgan, won't you, please?" She turned to him suddenly, appealing with her eyes, with her wistful lips, with every line of her sympathetic, anxious face.
"Give it up?" he repeated, her meaning not quite clear.
"The office, I mean. Surely, as I coaxed you into taking it, I've got a right to ask you to give it up. You've done what you took the place to do, you've got Craddock out of it and away from here. Your work's done, you can quit now with a good conscience and no excuse to anybody."
"Why," said Morgan, reflectively, "I don't believe I could quit right now, Miss Rhetta. There's something more to come, it isn't quite finished yet."
"There's a great deal more to come, the end of all this fighting and killing and grinning treachery never will come!" she said, in great bitterness. "What's the use of one man putting his life against all this viciousness? There's no cure for the curse of Ascalon but time. Let it go, Mr. Morgan—I beg you to give it up."
Morgan took the hand that she reached out to him in her appeal. The great fervor of her earnest heart had drawn the blood away from it, leaving it cold. He clasped it, tightly, to warm it in his big palm, and spoke comfortingly, yet he would not, could not, tell her that he would give over the office and leave the town to its devices. The work he had begun on her account, at her appeal, was not finished. He wanted to give her a peace that would make permanent the placidity of her eyes such as had warmed his heart during those three days. But he could not tell her that.
"If it goes on," she said, sad that he would not yield to her appeal, "you'll have to—you'll have to—do what the rest of them have done. And I don't want you to do that, Mr. Morgan. I want you to keep clean."
"As it must be, so it will be," he said. "But I don't see any reason why I can't keep on the way I've started. There's nobody doing any shooting here now."
"They're only waiting," she said.
"I'll have to watch them a little longer, then," he told her; "somebody might shoot your windows out."
He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back.
"He's over there in the courthouse now—that's his office where you see the light—trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know," she declared.
Morgan left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him, guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.
Rhetta Thayer, leaving theHeadlightoffice at nine o'clock, saw two men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk of starlight and early night. She paused on her way, wondering, and her wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell Hutton. The other she had no need to name.
When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. And when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of gratitude rose out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.
CHAPTER XIXTHE CURSE OF BLOOD
Sensitive as a barometer to every variation, every shading, in public sentiment and sympathy, Morgan patroled the town nightly until the streets were deserted. Night by night he felt, rather than saw, the growing insolence of the pale feeders on the profits of vice, the confidence in some approaching triumph gleaming in their furtive eyes.
None of the principals, few of the attendant vultures, had left Ascalon. The sheriff had returned from his excursion after cattle thieves, and, contrary to the expectation of anybody, had brought one lean and hungry, hound-faced man with him and locked him up in jail.
But the sheriff was taking no part in the new city marshal's campaign in the town, certainly not to help him. If he worked against him in the way his fat, big-jowled face proclaimed that it was his habit to work, no evidence of it was in his manner when he met Morgan. He was a friendly, puffy-handed man, loud in his hail and farewell to the riders who came in from the far-off cow camps to see for themselves this wide-heralded reformation of the godless town of Ascalon.
These visitors, lately food for the mills of the place, walked about as curiously as fowls liberated in a strange yard after long confinement in a coop. They looked with uncomprehending eyes on the closed doors of Peden's famous temple of excesses; they turned respectful eyes on Morgan as he passed them in his silent, determined rounds. And presently, after meeting the white-shirted, coatless dealers, lookout men,macquereaux, they began to have a knowing look, an air of expectant hilarity. After a little they usually mounted and rode away, laughing among themselves like men who carried cheerful tidings to sow upon the way.
In that manner Ascalon remained closed five nights, nobody contesting the authority of the new marshal, not a shot fired in the streets. On the afternoon of the sixth day an unusual tide of visitors began to set in to this railroad port of Ascalon. By sundown the hitching rack around the square was packed with horses; Dora Conboy told Morgan she never had waited on so many people before in her hotel experience.
At dusk Morgan brought his horse from the livery stable, mounted with his rifle under the crook of his knee. At nine o'clock Peden threw open his doors, the small luminaries which led a dim existence in his effulgence following suit, all according to their preconcerted plan.
There was a shout and a break of wild laughter, a scramble for the long bar with its five attendants working with both hands; a scrape of fiddles and a squall of brass; a squeaking of painted and bedizened drabs, who capered and frisked like mice after their long inactivity. And on the inflow of custom and the uprising of jubilant mirth, Peden turned his quick, crafty eyes as he stood at the head of the bar to welcome back to his doors this golden stream.
Close within Peden's wide door, one on eitherhand, two vigilant strangers stood, each belted with two revolvers, each keeping a hand near his weapons. One of these was a small, thin-faced white rat of a man; the other tall, lean, leathery; burned by sun, roughened by weather. A shoot from the tree that produced Seth Craddock he might have been, solemn like him, and grim.
Dell Hutton, county treasurer, cigar planted so far to one corner of his wide thin mouth that wrinkles gathered about it like the leathery folds of an old man's skin, came to Peden where he stood at the bar.
"All's set for him," he said, drawing his eyes small as he peered around through the fast-thickening smoke.
"Let him come!" said Peden, watching the door with expectant, vindictive eyes.
The news of Peden's defiance swept over the town like a taint on the wind. Not only that Peden had opened his doors to the long-thirsting crowd gathered by the advertised news of a big show for that night, but that he had posted two imported gun-fighters inside his hall with instructions to shoot the city marshal if he attempted to interfere. With the spread of this news men began to gather in front of Peden's to see what the city marshal was going to do, how he would accept this defiance, if he meant to accept it, and what the result to him would be.
Judge Thayer came down to the square without his alpaca coat, his perturbation was so great, looking for Morgan, talking of swearing in a large number of deputies to uphold the law.
This was received coldly by the men of Ascalon. Upholding the law was the city marshal's business, they said. If he couldn't do it alone, let the law drag; let it fall underfoot, where it seemed the best place for it in that town, anyhow. So Judge Thayer went on, looking around the square for Morgan, not finding him, nor anybody who had seen him within the last half hour.
Rhetta was working late in theHeadlightoffice, preparing for the weekly issue of the paper. This disquieting news had come in at her door like the wave of a flood. She had no thought of work from that moment, only to stand at the door listening for the dreaded sound of shooting from the direction of Peden's hall.
Judge Thayer found her standing in the door when he completed his search around the square, his heart falling lower at every step.
"He's gone! Morgan's deserted us!" he said.
"Gone!" she repeated in high scorn. "He'll be the last to go."
"I can't find him anywhere—I've hunted all over town. Nobody has seen him. I tell you, Rhetta, he's gone."
"I wish to heaven he would go! What right have we got to ask him to give his life to stop the mean, miserable squabbles of this suburb of hell!"
"I think you'd better run along home now—Riley will go with you. Why, child, you're cold!"
He drew her into the office, urging her to put on her bonnet and go.
"I'll stay here and see it out," she said. "Oh, if he would go, if he would go! But he'll never go."
She threw herself into the chair beside her littered desk, hands clenched, face white as if she bore a mortal pain, only to leap up again in a moment, run to the door, and listen as if she sought a voice out of the riotous sound.
Judge Thayer had none of this poignant concern for Morgan's welfare. He was not a little nettled over his failure to find the marshal, and that officer's apparent shunning of duty in face of this mocking challenge to his authority.
"Why, Rhetta, you wanted him to take the office, you urged him to," he reminded her. "I don't understand this sudden concern for the man's safety in disregard of his oath and duty, this—this—unaccountable——"
"I didn't know him then—I didn'tknowhim!" she said, in piteous low moan.
Judge Thayer looked at her with a sudden sharp turning of the head, as if her words had expressed something beyond their apparent meaning. He came slowly to the door, where he stood beside her a little while in silence, hand upon her shoulder tenderly.
"I'll look around again," he said, "and come back in a little while."
Meanwhile, in Peden's place the celebrants at the altar of alcohol were rejoicing in this triumph of personal liberty. Where was this man-eating city marshal? What had become of that knock-kneed horse wrangler from Bitter Creek they had heard so much about? They drank fiery toasts to his confusion, they challenged him in the profane emphasis of scorn. Upon what was his fame based? they wanted to be told. The mere corraling of certain stupid drunk men; the lucky throw of a rope.Henever had killed a man!
With the mounting of their hastily swilled liquor the hilarious patrons of Peden's hall became more contemptuous of the city marshal. His apparent avoidance of trouble, his unaccountable absence, his failure to step up and meet this challenge from Peden, became a grievance against him in their inflamed heads.
They had counted on him to make some kind of a bluff, to add something either of tragedy or comedy to this big show. Now he was hiding out, and they resented it in the proper spirit of men deprived of their rights. They began to talk of going out to find him, of dragging him from his hole and starting a noise behind him that would scare him out of the country.
Peden encouraged this growing notion. If Morgan wouldn't bring his show there, go after him and make him stand on his hind legs like a dog. After a few more drinks, after a dance, after another stake on the all-devouring tables of chance. They turned to these diversions in the zest of long abstinence, in the redundant vitality of youth, mocking all restraint, insolent of any reckoning of circumstance or time.
Peden distended with satisfaction to see the free spending, the free flinging of money into his games. A little virtuous recess seemed to be profitable; it was like giving a horse a rest. His two guards waited at the door, his lookout at the faro table swept the hall from his high chair with eyes keen to mark any hostile invasion. Morgan never could come six feet inside his door.
Well satisfied with himself and the beginning of that night's business, exceedingly comfortable in the thought that this defiance of the law would bring a newer and wider notoriety to himself and the town of which he was the spirit, Peden sauntered among the boisterous merrymakers on his floor.
Dancers were worming and shuffling in close embrace, couples breaking out of the whirl now and then to rush to the bar; players stood deep around the tables; men reached over each other's shoulders to take their drinks from the bar. All was haste and hilarity, all a crowding of pleasure with hard-pursuing feet, a snatching at the elusive thing with rough boisterous hands, with loud laughter, with wild yells.
Pleasure, indeed, seemed on the flight before these coarse revelers, who pursued it blindfold down the steeps of destruction unaware.
Peden shouldered his way through the throng toward the farther end of the long bar, nodding here with a friendly smile, stopping now and then to shake hands with some specially favored patron, throwing commands among his female entertainers from his cold, hard, soulless eyes as he passed along.
And in that sociable progression down his thronging hall, ten feet from the farther end of his famous bar, Peden came face to face with Morgan, as grim as judgment among the crowd of wastrels and women of poisoned lips, who fell back in breathless silence to let him pass.
Morgan was carrying his rifle; his pistol hung at his side. The big shield of office once worn by Seth Craddock was pinned on the pocket of his shirt; his broad-brimmed hat threw a shadow over his stern face.
Peden stopped with a little start of withdrawal at sight of Morgan, surprised out of his poise, chilled, perhaps, at the thought of the long pistol shot between this unexpected visitor and the hired killers at his front door, the way between them blocked by a hundred revelers.
So, this was the cunning of this range wolf, to come in at his back door and fall upon him in surprise! Peden's resentment rose in that second of reflection with the dull fire that spread in his dark face. He flung his hand to his revolver, throwing aside the skirt of his long coat.
"Let your gun stay where it is," Morgan quietly advised him. "Get these people out of here, and close this place."
"Show me your authority!" Peden demanded, scouting for a moment of precious time.
The musicians in the little orchestra pit behind Morgan ceased playing on a broken note, the shuffle of dancing feet stopped short. Up the long bar the loud hilarity quieted; across the hall the clash of pool balls cut sharply into the sudden stillness. As quickly as wind makes a rift in smoke the revelers fell away from Morgan and Peden, leaving a fairway for the shooting they expected to begin at the door. Peden stood as he had stopped, hand upon his gun.
Morgan stepped up to him in one long, quick stride, rifle muzzle close against Peden's broad white shirt front. In that second of hesitant delay, that breath of portentous bluff, Morgan hadread Peden to the roots. A man who had it in him to shoot did not stop at anybody's word when he was that far along the way.
"Clear this place and lock it up!" Morgan repeated.
The temperature of the crowded hall seemed to fall forty degrees in the second or two Morgan stood pushing his rifle against Peden's breastbone. Those who had talked with loud boasts, picturesque threats, high-pitched laughter, of going out to find this man but a little while before, were silent now and cold around the gills as fish.
Morgan was watching the two men at the front door while he held Peden up those few seconds. He knew there was no use in disarming Peden, to turn him loose where he could get fifty guns in the next two seconds if he wanted them. He believed, in truth, there was not much to fear from this fellow, who depended on his hired retainers to do his killing for him. So, when Peden, watching Morgan calculatively, shifted a little to get himself out of line so he would not stand a barrier between his gun-slingers and their target and longer block the opening of operations to clear the hall of this upstart, Morgan let him go. Then, with a sudden bound, Peden leaped across into the crowd.
A moment of strained waiting, quiet as the empty night, Morgan standing out a fair target for any man who had the nerve to pull a gun. Then a stampede in more of sudden fear than caution by those lined up along the bar, and the two hired killers at the front of the house began to shoot.
Morgan pitched back on his heels as if mortally hit, staggered, thrust one foot out to stay his fall. He stood bracing himself in that manner with out-thrust foot, shooting from the hip.
Three shots he fired, the roar of his rifle loud above the lighter sound of the revolvers. With the third shot Morgan raised his gun. In the smoke that was settling to the floor the taller of the gunmen lay stretched upon his face. The other, arms rigidly at his sides, held a little way from his body, head drooping to his chest, turned dizzily two or three times, spinning swiftly in his dance of death, gave at the knees, settled down gently in a strange, huddled heap.
Dead. Both of them dead. The work of one swift moment when the blood curse fell on this new, quick-handed marshal of Ascalon.
There was a choking scream, and a woman's cry. "Look out! look out!"
Peden, on the fringe of a crowd of shrinking, great-eyed women, ghastly in the painted mockery of their fear, fired as Morgan turned. Morgan blessed the poor creature who was woman enough in her debauched heart to cry out that warning, as the breath of Peden's bullet brushed his face. Morgan could not defend himself against this assault, for the coward stood with one shoulder still in the huddling knot of women, and fired again. Morgan dropped to the floor, prone on his face as the dead man behind him.
Peden came one cautious step from his shelter, leaning far over to see, a smile of triumph baring his gleaming teeth; another step, while the crowd broke the stifling quiet with shifted feet. Morgan, quick as a serpent strikes, raised to his elbow and fired.
Morgan had one clear look at Peden's face as he threw his arms high and fell. Surprise, which death, swift in its coming had not yet overtaken, bulged out of his eyes. Surprise: no other emotion expressed in that last look upon this life. And Peden lay dead upon his own floor, his hat fallen aside, his arms stretched far beyond his head, his white cuffs pulled out from his black coat sleeves, as if he appealed for the mercy that was not ever for man or woman in his own cold heart.