Trail's End Part 26

"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 n.o.body doing any shooting here now."

"They're only waiting," she said.

"I'll have to watch them a little longer, then," he told her; "somebody might shoot your windows out."

He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back.

"He's over there in the courthouse now--that's his office where you see the light--trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know,"

she declared.

Morgan left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him, guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.

Rhetta Thayer, leaving the _Headlight_ office at nine o'clock, saw two men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk of starlight and early night. She paused on her way, wondering, and her wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell Hutton. The other she had no need to name.

When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. And when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of grat.i.tude rose out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CURSE OF BLOOD

Sensitive as a barometer to every variation, every shading, in public sentiment and sympathy, Morgan patroled the town nightly until the streets were deserted. Night by night he felt, rather than saw, the growing insolence of the pale feeders on the profits of vice, the confidence in some approaching triumph gleaming in their furtive eyes.

None of the princ.i.p.als, 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 G.o.dless 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 pa.s.sed them in his silent, determined rounds. And presently, after meeting the white-s.h.i.+rted, 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, n.o.body 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 sc.r.a.pe of fiddles and a squall of bra.s.s; a squeaking of painted and bedizened drabs, who capered and frisked like mice after their long inactivity.

And on the inflow of custom and the uprising of jubilant mirth, Peden turned his quick, crafty eyes as he stood at the head of the bar to welcome back to his doors this golden stream.

Close within Peden's wide door, one on either hand, two vigilant strangers stood, each belted with two revolvers, each keeping a hand near his weapons. One of these was a small, thin-faced white rat of a man; the other tall, lean, leathery; burned by sun, roughened by weather. A shoot from the tree that produced Seth Craddock he might have been, solemn like him, and grim.

Dell Hutton, county treasurer, cigar planted so far to one corner of his wide thin mouth that wrinkles gathered about it like the leathery folds of an old man's skin, came to Peden where he stood at the bar.

"All's set for him," he said, drawing his eyes small as he peered around through the fast-thickening smoke.

"Let him come!" said Peden, watching the door with expectant, vindictive eyes.

The news of Peden's defiance swept over the town like a taint on the wind. Not only that Peden had opened his doors to the long-thirsting crowd gathered by the advertised news of a big show for that night, but that he had posted two imported gun-fighters inside his hall with instructions to shoot the city marshal if he attempted to interfere.

With the spread of this news men began to gather in front of Peden's to see what the city marshal was going to do, how he would accept this defiance, if he meant to accept it, and what the result to him would be.

Judge Thayer came down to the square without his alpaca coat, his perturbation was so great, looking for Morgan, talking of swearing in a large number of deputies to uphold the law.

This was received coldly by the men of Ascalon. Upholding the law was the city marshal's business, they said. If he couldn't do it alone, let the law drag; let it fall underfoot, where it seemed the best place for it in that town, anyhow. So Judge Thayer went on, looking around the square for Morgan, not finding him, nor anybody who had seen him within the last half hour.

Rhetta was working late in the _Headlight_ office, preparing for the weekly issue of the paper. This disquieting news had come in at her door like the wave of a flood. She had no thought of work from that moment, only to stand at the door listening for the dreaded sound of shooting from the direction of Peden's hall.

Judge Thayer found her standing in the door when he completed his search around the square, his heart falling lower at every step.

"He's gone! Morgan's deserted us!" he said.

"Gone!" she repeated in high scorn. "He'll be the last to go."

"I can't find him anywhere--I've hunted all over town. n.o.body 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 h.e.l.l!"

"I think you'd better run along home now--Riley will go with you. Why, child, you're cold!"

He drew her into the office, urging her to put on her bonnet and go.

"I'll stay here and see it out," she said. "Oh, if he would go, if he would go! But he'll never go."

She threw herself into the chair beside her littered desk, hands clenched, face white as if she bore a mortal pain, only to leap up again in a moment, run to the door, and listen as if she sought a voice out of the riotous sound.

Judge Thayer had none of this poignant concern for Morgan's welfare. He was not a little nettled over his failure to find the marshal, and that officer's apparent shunning of duty in face of this mocking challenge to his authority.

"Why, Rhetta, you wanted him to take the office, you urged him to," he reminded her. "I don't understand this sudden concern for the man's safety in disregard of his oath and duty, this--this--unaccountable----"

"I didn't know him then--I didn't _know_ him!" she said, in piteous low moan.

Judge Thayer looked at her with a sudden sharp turning of the head, as if her words had expressed something beyond their apparent meaning. He came slowly to the door, where he stood beside her a little while in silence, hand upon her shoulder tenderly.

"I'll look around again," he said, "and come back in a little while."

Meanwhile, in Peden's place the celebrants at the altar of alcohol were rejoicing in this triumph of personal liberty. Where was this man-eating city marshal? What had become of that knock-kneed horse wrangler from Bitter Creek they had heard so much about? They drank fiery toasts to his confusion, they challenged him in the profane emphasis of scorn.

Upon what was his fame based? they wanted to be told. The mere corraling of certain stupid drunk men; the lucky throw of a rope. _He_ never had killed a man!