Morgan galloped on toward the square, where a great volume of smoke hid the courthouse and all of the town that lay before the wind. He hoped to meet somebody there with a gun worth while, although he had no immediate plan for pitching into the fight and using it. That must be fixed for him by circumstances when he confronted them.

Women and children stood in the dooryards watching the fire that was cutting through the thin-walled buildings on that side of the square—the hotel side—as if they were strawboard boxes. They were silent in the great climax of fear; they stood as people stand, straining and waiting, watching the approach of a tornado, no safety in flight, no refuge at hand. There was but one man in sight, and he was running like a jack rabbit across the staked ground behind Judge Thayer's office, heading for the prairie. It was Earl Gray, the druggist. He was covering sixteen feet at a jump. When he saw Morgan galloping into the town, Gray stopped, darted off at an angle as if he were going on some brave and legitimate excursion, and disappeared.

The Elkhorn hotel was well under way of destruction, its roof already fallen, its thin walls bending inward, perforated in a score of places by flames. The head of the street was unguarded; Morgan rode on and halted at the edge of the square.

Smoke blotted out everything in the square, except for a little shifting by the rising wind which revealed the courthouse, the pigeons in wild flight around the tower. There was not a man in sight, neither raider nor defender. Across on the other side of the square, as if they defended that part from being set on fire, the citizens were doing some shooting with rifles, even shotguns, as Morgan could define by the sound. The raiders were there, for they were answering with shot and yell.

Morgan caught the flutter of a dress at the farther corner of the bank—a little squat brick building this was—where some woman stood and watched. He rode around, and at the sound of his approach a gun-barrel was trained on him, and a familiar fair head appeared, cheek laid against the rifle stock in a most determined and competent way.

"Dora! don't shoot!" Morgan shouted. In a moment he was on the ground beside her, and Dora Conboy was handing him his own rifle, pride and relief in her blue eyes.

"I knew you'd come, I told them you'd come!" she said.

"How did you save it—what are you doing here, Dora?" he asked in amazement.

"I was layin' for Craddock! If he'd 'a' come around that corner—but it was you!"—with a sigh of relief.

"Have you got any shells, Dora?"

"No, I didn't have time to grab anything but your gun—I run to your room when they set the hotel afire and drove us out."

"You're the bravest man in town!" he praised her, patting her shoulder as if she were a very little girl, indeed. "Where are they all?"

"They've locked Riley, and Judge Thayer, and all the men that's got a fight in 'em up in jail with the sheriff. Pa got away—he's over there where you hear that shootin'—but he can't hit nothin'!" Dora said, in hopeless disgust.

Morgan saw with relief that the magazine of his rifle was full, and a shot in the barrel. He took Dora by the hand, turning away from his haste to mount as if it came to him as an after-thought to thank her for this great help.

"There's going to be a fight, Dora," he said. "You'd better get behind the bank, and keep any of the women and children there that happen along. You're a brave, good little soul, I'll never forget you for what you've done for me today. Please take care of this gun—it belongs to Uncle John."

He was up in the saddle with the last word, and gone, galloping into the pitchy black smoke that swirled like a turgid flood from burning Ascalon across the square.

Morgan's thought was to locate the raiders' horses and cut them off, if it should be that some of the rascals were still on foot setting fires, as it seemed likely from the smell of kerosene, that they were. It would increase his doubtful chances to meet as many of them on foot as possible. This was his thought.

He made out one mounted man dimly through the blowing smoke, watching in front of the Santa Fe cafe, but recently set on fire. This fellow doubtless was stationed there on the watch for him, Morgan believed, from the close attention he was giving the front door of the place, out of which a volume of grease-tainted smoke rolled. He wondered, with a little gleam of his saving humor, what there was in his record since coming to Ascalon that gave them ground for the belief that it was necessary to burn a house to bring him out of it to face a fight.

Morgan rode on a little way across the square, not twenty yards behind this raider, the sound of his horse silenced in the roar of fire and growing wind. The heat of the place was terrific; burning shingles swirled on the wind, coals and burning brands fell in a rain all over the square. At the corner of the broad street that came into the square at Peden's hall, another raider was stationed.

The citizens who were making a weak defense were being driven back, the sound of firing was behind the stores, and falling off as if the raiders pressed them hard. Morgan quickly concluded that Craddock and the rest of the outfit were over there silencing this resistance, probably in the belief that he was concerned in it.

This seemed to be his moment for action, yet arresting any of them was out of the question, and he did not want to be the aggressor in the bloodshed that must finish this fiendish morning's work. Hopeless as his situation appeared, justified as he would have been in law and reason for opening fire without challenge, he waited the further justification of his own conscience. They had come looking for him; let them find him here in their midst.

Fire was rising high among the stripped timbers of Peden's hall, purging it of its debauchery and blood. On the rising wind the flames were licking up Gray's drug-store, the barber shop beside it, the newspaper office, the Santa Fe cafe and the incidental small shops between them and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little while would suffice to see their obliteration, a little longer to witness the destruction of the town if the wind should carry the coals and blazing shingles to other roofs, dry as the sered grasses of the plain.

The sound of this fire set by Seth Craddock in celebration of his return to Ascalon was in Morgan's ears like the roar of the sea; the heat of it drew the tough skin of his face as he rode fifty yards from it into the center of the square. There he stopped, his rifle across his breast, waiting for the discovery.

The man in the street near Peden's was the first to see and recognize him as he waited there on his horse in the pose of challenge, in the expectant, determined attitude of defense. This fellow yelled the alarm and charged, breakneck through the smoke, shooting as he came.

Morgan fired one shot, offhand. The charging horse reared, stood so a moment as rigidly as if fixed by bronze in that pose, its rider leaning forward over its neck. Then, in whatever terrible pang that such sudden stroke of death visits, it flung itself backward, the girths snapping from its distended belly. The rider was flung aside, where Morgan saw him lying, head on one extended arm, like a dog asleep in the sun.

The others came whooping their triumphant challenge and closed in on Morgan then, and the battle of his life began.

How many were circling him as he stood in the center of the square, or as close to the center as he could draw, near the courthouse steps, Morgan did not know. Some had come from behind the courthouse, others from the tame fight with the citizens back of the stores not yet on fire.

The dust that rose from their great tumult of charge and galloping attack, mingling with the smoke that trailed the ground, was Morgan's protection and salvation. Nothing else saved him from almost immediate death in the fury of their assault.

Morgan fired at the fleeting figures as they moved in obscurity through this stifling cloud, circling him like Indians of the plains, shouting to each other his location, drawing in upon him a little nearer as they rode. He turned and shifted, yet he was a target all too plain for anything he could do to lessen his peril.

A horse came plunging toward him through the blinding swirl, plain for a flash of wild-flying mane and tossing rein, its saddle empty, fleeing from the scene of fire-swept conflict as if urged on by the ghost of the rider it had lost.

Bullets clipped Morgan's saddle as the raiders circled him in a wild fete of shots and yells. One struck his rifle, running down the barrel to the grip like a lightning bolt, spattering hot lead on his hand; another clicked on the ornament of the Spanish bit, frightening his horse, before that moment as steady as if at work on the range. The shaken creature leaped, bunching its body in a shuddering knot. Blood ran from its mouth in a stream.

A shot ripped through the high cantle of the saddle; one seared Morgan's back as it rent his shirt. The horse leaped, to come down stiff-legged like an outlaw, bleeding head thrust forward, nose close to the ground. Then it reared and plunged, striking wildly with fore feet upon the death-laden air.

In leaping to save himself from entanglement as the creature fell, Morgan dropped his rifle. Before he could recover himself from the spring out of the saddle, the horse, thrashing in the paroxysm of death, struck the gun with its shod fore foot, snapping the stock from the barrel.

Dust was in Morgan's eyes and throat, smoke burned in his scorched lungs. The smell of blood mingling with dust was in his nostrils. The heat of the increasing fire was so great that Morgan flung himself to the ground beside his horse, with more thought of shielding himself from that torture than from the inpouring rain of lead.

How many were down among the raiders he did not know; whether the people had heard the noise of this fight and were coming to his assistance, he could not tell. Dust and smoke flew so thick around him that the courthouse not three rods away, was visible only by dim glimpses; the houses around the square he could not see at all.

The raiders flashed through the smoke and dust, here seen in a rift for one brief glance, there lost in the swathing pall that swallowed all but their high-pitched yells and shots. Morgan was certain of only one thing in that hot, panting, brain-cracking moment—that he was still alive.

Whether whole or hurt, he did not know, scarcely considered. The marvel of it was that he still lived, like a wolf at the end of the chase ringed round by hounds. Lived, lead hissing by his face, lead lifting his hair, lead knocking dirt into his eyes as he lay along the carcass of his horse, his body to the ground like a snake.

Morgan felt that it would be his last fight. In the turmoil of smoke and dust, his poor strivings, his upward gropings out of the dark; his glad inspirations, his thrilling hopes, must come to an obscure end. It was a miserable way to die, nothing to come out of it, no ennobling sacrifice demanding it to lift a man's name beyond his day. In the history of this violent place, this death-struggle against overwhelming numbers would be only an incident. Men would say, in speaking of it, that his luck failed him at last.

Morgan discovered with great concern that he had no cartridges left but those in the chambers of his revolver. He considered making a dash for the side of the square not yet on fire, where he might find support, at least make a further stand with the arms and ammunition every storekeeper had at hand.

As these thoughts swept him in the few seconds of their passing, Morgan lay reserving his precious cartridges. The momentary suspension of his defense, the silence of his rifle's defiant roar, which had held them from closing in, perhaps led his assailants to believe him either dead or disabled. They also stopped shooting, and the capricious wind, now rising to a gale as it rushed into the fiery vacuum, bent down and wheeled away the dust and smoke like a curtain suddenly drawn aside.

Craddock and such of his men as were left out of that half-minute battle were scattered about the square in a more or less definite circle around the spot where Morgan lay behind his horse, the nearest to him being perhaps thirty yards away. The citizens of the town who had been resisting the raiders, had come rushing to the square at the diversion of the fight to that center. These began firing now on the raiders from windows and doors and the corners of buildings. Craddock sent three of his men charging against this force, now become more courageous and dangerous, and with two at his side, one of whom was the Dutchman, he came riding over to investigate Morgan's situation.

Morgan could see the Dutchman's face as he spurred on ahead of the others. Pale, with a pallor inborn that sun and wind could not shade, a wide grin splitting his face, the Dutchman came on eagerly, no doubt in the hope that he would find a spark of conscious life in Morgan that he could stamp out in some predesigned cruelty.

The Dutchman was leaning forward as he rode, revolver lifted to throw down for a quick shot. When he had approached within two lengths of his horse, Morgan lifted himself from the ground and fired. The Dutchman sagged over the horn of his saddle like a man asleep, his horse galloping on in panic. As it passed Morgan the Dutchman pitched from the saddle, drug a little way by one encumbered foot, the frantic horse plunging on. Fred Stilwell, closely followed by his father, came riding into the square.

Morgan leaped to his feet, new hope in him at sight of this friendly force. Craddock's companion turned to meet Fred with the fire of two revolvers. One of the three sent a moment before to dislodge the citizens, turned back to join this new battle.

Morgan had marked this man as Drumm from the beginning. He was a florid, heavy man, his long mustache strangely white against the inflamed redness of his face. He carried a large roll covered with black oilcloth behind his saddle.

Morgan wasted one precious cartridge in a shot at this man as he passed. The raider did not reply. He was riding straight to meet Stilwell and Fred, to whom Craddock also turned his attention when he saw Morgan's rifle broken on the ground. It was as if Craddock felt him out of the fight, to be finished at leisure.

Morgan left his dubious shelter of the fallen horse and ran to meet his friends, hoping to reach one of them and replenish his ammunition. Fred Stilwell was coming up with the wind, his dust blowing ahead of him on the sweeping gale. At his first shot the man who had left Craddock's side to attack him pitched from his saddle, hands thrown out before him as if he dived into eternity. The next breath Fred reeled in his saddle and fell.

The man with the oilcloth roll at his saddle yelled in exultation, lifting his gun high in challenge to Stilwell, who rode to meet him. A moment Stilwell halted where Fred lay, as if to dismount, then galloped furiously forward to avenge his fall. The two raiders who had gone against the townsmen, evidently believing that the battle was going against them, spurred for the open country.

Craddock was bearing down on Morgan, the fight being apportioned now man to man. Morgan heard Stilwell's big gun roaring when he turned to face Craddock, vindictive, grim, who came riding upon him with no word of challenge, no shout of triumph in what seemed his moment of victory.

Morgan was steady and unmoved. The ground was under his feet, his arm was not disturbed by the rock of a galloping horse. He lifted his weapon and fired. Craddock's horse went down to its knees as if it had struck a gopher hole, and Craddock, horseman that he was, pitched out of the saddle and fell not two yards from Morgan's feet.

In falling, Craddock dropped his gun. He was scrambling for it when Morgan, no thought in him of mercy, threw his weapon down for the finishing shot. The hammer clicked on an empty shell. And Craddock, on hands and knees, agile as a bear, was reaching one long hairy arm to clutch his lost gun.

Morgan threw himself headlong upon the desperado, crushing him flat to the ground. With a sprawling kick he sent Craddock's gun far out of reach, and they closed, with the weapons nature had given them, for the last struggle in the drama of their lives.

The stage was empty for them of anything that moved, save only Craddock's horse, which Morgan's last shot, confident as he was when he aimed it, had no more than maimed with a broken leg. To the right of them Fred Stilwell lay, his face in the dust, his arms outspread, his hat close by; on the other hand the Dutchman's body sprawled, his legs, flung out as if he had died running. And near this unsightly wreckage of a worthless wretch Morgan's horse stretched, in the lazy posture of an animal asleep in a sunny pasture.

Behind them the fire that was eating one side of the square away rose and bent, roared and crackled, sighed and hissed, flinging up long flames which broke as they stabbed into the smoke. Morgan felt the fire hot on his neck as he bent over Craddock, throwing the strain of every tendon to hold the old villain to the ground.

Craddock writhed, jointless as a snake, it seemed, under the grip of Morgan's hand at his spiney throat, squirmed and turned and fought to his knees. They struggled and battled breast to breast, until they stood on their feet, locked in a clinch out of which but one of them, Morgan was determined, should come a living man.

Morgan had dropped his empty revolver when he flung himself on Craddock. There was no inequality between them except such as nature had given in the strength of arm and back. They swayed in silent, terrible determination each to have the other's life, and Morgan had a glimpse, as he turned, of women and children watching them from the corner near the bank, huddled groups out of which he knew many a hope went out for his victorious issue.

Craddock was a man of sinews as hard as bow strings; his muscles were like dried beef. Strong as Morgan was, he felt that he was losing ground. Then, by some trick learned perhaps in savage camps, Craddock lifted him, and flung him with stunning force against the hard ground.

There they rolled, clawing, striking, grappling at each other's throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped for it in the star-shot agony of sinewy fingers choking out his life. His empty gun. It seemed that he grasped it in delirium, and struck with it in the blindness of hovering death.

When Morgan staggered to his feet there was blood in his mouth; the sound of the fiery turmoil around him was hushed in the roar of blood in his ears. He stood weakly a moment, looking at the pistol in his hand. The blow he had laid along Craddock's head had broken the cylinder pin. Meditatively Morgan looked at it again, then threw it down as an abandoned and useless thing. It fell close by where Craddock lay, blood running from a wound on his temple.



CHAPTER XXVII

ABSOLUTION

Morgan stood looking down on the man whom he had overcome in the climax of that desperate hour, wondering if he were dead. He did not stoop to investigate; from where he stood no sign of life disturbed Craddock's limp body. Morgan was thinking now that they would say of him in Ascalon that luck had been with him to the last.

Not prowess, at any rate; he did not claim to that. Perhaps luck was as good a name as any for it, but it was something that upheld his hand and stimulated his wit in crises such as he had passed in Ascalon that eventful fortnight.

A band of men came around the corner past Peden's hall, now only a vanishing skeleton of beams, bringing with them the two raiders who had attempted to escape by that avenue to the open prairie. The two were still mounted, the crowd that surrounded them was silent and ominous. Morgan waited until they came up, when, with a sign toward Craddock, which relinquished all interest in and responsibility for him to the posse comitatus, he turned away to hasten to Fred Stilwell's side.

Tom Conboy had reached the fallen youth—he was little more than a boy—and was kneeling beside him, lifting his head.

"God! they killed a woman over there—and a man!" Conboy said.

"Is he dead?" Morgan inquired, his voice hoarse and strange.

"He's shot through the lung, he's breathin' through his back," Conboy replied, shaking his head sadly. "But I've seen men live shot up worse than Fred is," he added. "It takes a big lot of lead to kill a man sometimes."

"We must carry him out of this heat," Morgan said.

They carried him across the square to that part of the business front the fire had not yet leaped over to and taken, and laid him in a little strip of shade in front of the harness store. Conboy hurried off to see if he could find the doctor.

Morgan wadded a handkerchief against the wound in Fred's back, whence the blood bubbled in frothy stream at every weak inspiration, and let him down gently upon that insufficient pad to wait the doctor, not having it in his power to do more. He believed the poor fellow would die with the next breath, and looked about to see if Stilwell were in sight. Stilwell was nowhere to be seen, his pursuit of Drumm having led him far. But approaching Morgan were five or six men carrying guns, their faces clouded with what seemed an unfriendly severity.

"We want to have a word or two with you over in the square," one of them said.

Morgan recognized all of them as townsmen. He looked at them in undisguised surprise, completely lost for the meaning of the blunt request.

"All right," he said.

"The doctor will be here in a minute, he's gone for his case," one of them volunteered.

Relieved by the word, Morgan thanked him, and returned with them to the place where a growing crowd of men stood about Seth Craddock and the two prisoners who had been taken in their attempt to escape. Craddock was sitting on the ground, head drooping forward, a man's knee at his back. And Earl Gray, a revolver in his hand, no hat on, his hair flying forty ways, was talking.

"If he'd 'a' been here tendin' to duty under his oath, in place of skulkin' out and leavin' the town wide open to anybody that wanted to set a match to it, this thing wouldn't 'a' happened, I tell you, gentlemen. Look at it! look at my store, look at the ho-tel, look at everything on that side of the square! Gone to hell, every stick of it! And that's the man to blame!"

Gray indicated Morgan with a thrust of his gun, waving one hand dramatically toward the ruin. A sound, more a growl than a groan, ran through the crowd, which now numbered not fewer than thirty or forty men.

The sight of the destruction was enough, indeed, to make them growl, or even groan. Everything on that side of the square was leveled but a few upstanding beams, the fire was rioting among the fallen rafters, eating up the floors that had borne the trod of so many adventurous feet. The hotel was a ruin, Gray's store only a recollection, the little shops between it and Peden's long, hollow skeleton of a barn already coals.

Men, women, and children were on the roofs of buildings across the street from Peden's, pouring precious water over the fires which sprang from falling brands. It seemed that this shower of fire must overwhelm them very soon, and engulf the rest of the business houses, making a clean sweep of everything but the courthouse and the bank. The calaboose, in its isolation, was still safe.

"Where was you last night?" Gray demanded, insolence in his narrow face as he turned again to Morgan, poking out with his gun as if to vex the answer from him as one prods a growl from a dog.

"None of your —— business!" Morgan replied, rising into a rage as sudden as it was unwise, the unworthiness of the object considered. He made a quick movement toward Gray as he spoke, which brought upon him the instant restraint of many hands.

"You don't grab no gun from nobody here!" one said.

"Why wasn't you here attendin' to business when that gang rode in this morning?" one at Morgan's side demanded. It was the barber; his shop was gone, his razors were fused among the ashes.

Morgan ignored him, regretting at once the flash of passion that had betrayed him into their hands. For they were madmen—mad with the torture of hot winds and straining hopes that withered and fell; mad with their losses of that day, mad with the glare of sun of many days, and the stricken earth under their bound and sodden feet; mad with the very bareness of their inconsequential lives.

Seth Craddock heaved up to his knees, struggled to his feet with quick, frantic lumbering, like a horse clambering out of the mire. He stood weaving, his red eyes watching those around him, perhaps reading something of the crowd's threat in the growl that ran through it, beginning in the center as it died on the edge, quieting not at all. His hat was off, dust was in his hair, a great welted wound was black on his temple, the blood of it caked with dust on his face.

The two prisoners on horseback, one of them wounded so badly his life did not seem worth a minute's reprieve, were pulled down; all were bunched with Morgan in the middle of the mob. Gray began again with his denunciation, Morgan hearing him only as the wind, for his attention was fixed on the activities of Dell Hutton, working with insidious swiftness and apparent success among the mob.

Hutton did not look at Morgan as he passed with low word from man to man, sowing the poison of his vindictive hate against this man who had compelled him to be honest once against his bent. A moment Hutton paused in conference with the blacksmith, and that man came forward now, silenced Gray with a word and pushed him aside.

The blacksmith was a knotty short man of Slavic features, a cropped mustache under his stubby nose. His shop was burning in the ruin of that tragic morning; the blame of it was Morgan's. Others whose business places had been erased in the fire were recognized by Morgan in the crowd. The proprietor of the Santa Fe cafe, the cobbler, the Mexican who sold tamales and chili—none of them of any consequence ordinarily, but potent of the extreme of evil now, merged as they were into that unreasoning thing, the mob.

There were murmured suggestions, rejections; talk of the cross-arms on the telegraph poles, which at once became determined, decisive. Men pushed through the press with ropes. Seth Craddock looked across at Morgan, and cursed him. One of the prisoners, the unwounded man, a youth no older than Fred Stilwell, began to beg and cry.

Morgan had not been alarmed up to the moment of his seeing Hutton inflaming the crowd against him, for the mob was composed of men whose faces were for the greater part familiar, mild men in their way, whom the violence in which they had lived had passed and left untouched. But they held him with strong hands; they were making ready a noose to throw over his head and strangle his life out in the shame that belongs to murderers and thieves.

This had become a matter beyond his calculation; this should not be. There were guns in men's hands all about him where guns did not belong. Morgan threw his determination and strength into a fling that cleared his right arm, and began a battle that marked for life some of them who clung to him and tried to drag him down.

They were crushing him, they were overwhelming him. Only a sudden jerk of the head, a dozen determined, silent men hanging to him, saved Morgan's neck from the flung rope. The man who cast it cursed; was drawing it back with eager haste to throw again, when Rhetta Thayer came.

She came pushing through the mad throng about Morgan, he heard her command to clear the way; she was beside him, the mystery of her swift passage through the mob made plain. Seth Craddock's guns, given her as a trophy of that day when Morgan lassoed the meat hunter, were in her hands, and in her eyes there was a death warrant for any wretch that stood in her way. She gave the weapons to Morgan, her breathing audible over the hush that fell in the failing of their cowed hearts.

"Drop your guns!" Morgan commanded.

There was a panic to comply. Steel and nickel, ivory handle, old navy and new Colt's, flashed in the sun as they were dropped in the little open space at Morgan's feet.

"Clear out of here!"

Morgan's sharp order was almost unnecessary. Those on the edge of the crowd were beginning already to sneak off; a little way, looking back over shoulders, and they began to run. They dispersed like dust on the wind, leaving behind them their weapons which would identify them for the revenge this terrible, invincible, miraculously lucky man might come to their doors and exact.

The thought was terrifying. They did not stop at the margin of the square to look back to see if he pressed his vengeance at their heels. Only the shelter of cyclone cellar, sequestered patches of corn, the willows along the distant river, would give them the respite from the terror of this outreaching hand necessary to a full, free breath.

The sheriff had released himself from jail, with Judge Thayer and the valorous Riley Caldwell, and twenty or more others who had been locked up with them. The sheriff, humiliated, resentful, red with the anger that choked him—for it was safe now to be as angry as he could lash himself—came stalking up to where Morgan held Craddock and the unwounded raider off from the tempting heap of weapons thrown down by the mob. The sheriff began to abuse Craddock, laying to him all the villainy of ancestry and life that his well-schooled tongue could shape. Morgan cut him off with a sharp word.

"Take these men and lock them up!"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Morgan, you bet your life I'll lock 'em up!" the sheriff agreed.

"Hold them for a charge of arson and murder," Judge Thayer commanded sternly. "And see that you do hold them!"

Judge Thayer came on to where Morgan stood, the surrendered weapons at his feet, Rhetta beside him, pride higher than the heavens in her eyes.

"I can't apologize for them, I can't even try," said the judge, with a humility in his word and manner quite new and strange, indicating the members of the fast-scattering mob. He made himself as small as he felt by his way of approaching this man who had pitched his life like a coin of little value into the gamble of that tragic day.

"Never mind trying—it's only an incident," Morgan told him, full of another thought.

"I'll see that he locks Craddock and the other two up safe, then I'll have these guns picked up for evidence. I'm going to lay an information against every man of them in that mob with the prosecuting attorney!"

"Let them go, Judge Thayer—I'd never appear against them," Morgan said.

Judge Thayer appeared to be dazed by the events of that day, crowded to their fearful climax of destruction of property and life. He was lacking in his ready words, older, it seemed, by many years, crushed under the weight of this terrible calamity that had fallen on his town. He went away after the sheriff, leaving Morgan and Rhetta, the last actors on the stage in the drama of Ascalon's downfall, alone.

Beyond them the fire raged in the completion of the havoc that was far beyond any human labor to stay. The heat of it was scorching even where they stood; coals, blazing fragments, were blown about their feet on the turbulent wind. The black-green smoke still rose in great volume, through which the sun was red. On the flank of the fire those who labored to confine its spread shouted in the voice of dismay. It was an hour of desolation; it was the day of doom.

"Thank you for my life," said Morgan. "I've put a new valuation on it since you've gone to so much trouble to save it."

"Don't speak cynically about it, Mr. Morgan!" she said, hurt by his tone.

"I'm not cynical," he gravely assured her. "My life wasn't worth much to me this morning when I left Stilwell's. It has acquired a new value now."

All this time Morgan had stood holding Seth Craddock's big revolvers in his hands, as if he distrusted the desolation of the fire-sown square. Now he sheathed one of them in his holster, and thrust the other under his belt. His right hand was bleeding, from wounds of the bullet that had struck his rifle-barrel and sprayed hot lead into his flesh, and from the blows he had dealt in his fury amongst the mob.

Rhetta put out her hand and took his, bleeding and torn and battle-maimed as it was, and lifted it tenderly, and nestled it against her cheek.

"Dear, brave hand!" she said.

"You're not afraid of it now!" he wondered, putting out his free hand as if he offered it also for the absolution of her touch.

"It was only the madness of the wind," she told him, the sorrow of her penance in her simple words.



CHAPTER XXVIII

SUNSET

Evening saw the fires of Ascalon subdued and confined. With the falling of the wind the danger of the disaster spreading to embrace the entire town decreased almost to safety, although the wary, scorched townsmen stood watch over the smoldering coals which lay deep where the principal part of Ascalon lately stood.

Fred Stilwell had been taken to Judge Thayer's house, where his mother and Violet attended him. The doctor said youth and a clean body would carry him through. As for Drumm, whose bullet had brought the young man down, his horse with the black saddle-roll had stood hitched to Judge Thayer's fence until evening, when the sheriff came with a writ of attachment in Stilwell's favor and took it away. Drumm's body was lying on a board in the calaboose, diverted for that dark day in Ascalon's history into a morgue.

The sheriff reported that the Texas cattleman had carried more than fifty thousand dollars in currency behind his saddle. That was according to the custom of the times, and usage of the range, where many a man's word was as good as his bond, but no man's check was as good as money.

Tom Conboy was already hiring carpenters to rebuild the hotel, his eye full of the business that would come to his doors when the railroad shops were running, and the trainmen of the division point were there to be housed and fed. Dora and Riley had been wandering around town all afternoon, very much like two pigeons looking for a place to nest.

And so evening found peace in Ascalon, after all its tragedy and pain.

Calvin Morgan and Rhetta Thayer stood at the bank corner at sunset, looking down the square where the great gap in its front made the scene unfamiliar. Morgan's disabled hand was bandaged; there was a cross of surgical tape on his chin, closing a deep cut where some citizen had tapped him with a revolver in the last fight of that tumultuous day.

Little groups of desolate, disheartened people stood along the line of hitching racks; dead coals, which the wind had sown as living fire over the square, littered the white dust. Morgan had taken off his badge of office, having made a formal resignation to Judge Thayer, mayor of the town. Nobody had been sworn in to take his place, for, as Judge Thayer had said, it did not appear as if any further calamity could be left in store among the misfortunes for that town, except it might be an earthquake or a cyclone, and a city marshal, even Morgan, could not fend against them if they were to come.

"You have trampled your place among the thorns," said Rhetta.

"It looks like I've pulled a good deal down with me," he returned, viewing the seat of fire with a softening of pity in his grave face.

"All that deserves to rise will rise again," she said in confidence. "It's a good thing it burned—it's purged of its old shame and old monuments of corruption. I'm glad it's gone."

There was a quiet over the place, as if the heart of turbulence had been broken and its spirit had taken flight. In the southwest, in the faces of the two watchers at the margin of this ruin, a vast dark cloud stood like a landfall rising in the mariner's eye out of the sea. It had been visible since four o'clock, seeming to hesitate as if nature intended again to deny this parched and suffering land the consolation of rain. Now it was rising, already it had overspread the sunset glow, casting a cool shadow full of promise over the thirsting prairie wastes.

"It will rain this time," Rhetta prophesied. "It always comes up slowly that way when it rains a long time."

"A rain will work wonders in this country," he said, his face lifted to the promise of the cloud.

"And wisdom and faith will do more," she told him, her voice tender and low.

"And love," said he, voice solemn as a prophet's, yet gentle as a dove's.

"And love," she whispered, the wind, springing like an inspiration before the rain, lifting her shadowy hair.

Joe Lynch came driving into the stricken square down the road beside them, bringing a load of bones.

"Had to burn the town to fetch a rain, huh?" said Joe, his ghostly dry old face tilted to catch the savor of the wind. So saying, he drove on, and paused not in his labor of off-bearing the waste of failure that must be cleared for the new labor of wisdom, faith, and love.

* * * * *

Thirty years will do for a cottonwood what two centuries will do for an oak. Thirty years had built the cottonwoods of great girth, and lifted them in dignity high above the roof of Calvin Morgan's white farmhouse, his great barns and granaries. Elm trees, bringing their blessings of wide-spreading branch more slowly, led down a broad avenue to the white manse with its Ionian portico. Over the acres of smooth, luxuriant green lawn, the long shadows of closing day reached like the yearning of men's unfinished dreams.

Before the house a broad roadway, smooth as a city boulevard, ran straight to the bright, clean, populous city where Ascalon, with its forgotten shame and tragedies, once stood. And far and away, over the swell of gentle ridge, into the dip of gracious valley, spread the benediction of growing wheat. Wisdom and faith and love had worked their miracle. This land had become the nation's granary; it was a land redeemed.

* * * * *

Under the giant cottonwoods, gray-green of leaf as the desert grasses were gray-green in the old cattle days, the brown walls, the low roof, of a sod house stood, the lawn clipped smooth around its humble door, lilac clumps green beside its walls, sweet honeysuckle clambering over its little porch. And there came, in the tender last beams of the setting sun, a man and woman to its door.

Not old, not bent, not gnarled by the rack of blind-groping, undirected toil, for such of the chosen out of nature's nobility are never old. Hair once dark as woodland shadows was shot with the sunlight of many years; hair once bright as the mica tossed by joyous waves upon a sunny beach was whitened now by the unmelting snows of winters numbered swiftly in the brief calendar of man. But shoulders were unbent by the burdens which they had borne joyously, and their feet went quickly as lovers' to a tryst.

This little sod house stood with all its old-time furnishings, like a shrine, and on this day, which seemed to be an anniversary, it had been brightened with vases of flowers. This man and this woman, not old, indeed, entered and stood within its door, where the light was dimming through the little window high in the thick wall. The man crossed the room, and stood where a belt with holsters hung upon the wall. She drew near him, and lifted his great hand, and nestled it against her cheek.

"Old Seth Craddock's guns," he said, musing as on a recurring memory.

"His guns!" she murmured, drawing closer into the shadow of his strength.



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Transcriber's Notes:

1. The author's consistent use of a lower-case letter following an exclamation point or a question mark inside quoted dialect has been retained.

2. Punctuation has been changed to contemporary standards.

3. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

THE END