He had come to Ascalon in the belief that he could succeed and prosper in that land which had lured and beckoned, discouraged and broken and driven forth again ten thousand men. Already there was somebody in it who had looked for a moment into his soul and called it courageous, and passed on her way again, he knew not whither. But if Ascalon was so small that a man whom men sought could not hide in it, the country around it was not vast enough to swallow one whom his heart desired to find again.
He would find her; that he had determined hours ago. That should be his first and greatest purpose in this country now. No man, or band of men, that ever rode the Chisholm Trail could set his face away from it. He went on to meet them, his dream before him, the wild sound of Ascalon's obscene revelry in his ears.
* * *
CHAPTER VI
RIDERS OF THE CHISHOLM TRAIL
Peden's emporium of viciousness was a notable establishment in its day. By far the largest in Ascalon, it housed nearly every branch of entertainment at which men hazard their fortunes and degrade their morality. It was a vast shell of planks and shingles, with skeleton joists and rafters bare overhead, built hastily and crudely to serve its ephemeral day.
In the farther end there was a stage, upon which mephitic females displayed their physical lures, to come down and sell drinks at a commission in the house, and dance with the patrons, at intervals. Beyond the many small round tables which stood directly in front of the stage was a clear space for dancing, and on the border of this festival arena, in the front of the house, the gambling devices. A bar ran the length of the building on one side from door to orchestra railing. It was the pride of Ascalon that a hundred men could stand and regale themselves before this counter at one time.
Five bartenders stood behind this altar of alcohol when Morgan set foot in the place intent on putting himself in the way of the riders of the Chisholm Trail. These Texas cowboys were easily identified among the early activities of the place by the unusual amount of Mexican silver and leather ornamentation of their apparel. They were a road-worn and dusty crew, growing noisy and hilarious in their celebration of one of their number being elevated to the place of so conspicuous power as city marshal of that famous town. It appeared to have its humorous side from the loud laughter they were spending over it, and the caressing thumps which they laid on Seth Craddock's bony back.
They were lined up against the bar, Craddock in the midst of them, a regiment of bottles before them. Morgan drew near, ordered a drink, stood waiting the moment of his discovery and what might follow it. The Texans were trying everything in the stock, from gin to champagne, gay in the wide choice the marvelous influence of their comrade opened to them without money or the hint of price.
Morgan lounged at the bar, turning meditatively the little glass of amber liquor that was the passport to the estate of a proper man in Ascalon, as in many places neither so notorious nor perilous in those times. Each of the big metal kerosene lamps swung high on the joists threw a circular blotch of shadow on the floor, but the light from them fell brightly on the bar, increased in brilliancy by reflection from the long row of mirrors.
In this sparkle of glass and bar furniture Morgan stood, conspicuous by being apart, like a solitary who had ridden in for a jambouree of his own without companion or friend. He wore his broad-brimmed black hat with the high crown uncreased, and only for the lack of boots and pistol he might have passed for a man of the range. The bartender who served him looked at him with rather puzzled and frequent sidelong turning of the eyes as he stood brooding over the untasted liquor, as if he sought to place him in memory, or to classify him among the drift of men who came in varying moods to his mahogany altar to pay their devotions to its bottled gods.
Morgan's hat cast a shadow over half his face, making it as stern as a Covenanter's portrait. His eyes were on the bar, where his great hand turned and turned the glass, as if his mind were withdrawn a thousand leagues from the noisy scene about him. But for all that apparently wrapt and self-centered contemplation, Morgan knew the moment when Seth Craddock looked his direction and discovered him. At that moment he lifted his glass and drank.
Craddock turned to his companions, upon whom a quiet settled as they drew together in brief conference. Presently the city marshal sauntered out, leaving his comrades of the long trail to carry on their revelry alone. A gangling young man, swart-faced, fired by the contending crosses of alcoholic concoctions which he had swallowed, approached Morgan where he leaned against the bar. This fellow straddled as if he had a horse between his legs, and he was dusty and road-rough, but newly shaved and clipped, and perfumed with all the strong scents of the barber's stock.
"Good evenin', bud. How does your copperosticies seems to segastuate this evenin'?" he hailed, in a bantering, insolent, overriding way.
"I'm able to be up and around and take a little grub," Morgan returned, as good-humoredly as if there had been no insulting sneer in the cowboy's words.
"I hear you're leaving town this evenin'?"
"I guess that's a mistake of the printer," Morgan said with casual ease.
The other men in the party drew around Morgan, some of them challenging him with insolent glances, all of them holding their peace but the one who had spoken, who appeared to have been selected for that office.
"A friend of mine told me you was hittin' the grit out of here tonight," the young man insisted, putting that in his voice which seemed to admit no controversy. "This country ain't no place for a granger, bud; farmin's the unhealthiest business here a man ever took up, they tell me, he don't live no time at it. Sure, you're hittin' the road out of here tonight—my friend appointed us a committee to see you off."
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, boys, but your friend's got the wrong information on me and my movements, whoever he is. I'm goin' to hang around this town some little time, till my farming tools come, anyhow. Just pass that word along to your friend, will you, sport?"
"You ain't got erry gun stuck around in your pants, have you, bud?" the Texan inquired with persuasive gentleness.
"Not the ghost of a gun."
"Grangers burn their eyebrows off and shoot theirselves through the feet when they go totin' guns around," the fellow said, speaking in the wheedling, ingratiating way that one addresses an irresponsible child or a man in alcoholic paresis. The others appeared to find a subtle humor in their comrade's mode of handling a granger. Morgan grinned with them as if he found it funny himself.
One fellow stood a little apart from the rest of the band, studying Morgan with an expression of insolence such as might well warrant the belief that he held feud with all grangers and made their discomfiture, dislodgment, and extermination the chief business of his life. This was a man of unlikely proportions for a trade aback of a horse—short of legs, heavy of body, long in the reach of his arms. His face was round and full, fair for one who rode abroad in all seasons under sun and storm, his teeth small and far apart.
This man said nothing, took no part in the side comment that passed among his comrades, only grinned occasionally, his eyes unwaveringly on Morgan's face. Morgan was drawn to note him particularly among this mainly trifling and innocuous bunch, uneasily impressed by the cold curiosity of his round, tigerish eyes. He thought the fellow appeared to be calculating on how much blood a granger of that bulk contained, and how long it would take him to drink it.
"You ain't got a twenty-two hid around in your pocket nowhere?" the inquisitor pressed, with comically feigned surprise. Morgan denied the ownership of even a twenty-two. "I'll have to feel over you and see—I never saw a granger in my life that didn't tote a twenty-two," the Texan declared, stepping up to Morgan to put his declaration into effect.
Morgan had stood through this mocking inquisition in careless posture, elbows on the bar at his back, with as much good humor as if he were a member of the band taking his turn as the butt of the evening's merrymaking. Now, as the young Texan approached with the evident intention of searching him for a wea
pon, Morgan came suddenly out of his lounging posture into one of watchfulness and defense. He put up his hand in admonitory gesture to stay the impending degradation.
"Hands off, pardner!" he warned.
The cowboy stopped, turned to his comrades in simulated amazement.
"Did you hear the pore feller make that noise?" he asked, turning his head as if he listened, not quite convinced that his ears had not deceived him.
"He's sick, he orto have a dose of turkentime for the holler horn," said one.
"He's got the botts—drench him for the botts," another prescribed.
That suggestion appealed to their humor. It was endorsed with laughter as they pressed around Morgan to cut off his escape.
"I was told you men were looking for me," Morgan said, estimating them individually and collectively with calculative eyes, "so I stepped in here where you could find me if you had anything worth a man's time to say to me. I guess you've shot your wad, and you've got my answer. You can tell your friend I'm stopping at the Elkhorn hotel, if he don't know it already."
Morgan moved away from the bar as if to leave the place. They bunched in front of him to bar his passage, one laying hold of his arm.
"We're fixin' up a little drink for you," this detainer said, indicating the former spokesman, who was busy at the bar pouring something of the contents of the various bottles into one that bore a champagne label.
"I've had my drink, it isn't time for another," Morgan said, swinging his arm, sending the fellow who clung to it headlong through the ranks of his companions.
At this show of resistance the mask of humor that had covered their sinister intention was flung aside. The man with the wide-set teeth stepped into action there, the others giving place to him as to a recognized champion. He whirled into Morgan, planting a blow just above the bridge of his nose that sent him back against the bar with a jolt that made the bottles dance.
It was such a sudden and mighty blow that Morgan was dazed for a moment, almost blinded. He saw his assailant before him in wavering lines as he guarded instinctively rather than scientifically against the fierce follow-up by which the fellow seemed determined to make an inglorious end of it for the despised granger. Morgan cleared out of the mists of this sudden assault in a moment, for he was a man who had taken and given hard blows in more than one knock-down and drag-out in his day. He caught the swing that was meant for a knock-out on his left guard, and drove his able right fist into the fellow's face.
The pugilistic cowboy, rare fellow among his kind, went to the floor. But there was good stuff in him, worthy the confidence his comrades reposed. For a breath or two he lay on his back as he fell, twisted to his side with a springy movement of incredible swiftness, and sprang to his feet. Blood was running from his battered nose and already puffed lips. The cheers of his comrades warmed him back to battle, and the onlookers who came pressing from all quarters, drew aside to give them room to fight.
They began to mix it at a furious pace, both of them sledging heavily, the advantage of reach and height sparing Morgan much of the heavy punishment his opponent lacked the cleverness to avoid. While the fellow doubtless was a champion among the men of his range, he had little chance against Morgan, imperfect as he was at that game. In a few minutes of incessant hammering, no breathing spell to break the fierce encounter, Morgan had chopped the cowboy's face severely. Five times Morgan knocked him down in less than half as many minutes, the elastic, enduring fellow coming back each time with admirable courage and vigor.
Morgan's hands were cut from this bare-knuckled mauling, but his opponent had not landed a damaging blow on his face since the first unexpected and unguarded one. He could see, from their crowding and attempts to interfere, that the spirit of fairness had gone out of the rest of the bunch. An end must be made speedily, or they would climb him like a pack of wildcats and crush him like a rabbit in a fall. With this menace plainly before him, Morgan put his best into the rush and wallop that he meant to finish the fight.
The cowboy's extraordinary resistance broke with the blow; he lay so long like a dead man where he fell that his comrades brought whisky to revive him. Presently he struggled to hands and knees, where he stood coughing blood, Morgan waiting by to see what would follow.
"Take them knucks away from him! he slugged me!" Morgan was amazed to hear the fellow charge.
"That's not so!" Morgan denied. "Here—search me," he offered, lifting his arms.
In the code governing personal encounter in those days of the frontier, which was not so very long ago, just one tick in the great clock of history, it was permissible to straddle one's enemy when one got him down, and churn his head against the ground; to gouge out his eyes; to bite off his ears; to kick him, carve him, mutilate him in various and unsportsman-like and unspeakable ways. But it was the high crime of the code to slug him with brass or steel knuckles, commonly called knucks. The man who carried this reenforcement for the natural fist in his pocket and used it in a fight was held the lowest of all contemptible and namelessly vile things. So, these Texas cowboys turned on Morgan at their comrade's accusation, deaf to any denial, flaming with vengeful resentment.
They probably would have made an end of Morgan then and there, but for the interference of Peden, proprietor of the place, who appeared on the scene of the turmoil at that moment, calm and unruffled, expensive white sombrero on the back of his head, fresh cigar in his mouth, black frock coat striking him almost to the knees.
Peden pushed in among the cowboys as they made a rush for Morgan, who stood his ground, back to the bar, regretting now the foolish impulse that had led him into this pack of wolves. Peden stepped in front of Morgan, authority in his very calmness, and restrained the inflamed Texans.
He asked them to consider the ladies. The ladies were in a terrible panic, he said, sweeping his hand toward the farther end of the room where a dozen or so of the creatures whom he dignified with the name were huddled under the restraint of the chief fiddler, who stood before them with fiddle in one hand, bow in the other, like sword and buckler.
There was more curiosity than fright in the women, as the most unsophisticated observer could have read in their kalsomined countenances. Peden's only object in keeping them back from a closer enjoyment of the battle was entirely commercial, humanity and delicacy being no part of his business plan. A live lady was worth a great deal more to his establishment than one with a stray bullet in her skin, waiting burial at his expense in the busy undertaker's morgue.
The cowboys yielded immediately to Peden's appeal in behalf of the ladies, although they very likely would have resented a more obscure citizen's interference with their plans. They fronted the bar again on Peden's invitation to pour another drink. Two of them lifted from the floor the man whom Morgan had fought, and supported him in a weak-kneed advance upon the bar. They cheered him in his half-blind and bleeding wretchedness with promise of what that marvelous elixir, whisky, would do for him once he began to feel the quickening of its potent flame.
Peden indicated by a lifting of the eyebrows, a slight movement of the head toward the door, that Morgan was to improve this moment by making a quiet and expeditious get-away. Morgan needed no urging, being quite willing to allow matters to rest where they stood. He started for the door, making a little detour to put a faro table, around which several men were standing, between himself and the men to whom Seth Craddock had delegated the business of his expulsion from the town. One of the men supporting their defeated champion saw Morgan as he rounded the table, and set up the alarm that the granger was breaking for the range.
Even then Morgan could have escaped by a running dash, for those high-heeled horseback men were not much on foot. But he could not pay that much for safety before the public of Ascalon, despicable as those of it gathered there might be. He made a pretense of watching the faro game while the Texans put down their glasses to rush after him and make him prisoner, threatening him with clubbed pistols above his head.
The lo
okout at the faro game, whose patrons were annoyed by this renewal of the brawl, jumped from his high seat and took a hand in the row. Friends of the marshal or friends of the devil, he said, made no difference to him. They'd have to go outside to finish their fuss. This man, a notorious slayer of his kind, quicker of hand than any man in Ascalon, it was said, urged them all toward the door.
The cowboys protested against this breach of hospitality, but Peden stood in his customary pose of calmness to enforce his bouncer's word, hand pushing back his long black coat where it fell over the holster at his belt.
Morgan was in no mind to go with them, for he began to have a disturbing alarm over what these men might do in their drunken vengeance, relieved as they thought themselves to be of all responsibility to law by the liberty their friend Craddock had given them. Without regard to the bouncer's orders or Peden's threatening pose, he began to lay about him with his fists, making a breach in the ranks of his captors that would have opened the way to the door in a moment, the outbreak was so unexpected and violent, if it had not been for a quieting tap the bouncer gave him with one of the lethal instruments which he carried for such exigencies.
Morgan was conscious of a sensation of expulsion, which seemed swift, soft, and soundless, with a dim sense of falling at the end. When his dispersed senses returned to their seat again, he found himself in the open night, stretched on the ground, hands bound behind his back.
* * *
CHAPTER VII
A GENTLE COWBOY JOKE
Trails End Page 6
