Trails End

by Ogden, George W

  "When can I get breakfast?" Morgan inquired, turning suddenly, catching Conboy with his new resolution in his shifty, flickering eyes, reading him to the marrow of his bones.

  "It's a little early—not half-past five," Conboy returned, covering his confusion as well as he could by referring to his thick silver watch. "We don't begin to serve till six, the earliest of 'em don't come in before then. If you feel like turnin' in for a sleep, we'll take care of you when you get up."

  Morgan said he had sleep enough to carry him over the day. Dora, yawning, disheveled, appeared in the dining-room door at that moment, tying her all-enveloping white apron around her like Poor Polly Bawn. She blushed when she saw Morgan, and put up her hands to smooth her hair.

  "I had the best sleep last night I can remember in a coon's age—I felt so safe," she said.

  "You always was safe enough," Conboy told her, not in the best of humor.

  "Safe enough! I can show you five bullet holes in the walls of my room, Mr. Morgan—one of 'em through the head of my bed!"

  "Pretty close," Morgan said, answering the animation of her rosy, friendly face with a smile.

  "Never mind about bullet holes—you go and begin makin' holes in a piece of biscuit dough," her father commanded.

  "When I get good and ready," said Dora, serenely. "You wouldn't care if we got shot to pieces every night as long as we could get up in the morning and make biscuits!"

  "Yes, and some of you'd be rootin' around somebody else's kitchen for biscuits to fill your craws if this town laid dead a little while longer," Conboy fired back, his true feeling in the matter revealed.

  "I can get a job of biscuit shooter any day," Dora told him, untroubled by the outlook of disaster that attended upon peace and quiet. "I'd rather not have no guests than drunks that come in stagger blind and shoot the plaster off of the wall. It ain't so funny to wake up with your ears full of lime! Ma's sick of it, and I'm sick of it, and it'd be a blessin' if Mr. Morgan would keep the joints all shut till the drunks in this town dried up like dead snakes!"

  "You, and your ma!" Conboy grumbled, bearing on an old grievance, an old theme of servitude and discontent.

  Morgan recalled the gaunt anxiety of Mrs. Conboy's eyes, hollow of every emotion, as they seemed, but unrest and straining fear. Dora had gone unmarked yet by the cursed fires of Ascalon; only her tongue discovered that the poison of their fumes had reached her heart.

  "I'd like to put strickenine in some of their biscuits!" Dora declared, with passionate vehemence.

  "Tut-tut! no niggers——"

  "How's your face, Mr. Morgan?" Dora inquired, out of one mood into another so quickly the transition was bewildering.

  "Face?" said Morgan, embarrassed for want of her meaning. "Oh," putting his hand to the forgotten wound—"about well, thank you, Miss Dora. I guess my good looks are ruined, though."

  Dora half closed her eyes in arch expression, pursing her lips as if she meant to give him either a whistle or a kiss, laughed merrily, and ran off to cut patterns in a sheet of biscuit dough. She left such a clearness and good humor in the morning air that Morgan felt quite light at heart as he started for a morning walk.

  Morgan was still wearing the cowboy garb that he had drawn from the bottom of his trunk among the things which he believed belonged to a past age and closed period of his life's story. He had deliberated the question well the night before, reaching the conclusion that, as he had stepped out of his proper character, lapsed back, in a word, to raw-handed dealings with the rough edges of the world, he would better dress the part. He would be less conspicuous in that dress, and it would be his introduction and credentials to the men of the range.

  Last night's long vigil, tramping around the square in his high-heeled, tight-fitting boots, had not hastened the cure of his bruised ankles and sore feet. This morning he limped like a trapped wolf, as he said to himself when he started to take a look around and see whether any of the outlawed had made bold to open their doors.

  Few people were out of bed in Ascalon at that hour, although the sun was almost an hour high. As Morgan passed along he heard the crackling of kindling being broken in kitchens. Here and there the eager smoke of fresh fires rose straight toward the blue. No stores were open yet; the doors of the saloons remained closed as the night before. Morgan paused at the bank corner after making the round of the square.

  Ahead of him the principal residence street of the town stretched, the houses standing in exclusive withdrawal far apart on large plots of ground, a treeless, dusty, unlovely lane. Here the summer sun raked roof and window with its untempered fire; here the winds of winter bombarded door and pane with shrapnel of sleet and charge of snow, whistling on cornice and eaves, fluttering in chimney like the beat of exhausted wings.

  Morgan knew well enough how the place would appear in that bitter season; he had lived in the lonely desolation of a village on the bald, unsheltered plain. How did Rhetta Thayer endure the winter, he wondered, when she could not gallop away into the friendly solitude of the clean, unpeopled prairie? Where did she live? Which house would be Judge Thayer's among the bright-painted dwellings along that raw lane? He favored one of the few white ones, a house with a wide porch screened by morning-glory vines, a gallant row of hollyhocks in the distance.

  Lawn grass had been sown in many of the yards, where it had flourished until the scorching summer drouth. Even now there were little rugs of green against north walls where the noonday shadows fell, but the rest of the lawns were withered and brown. Some hardy flowers, such as zinnias and marigolds, stood clumped about dooryards; in the kitchen gardens tasseled corn rose tall, dust thick on the guttered blades.

  Morgan turned from this scene in which Ascalon presented its better side, to skirmish along the street running behind Peden's establishment. It might be well, for future exigencies, to fix as much of the geography of the place in his mind as possible. He wondered if there had been a back-door traffic in any of the saloons last night as he passed long strings of empty beer kegs, concluding that it was very likely something had been done in that way.

  Across the street from Peden's back door was a large vacant piece of ground, a wilderness of cans, bottles, packing boxes, broken barrels. On one corner, diagonally across from where Morgan stood, facing on the other street, a ragged, weathered tent was pitched. Out of this the sound of contending children came, the strident, commanding voice of a woman breaking sharply to still the commotion that shook her unstable home. Morgan knew this must be the home of the cattle thief whose case Judge Thayer had undertaken. He wondered why even a cattle thief would choose that site at the back door of perdition to pitch his tent and lodge his family.

  A bullet clipping close past his ear, the sharp sound of a pistol shot behind him, startled him out of this speculation.

  Morgan did not believe at once, even as he wheeled gun in hand to confront the careless gun-handler or the assassin, as the case might prove, that the shot could have been intended for him, but out of caution he darted as quick as an Indian behind a pyramid of beer kegs. From that shelter he explored in the direction of the shot, but saw nobody.

  There was ample barrier for a lurking man all along the street on Peden's side. From behind beer cases and kegs, whisky barrels, wagons, corners of small houses, one could have taken a shot at him; or from a window or back door. There was no smoke hanging to mark the spot.

  Morgan slipped softly from his concealment, coming out at Peden's back door. Bending low, he hurried back over the track he had come, keeping the heaps of kegs, barrels, and boxes between him and the road. And there, twenty yards or so distant, in a space between two wagons, he saw a man standing, pistol in hand, all set and primed for another shot, but looking rather puzzled and uncertain over the sudden disappearance of his mark.

  Morgan was upon him in a few silent strides, unseen and unheard, his gun raised to throw a quick shot if the situation called for it. The man was Dell Hutton, the county treasurer. His face was white. There
was the look in his eyes of a man condemned when he turned and confronted Morgan.

  "Who was it that shot at you, Morgan?" he inquired, his voice husky in the fog of his fright. He was laboring hard to put a face on it that would make him the champion of peace; he peered around with simulated caution, as if he had rushed to the spot ready to uphold the law.

  Morgan let the pitiful effort pass for what it was worth, and that was very little.

  "I don't know who it was, Hutton," he replied, with a careless laugh, putting his pistol away. "If you see him, tell him I let a little thing like that pass—once."

  Morgan did not linger for any further words. Several shock-haired children had come bursting from the tent, their contention silenced. They stood looking at Morgan as he came back into the road, wonder in their muggy faces. Heads appeared at windows, back doors opened cautiously, showing eyes at cracks.

  "Some fool shootin' off his gun," Morgan heard a man growl as he passed under a window of a thin-sided house, from which the excited voices of women came like the squeaks of unnested mice.

  "What was goin' on back there?" Conboy inquired as Morgan approached the hotel. The proprietor was a little way out from his door, anxiety, rather than interest, in his face.

  "Some fool shootin' off his gun, I guess," Morgan replied, feeling that the answer fitted the case very well.

  He gave Dora the same explanation when she met him at the blue door of the dining-room, trouble in her fair blue eyes. She looked at him with keen questioning, not satisfied that she had heard it all.

  "I hope he burnt his fingers," she said.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XV

  WILL HIS LUCK HOLD?

  Dora escorted Morgan to a table apart from the few heavy feeders who were already engaged, indicating to the other two girls who served with her in the dining-room that this was her special customer and guest of honor. She whirled the merry-go-round caster to bring the salt and pepper to his hand; just so she placed his knife and fork, and plate overturned to keep the flies off the business side of it. Then she hurried away for his breakfast, asking no questions bearing on his preferences or desires.

  A plain breakfast in those vigorous times was unvarying—beefsteak, ham or bacon to give it a savor, eggs, fried potatoes, hot biscuits, coffee. It was the same as dinner, which came on the stroke of twelve, and none of your six-o'clock pretenses about that meal, except there was no pie; identical with supper, save for the boiled potatoes and rice pudding. A man of proper proportions never wanted any more; he could not thrive on any less. And the only kind of a liver they ever worried about in that time on the plains of Kansas was a white one. That was the only disease of that organ known.

  Dora was troubled; her face reflected her unrest as glass reflects firelight, her blue eyes were clouded by its gloom. She made a pretense of brushing crumbs from the cloth where there were no crumbs, in order to furnish an excuse to stoop and bring her lips nearer Morgan's ear.

  "He's comin' on the one-twenty this afternoon—I got it straight he's comin'. I thought maybe you'd like to know," she said.

  Morgan lifted his eyes in feigned surprise at this news, not having it in his heart to cloud her generous act by the revelation of a suspicion that it was no news to him.

  "You mean——?"

  "I got it straight," Dora nodded.

  "Thank you, Miss Dora."

  "I hope to God," she said, for it was their manner to speak ardently in Ascalon in those days, "you'll beat him to it when he gets off of the train!"

  "A man can only do his best, Dora," he said gently, moved by her honest friendship, simple wild thing though she was.

  "If I was a man I'd take my gun and go with you to meet him," she declared.

  "I know you would. But maybe there'll not be any fuss at all."

  "There'll be fuss enough, all right!" Dora protested. "If he comes alone—but maybe he'll not come alone."

  A man who rose from a near-by table came over to shake hands with Morgan, and express his appreciation for the good beginning he had made as peace officer of the town. Dora snatched Morgan's cup and hastened away for more coffee. When she returned the citizen was on his way to the door.

  "Craddock used to come in here and wolf his meals down," she said, picking up her theme in the same troubled key, "just like it didn't amount to nothing to kill a man a day. I looked to see blood on the tablecloth every time his hand touched it."

  "It's a shame you girls had to wait on the brute," Morgan said.

  "Girls! he wouldn't let anybody but me wait on him." Dora frowned, her face coloring. She bent a little, lowering her voice. "Why, Mr. Morgan, what do you suppose? He wanted me to marry him!"

  "That old buffalo wrangler? Well, he is kind of previous!"

  "He's too fresh to keep, I told him. Marry him! He used to come in here, Mr. Morgan, and put his hat down by his foot so he could grab it and run out and kill another man without losin' time. He never used to take his guns off and hang 'em up like other gentlemen when they eat. He just set there watchin' and turnin' his mean old eyes all the time. He's afraid of them, I know by the way he always tried to look behind him without turnin' his head, never sayin' a word to anybody, he's afraid."

  "Afraid of whom, Dora?"

  "The ghosts of them murdered men!"

  Morgan shook his head after seeming to think it over a little while. "I don't believe they'd trouble him much, Dora."

  "I'd rather wait on a dog!" she said, scorn and rebellion in her pretty eyes.

  "You can marry somebody else and beat him on that game, anyhow. I'll bet there are plenty of them standing around waiting."

  "O Mr. Morgan!" Dora was drowned in blushes, greatly pleased. "Not so many as you might think," turning her eyes upon him with coquettish challenge, "only Mr. Gray and Riley Caldwell, the printer on the Headlight."

  "Mr. Gray, the druggist?"

  "Yes, but he's too old for me!" Dora sighed, "forty if he's a day. He's got money, though, and he's perfec'ly grand on the pieanno. You ought to hear him play The Maiden's Prayer!"

  "I'll listen out for him. I saw him washing his window a while ago—a tall man with a big white shirt."

  "Yes," abstractedly, "that was him. He's an elegant fine man, but I don't give a snap for none of 'em. I wish I could leave this town and never come back. You'll be in for dinner, won't you?" as Morgan pushed back from the repletion of that standard meal.

  "And for supper, too, I hope," he said, turning it off as a joke.

  "I hope to God!" said Dora fervently, seeing no joke in the uncertainty at all.

  Excitement was laying hold of Ascalon even at that early hour. When Morgan went on the street after breakfast he found many people going about, gathering in groups along the shady fronts, or hastening singly in the manner of men bound upon the confirmation of unusual news. The pale fish of the night were out in considerable numbers, leaking cigarette smoke through all the apertures of their faces as they grouped according to their kind to discuss the probabilities of the day. Seth Craddock was coming back with fire in his red eyes; their deliverer was on his way.

  There was no secret of Seth's coming any longer. Even Peden leered in triumph when he met Morgan as he sauntered outside his closed door in the peculiar distinction of his black coat, which the strong sun of that summer morning was not powerful enough to strip from his broad back.

  None of the saloons or resorts made an attempt to open their doors to business. The proprietors appeared to have, on the other hand, a secret pleasure in keeping them closed, perhaps counting on the gain that would be theirs when this brief prohibition should come to its end.

  Opposed to this pleasurable expectancy of the proscribed was the uneasiness and doubt of the respectable. True, this man Morgan had taken Seth Craddock's gun away from him once, but luck must have had much to do with his preservation in that perilous adventure. Morgan had rounded up the Texas men quartered on the town under Craddock's patronage, also, but they were sluggish from the
ir debauch, and he had approached them with the caution of a man coming up on the blind side of a horse. Yesterday that had looked like a big, heroic thing for one man to accomplish, but in the light of reflection today it must be admitted that it was mainly luck.

  Yes, Morgan had closed up the town last night, defying even Peden in his own hall, where defiance as a rule meant business for the undertaker. But the glamour of his morning's success was still over him at that time; Peden and his bouncers were a little cautious, a little cowed. He could not close the town up another night; murmurs of defiance were beginning to rise already.

  And so the people who had applauded his drastic enforcement of the law last night, became of no more support to Morgan today than a furrow of sand. Luck was a great thing if a man could play it forever, they said, but it was too much to believe that luck would hold even twice with Morgan when he confronted Seth Craddock that afternoon.

  Morgan walked about the square that morning like a stranger. Few spoke to him, many turned inward from their doors when they saw him coming, afraid that a little friendship publicly displayed might be laid up against them for a terrible reckoning of interest by and by. Morgan was neither offended nor downcast by this public coldness in the quarter where he had a right to expect commendation and support. He understood too well the lengths that animosities ran in such a town as Ascalon. A living coward was more comfortable than a dead reformer, according to their philosophy.

  It was when passing the post-office, about nine o'clock in the morning, that Morgan met Rhetta Thayer. She saw him coming, and waited. Her face was flushed; indignation disturbed the placidity of her eyes.

  "They don't deserve it, the cowards!" she burst out, after a greeting too serious to admit a smile.

  "Deserve what?" he inquired, looking about in mystification, wondering if something had happened in the post-office to fire this indignation.

  "The help and protection of a brave man!" she said.