Trails End

by Ogden, George W

  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 killed one editor, so far."

  "Can you shoot?" he as
ked, 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."

  "The Headlight is 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 through without 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 XVIII

  A 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 the Kansas City Times and 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 the Headlight during 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 the Headlight office 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, a
nd 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.