People were hastening by in the direction of Peden's, scattered at first, like the beginning of a retreat, coming then by twos and threes, presently overflowing the sidewalk, running in the street. Rhetta stood staring, half insensible, on this outpouring. Riley Caldwell, the young printer, rushed past her out of the shop, his roached hair like an Algonquin's standing high above his narrow forehead, his face white as if washed by death.
Impelled by a desire that was commanding as it was terrifying, moved by a hope that was only a shred of a raveled dream, Rhetta joined the moving tide that set toward Peden's door. Dead—Morgan was dead! Because she had asked him, he had set his hand to this bloody task. She had sent him to his death in her selfish desire for security, in her shrinking cowardice, in her fear of riot and blood. And he was dead, the light was gone out of his eyes, his youth and hope were sacrificed in a cause that would bring neither glory nor gratitude to illuminate his memory.
She began to run, out in the dusty street where he had marched his patrol that first night of his bringing peace to Ascalon; to run, her feet numb, her body numb, only her heart sentient, it seemed, and that yearning out to him in a great pain of pity and stifling labor of remorse. It was only a little way, but it seemed heavy and long, impeded by feet that could not keep pace with her anguish, swift-running to whisper a tender word.
The lights were bright in Peden's hall, a great crowd leaned and strained and pushed around its door. There were some who asked her kindly to go away, others who appealed earnestly against her looking into the place, as Rhetta pushed her way, panting like an exhausted swimmer, through the crowd.
Nothing would turn her; appeals were dim as cries in drowning ears. Gaining the door, she paused a moment, hands pressed to her cheeks, hair fallen in disorder. Her eyes were big with the horror of her thoughts; she was breathless as one cast by breakers upon the sand. She looked in through the open door.
Morgan was standing like a soldier a little way inside the door, his rifle carried at port arms, denying by the very sternness of his pose the passage of any foot across that threshold of tragedy. There was nothing in his bearing of a wounded man. Beyond him a few feet lay the bodies of the two infamous guards who had been posted at the door to take his life; along the glistening bar, near its farther end, Peden stretched with face to the floor, his appealing hands outreaching.
A gambling table had been upset, chairs strewn in disorder about the floor, when the rabble was cleared out of the place. Only Morgan remained there with the dead men, like a lone tragedian whose part was not yet done.
Rhetta looked for one terrifying moment on that scene, its tragic detail impressed on her senses as a revelation of lightning leaps out of the blackest night to be remembered for its surrounding terror. And in that moment Morgan saw her face; the horror, the revulsion, the sickness of her shocked soul. A moment, a glance, and she was gone. He was alone amidst the blood that the curse of Ascalon had led his hand to pour out in such prodigality in that profaned place.
Long after the fearful waste of battle had been cleared from Peden's floor, and the lights of that hall were put out; long after the most wakeful householder of Ascalon had sought his bed, and the last horseman had gone from its hushed streets, Morgan walked in the moonlight, keeping vigil with his soul. The curse of blood had descended upon him, and she whose name he could speak only in his heart, had come to look upon his infamy and flee from before his face.
Time had saved him for this excruciating hour; all his poor adventures, slow striving, progression upward, had been designed to culminate in the mockery of this night. Fate had shaped him to his bitter ending, drawing him on with lure as bright as sunrise. And now, as he walked slowly in the moonlight, feet encumbered by this tragedy, he felt that the essence had been wrung out of life. His golden building was come to confusion, his silver hope would ring its sweet chime in his heart no more. From that hour she would abhor him, and shrink from his polluted hand.
He resented the subtle indrawing of circumstance that had thrust him in the way of this revolting thing, that had thrust upon him this infamous office that carried with it the inexorable curse of blood. Softly, against the counsel of his own reason, he had been drawn. She who had stared in horror on the wreckage of that night had inveigled him with gentle word, with appeal of pleading eye.
This resentment was sharpened by the full understanding of his justification, both in law and in morals, for the slaying of these desperate men. Duty that none but a coward and traitor to his oath would have shunned, had impelled him to that deed. Defense of his life was a justification that none could deny him. But she had denied him that. She had fled from the lifting of his face as from a thing unspeakably unclean.
He could not chide her for it, nor arraign her with one bitter thought. She had hoped it would be otherwise; her last word had been on her best hope for him in a place where such hope could have no fruition—that he would pass untainted by the bloody curse that fell on men in this place. It could not be.
Because he had taken Seth Craddock's pistol away from him on that first day, she had believed him capable of the superhuman task of enforcing order in Ascalon without bloodshed. Sincere as she had been in her desire to have him assume the duties of peace officer, she had acted unconsciously as a lure to entangle him to his undoing.
Very well; he would clean up the town for her as she had looked to him to do, sweep it clear of the last iniquitous gun-slinger, the last slinking gambler, the last drab. He would turn it over to her clean, safe for her day or night, no element in it to disturb her repose. At what further cost of life he must do this, he could not then foresee, but he resolved that it should be done. Then he would go his way, leaving his new hopes behind him with his old.
Although it was a melancholy resolution, owing to its closing provision, it brought him the quiet that a perturbed mind often enjoys after the formation of a definite plan, no matter for its desperation. Morgan went to the hotel, where Tom Conboy was still on duty smoking his cob pipe in a chair tilted back against a post of his portico.
"Well, the light's out up at Peden's," said Conboy, feeling a new and vast respect for this man who had proved his luck to the satisfaction of all beholders in Ascalon that night.
"Yes," said Morgan, wearily, pausing at the door.
"They'll never be lit again in this man's town," Conboy went on, "and I'm one that's glad to see 'em go. Some of these fellers around town was sayin' tonight that Ascalon will be dead in the shell inside of three weeks, but I can't see it that way. Settlers'll begin to come now, that hall of Peden's'll make a good implement store, plenty of room for thrashin' machines and harvesters. I may have to put up my rates a little to make up for loss in business till things brighten up, but I'd have to do it in time, anyhow."
"Yes," said Morgan, as listlessly as before.
"They say you made a stand with that gun of yours tonight that beat anything a man ever saw—three of 'em down quicker than you could strike a match! I heard one feller say—man! look at that badge of yours!"
Conboy got up, gaping in amazement. Morgan had stepped into the light that fell through the open door, passing on his way to bed. The metal shield that proclaimed his office was cupped as if it had been held edgewise on an anvil and struck with a hammer. Morgan hastily detached the badge and put it in his pocket, plainly displeased by the discovery Conboy had made.
"Bullet hit it, square in the center!" Conboy said. "It was square over your heart!"
"Keep it under your hat!" Morgan warned, speaking crossly, glowering darkly on Conboy as he passed.
"No niggers in Ireland," said Conboy, knowingly; "no-o-o niggers in Ireland!"
Morgan regretted his oversight in leaving the badge in place. He had intended to remove it, long before. As he went up the complaining stairs he pressed his hand to the sore spot over his heart where the bullet almost had driven the badge into his flesh. Pretty sore, but not as sore as it was deeper within his breast from another wound, not as sore
as that other hurt would be tomorrow, and the heavy years to come.
* * *
CHAPTER XXI
AS ONE THAT IS DEAD
"I feel like I share his guilt," said Rhetta, voice sad as if she had suffered an irreparable loss.
"He's not guilty," said Violet, stoutly, standing in his defense.
Rhetta had fled from Ascalon that morning, following the terrible night of Morgan's sanguinary baptism. Racked by an agony of mingled remorse for her part in this tragedy and the loss of some valued thing which she would not bring her heart to acknowledge, only moan over and weep, and bend her head to her pillow through that fevered night, she had taken horse at sunrise and ridden to Stilwell's ranch, for the comfort of Violet, whose sympathy was like balm to a bruise. Rhetta had come through the night strained almost to breaking. All day she had hidden like one crushed and shamed, in Stilwell's house, pouring out to Violet the misery of her soul.
Now, at night, she was calmer, the haunting terror of the scene which rose up before her eyes was drawing off, like some frightful thing that had stood a menace to her life. But she felt that it never would dim entirely from her recollection, that it must endure, a hideous picture, to sadden her days until the end.
The two girls had gone to the river, where the moonlight softened the desert-like scene of barren bars, and twinkled in the ripples of shallow water which still ran over against the farther shore. They were sitting near the spot where Morgan had laved his bruised feet in the river not many nights past. A whippoorwill was calling in the tangle of cottonwoods and grapevines that grew cool and dark on a little island below them, its plaint as sad as the mourner's own stricken heart.
"I begged him to give up the office and let things go," said Rhetta, pleading to mitigate her own blame, against whom no blame was laid.
"You'd have despised him for it if he had," said Violet.
"But he wouldn't do it, and now this has happened, and he's a man-killer like the rest of them. Oh it's terrible to think about!"
"Not like the rest of them," Violet corrected, in her firm, gentle way. "He had to stand up like a man for what he was sworn to do, or run like a dog. Mr. Morgan wouldn't run. Right or wrong, he wouldn't run from any man!"
"No," said Rhetta, sadly, "he wouldn't run."
"You talk like you wanted him to!"
"I don't think I would," said Rhetta.
"Then what do you expect of a man?" impatiently. "If he stands up and fights he's either got to kill or be killed."
"Don't—don't, Violet! It seems like killing is all I hear—the sound of those guns—I hear them all the time, I can't get them out of my ears!"
"Suppose," said Violet, looking off across the runlet sparkling, gurgling like an infant across the bar, "it was him you saw when you looked in there, instead of the others. You'd have been satisfied then, I suppose?"
"Violet! how can you say such awful things!"
"Well, somebody had to be killed. Do you suppose Mr. Morgan killed them just for fun?"
"They say, they were talking all over town that night—last night—and saying the same thing this morning, that he didn't give them a show, that he just turned his rifle on them and killed them before he knew whether they were going to shoot or not!"
"Well, they lie," said Violet, with the calmness of conviction.
"I suppose he had a right to do what he did, but he doesn't seem like the same man to me now. I feel like I'd lost something—some friendship that I valued, I mean, Violet—you know what I mean."
"I know as well as anything," said Violet, smiling to herself, head turned away, the moonlight on her good, kind face.
"I feel like somebody had died, and that he—they—that he——"
"And you ought to be thankful it isn't so!" said Violet, sharply, "but I don't believe you are."
"I never want to see him again, I'll always think of him standing there with that terrible gun in his hands, those dead men around him on the floor!"
"You may have to go to him on your knees yet, and I hope to God you will Rhetta Thayer!" Violet said.
"If you'd seen somebody—somebody that you—that was—if you'd seen him like I saw him, you wouldn't blame me so," Rhetta defended, beginning again to cry, and bend her head upon her hands and moan like a mother who had lost a child.
Violet was moved out of her harshness at once. She put her arm around the weeping girl, whose sorrow was too genuine to admit a doubt of its great depth, and consoled her with soft words.
"And he looked so big to me, and he was so clean, before that," Rhetta wailed.
"He's bigger than ever, he's as blameless as a lamb," said Violet. "After a little while you'll see it different, he'll be the same to you."
"I couldn't touch his hand!" said Rhetta, shuddering at the thought.
"Never mind," said Violet, soothingly; "never mind."
Violet said no more, but took Rhetta by the hand, and it was wet with tears from her streaming cheeks. There was peace in the night around them, for all the turmoil there might be in human hearts, for night had eased the throbbing, drouth-cursed earth of its burning, and called the trumpeters of the greenery out along the riverside.
"I'm afraid he'll come," said Rhetta by and by.
"Why should he come?" asked Violet, stroking back the other's hair.
"He's got one of your horses—I'm afraid he'll come to bring it home."
"You only hope he will," said Violet, in her assured, calm way.
"Violet!" But there was not so much chiding in the word as a cry of pain, a confession of despair. He would not come; and she knew he would not come.
* * *
CHAPTER XXII
WHINERS AT THE FUNERAL
Joe Lynch, the bone man, stopped at the well in the public square to pour water on his wagon tires. A man was pestered clean out of his senses by his tires coming off, his felloes shrinking up like a fried bacon rind in that dry weather, Joe said. It beat his time, that drouth. He had been through some hot and dry spells in the Arkansaw Valley, but never one as dry and hot as this.
He told Morgan this as he poured water slowly on his wheels to swell the wood and tighten the tires, there at the town well in the mid-morning of that summer day. It was so hot already, the ceaseless day wind blowing as if it trailed across a fire, that one felt shivers of heat go over the skin; so hot that the heat was bitter to the taste, and shade was only an aggravation.
This was almost a week after Morgan's forceful assertion of the law's supremacy in Ascalon, when Peden and his assassins fell in their insolence. It seemed that day as if Ascalon itself had fallen with Peden, and the blood of life had drained out of its body. There was a quietude over it that seemed the peace of death.
"I never thought, the day I hauled you into this town," said Joe, his high rasping voice harmonizing well with his surroundings, like a katydid on a dead limb, "you'd be the man to put the kibosh on 'em and close 'em up like you done. I never saw the bottom drop out of no place as quick as it's fell out of this town, and I've saw a good many go up in my day. The last of them gamblers pulled out a couple of days ago, I hauled his trunk over to the depot. He went a cussin', and he pulled the hole in after him, I guess, on all the high-kickin' this town'll ever do. Well, I ain't a carin'; I've been waitin' my time."
"You were wiser than some of them, you knew it would come," Morgan said, glad to meet this bone-gathering philosopher in the desert he had made of Ascalon, and stand talking with him, foot on his hub in friendly way.
"Not so much bones," said Joe reflectively, as if he had weighed the possibilities long ago and now found them coming out according to calculation, "as bottles. Thousands of bottles, every boy in this town's out a pickin' up bottles for me. I reckon I'll have a couple of carloads of nothing but bottles. Oh-h-h, they'll be some bones, but the skeleton of this town is bottles. That's why I tell 'em it never will pick up no more. You've got to build a town on something solider'n a bottle if you want it to stand up."
"I
believe you," Morgan said.
"You've worked yourself out of a job. They won't no more need a marshal here'n they will a fish net."
Morgan shook his head, got out his pipe, struck a match on the bleached forehead of a buffalo skull in Joe's wagon.
"No. I'm leaving town in a week or two—when I make sure it is dead, that they'll never come back and start the games again."
"They never will," said Joe, shaking a positive head. "Peden was the guts of this town; it can't never be what it was without him. So you're goin' to leave the country, air you?"
"Yes."
"Give up that fool notion you had about raising wheat out here on this pe-rairie, heh?"
"Gave it up," Morgan replied, nodding in his solemn, expressive way.
"Well, you got some sense hammered into you, anyhow. I told you right at the jump, any man that thought he could farm in this here country should be bored for the simples. Look at that range, look at them cattle that's droppin' dead of starvation and want of water all over it. Look at them cattlemen shippin' out thousands of head that ain't ready for market all along this railroad every day. This range'll be as bare of stock by fall, I tell you, as the pa'm of my hand's bare of hairs. Bones? I'll have more bones to pick up than ever was in this country before. Ascalon ain't all that's dead—the whole range's gone up. This'll clean 'em all out. It's the hottest summer and the longest dry spell that ever was."
"It couldn't be much worse."
"Worse!" Joe looked up from his pouring in his reprovingly surprised way, stopping his dribbling stream on the wagon wheel. "You hang around here a month longer and see what worse is! I'm goin' to begin pickin' up bones over on Stilwell's range in about a week; I'm givin' them wolves and buzzards time to clean 'em up a little better. About then you'll see the cattlemen begin to fight for range along the river where their stock can eat the leaves off of the bushes and find a bunch of bluestem once in a while that ain't frizzled and burnt up. You'll begin to see the wolf side to some of these fellers in this country then."
Trails End Page 19
