Trails End

by Ogden, George W

  There was some scattered shooting going on in the direction of the square, but whether the citizens were gathering to the defense of the town, or the raiders were firing admonitory shots to keep them indoors, Morgan could not at that distance tell. He rode on, considering his most urgent necessity of more arms, concluding to ride straight for Judge Thayer's house and borrow his buffalo rifle.

  He swung into the road that led past Judge Thayer's house, which thoroughfare entered the square at the bank corner, still about a quarter of a mile away. As he came round the turn of the road he saw, a few hundred yards ahead of him, a man hurrying toward the square with a gun in his hand. A spurt of speed and Morgan was beside him, leaning over, demanding the gun.

  It was the old man who had jumped out of his reverie on the morning of Morgan's first return to Ascalon, and menaced him with the crook of his hickory stick. The veteran was going now without the comfort of his stick, making pretty good time, eager in the rousing of fires long stilled in his cooling heart. He began trotting on when he recognized Morgan, shouting for him to hurry.

  "Lend me your gun, Uncle John—I left mine in the hotel," Morgan said.

  "Hell, what'll I do then?" said Uncle John, unwilling to give it up.

  Morgan was insistent. He commandeered the weapon in the name of the law. That being the case, Uncle John handed it up to him, with a word of affection for it, and a little swearing over his bad luck.

  It was a double-barreled buffalo rifle, a cap-and-ball gun of very old pattern, belonging back in the days of Parkman and the California Trail, and the two charges which it bore were all that Morgan could hope to expend, for Uncle John carried neither pouch nor horn. But Morgan was thankful for even that much, and rode on.

  A little way ahead a man, hatless, wild-haired, came running out from his dooryard, having witnessed Morgan's levying on Uncle John's gun and read his reason for it. This citizen rushed into the road and offered a large revolver, which Morgan leaned and snatched from his hand as he galloped by. But it hadn't a cartridge in its chambers, and its caliber was not of Morgan's ammunition. Still, he rode on with it in his hand, hoping that it might serve its turn.

  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 Fé café, 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 Fé café and the incidental small shops between them and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little while w
ould 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 fête 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.