Behind them the fire that was eating one side of the square away rose and bent, roared and crackled, sighed and hissed, flinging up long flames which broke as they stabbed into the smoke. Morgan felt the fire hot on his neck as he bent over Craddock, throwing the strain of every tendon to hold the old villain to the ground.
Craddock writhed, jointless as a snake, it seemed, under the grip of Morgan's hand at his spiney throat, squirmed and turned and fought to his knees. They struggled and battled breast to breast, until they stood on their feet, locked in a clinch out of which but one of them, Morgan was determined, should come a living man.
Morgan had dropped his empty revolver when he flung himself on Craddock. There was no inequality between them except such as nature had given in the strength of arm and back. They swayed in silent, terrible determination each to have the other's life, and Morgan had a glimpse, as he turned, of women and children watching them from the corner near the bank, huddled groups out of which he knew many a hope went out for his victorious issue.
Craddock was a man of sinews as hard as bow strings; his muscles were like dried beef. Strong as Morgan was, he felt that he was losing ground. Then, by some trick learned perhaps in savage camps, Craddock lifted him, and flung him with stunning force against the hard ground.
There they rolled, clawing, striking, grappling at each other's throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped for it in the star-shot agony of sinewy fingers choking out his life. His empty gun. It seemed that he grasped it in delirium, and struck with it in the blindness of hovering death.
When Morgan staggered to his feet there was blood in his mouth; the sound of the fiery turmoil around him was hushed in the roar of blood in his ears. He stood weakly a moment, looking at the pistol in his hand. The blow he had laid along Craddock's head had broken the cylinder pin. Meditatively Morgan looked at it again, then threw it down as an abandoned and useless thing. It fell close by where Craddock lay, blood running from a wound on his temple.
* * *
CHAPTER XXVII
ABSOLUTION
Morgan stood looking down on the man whom he had overcome in the climax of that desperate hour, wondering if he were dead. He did not stoop to investigate; from where he stood no sign of life disturbed Craddock's limp body. Morgan was thinking now that they would say of him in Ascalon that luck had been with him to the last.
Not prowess, at any rate; he did not claim to that. Perhaps luck was as good a name as any for it, but it was something that upheld his hand and stimulated his wit in crises such as he had passed in Ascalon that eventful fortnight.
A band of men came around the corner past Peden's hall, now only a vanishing skeleton of beams, bringing with them the two raiders who had attempted to escape by that avenue to the open prairie. The two were still mounted, the crowd that surrounded them was silent and ominous. Morgan waited until they came up, when, with a sign toward Craddock, which relinquished all interest in and responsibility for him to the posse comitatus, he turned away to hasten to Fred Stilwell's side.
Tom Conboy had reached the fallen youth—he was little more than a boy—and was kneeling beside him, lifting his head.
"God! they killed a woman over there—and a man!" Conboy said.
"Is he dead?" Morgan inquired, his voice hoarse and strange.
"He's shot through the lung, he's breathin' through his back," Conboy replied, shaking his head sadly. "But I've seen men live shot up worse than Fred is," he added. "It takes a big lot of lead to kill a man sometimes."
"We must carry him out of this heat," Morgan said.
They carried him across the square to that part of the business front the fire had not yet leaped over to and taken, and laid him in a little strip of shade in front of the harness store. Conboy hurried off to see if he could find the doctor.
Morgan wadded a handkerchief against the wound in Fred's back, whence the blood bubbled in frothy stream at every weak inspiration, and let him down gently upon that insufficient pad to wait the doctor, not having it in his power to do more. He believed the poor fellow would die with the next breath, and looked about to see if Stilwell were in sight. Stilwell was nowhere to be seen, his pursuit of Drumm having led him far. But approaching Morgan were five or six men carrying guns, their faces clouded with what seemed an unfriendly severity.
"We want to have a word or two with you over in the square," one of them said.
Morgan recognized all of them as townsmen. He looked at them in undisguised surprise, completely lost for the meaning of the blunt request.
"All right," he said.
"The doctor will be here in a minute, he's gone for his case," one of them volunteered.
Relieved by the word, Morgan thanked him, and returned with them to the place where a growing crowd of men stood about Seth Craddock and the two prisoners who had been taken in their attempt to escape. Craddock was sitting on the ground, head drooping forward, a man's knee at his back. And Earl Gray, a revolver in his hand, no hat on, his hair flying forty ways, was talking.
"If he'd 'a' been here tendin' to duty under his oath, in place of skulkin' out and leavin' the town wide open to anybody that wanted to set a match to it, this thing wouldn't 'a' happened, I tell you, gentlemen. Look at it! look at my store, look at the ho-tel, look at everything on that side of the square! Gone to hell, every stick of it! And that's the man to blame!"
Gray indicated Morgan with a thrust of his gun, waving one hand dramatically toward the ruin. A sound, more a growl than a groan, ran through the crowd, which now numbered not fewer than thirty or forty men.
The sight of the destruction was enough, indeed, to make them growl, or even groan. Everything on that side of the square was leveled but a few upstanding beams, the fire was rioting among the fallen rafters, eating up the floors that had borne the trod of so many adventurous feet. The hotel was a ruin, Gray's store only a recollection, the little shops between it and Peden's long, hollow skeleton of a barn already coals.
Men, women, and children were on the roofs of buildings across the street from Peden's, pouring precious water over the fires which sprang from falling brands. It seemed that this shower of fire must overwhelm them very soon, and engulf the rest of the business houses, making a clean sweep of everything but the courthouse and the bank. The calaboose, in its isolation, was still safe.
"Where was you last night?" Gray demanded, insolence in his narrow face as he turned again to Morgan, poking out with his gun as if to vex the answer from him as one prods a growl from a dog.
"None of your —— business!" Morgan replied, rising into a rage as sudden as it was unwise, the unworthiness of the object considered. He made a quick movement toward Gray as he spoke, which brought upon him the instant restraint of many hands.
"You don't grab no gun from nobody here!" one said.
"Why wasn't you here attendin' to business when that gang rode in this morning?" one at Morgan's side demanded. It was the barber; his shop was gone, his razors were fused among the ashes.
Morgan ignored him, regretting at once the flash of passion that had betrayed him into their hands. For they were madmen—mad with the torture of hot winds and straining hopes that withered and fell; mad with their losses of that day, mad with the glare of sun of many days, and the stricken earth under their bound and sodden feet; mad with the very bareness of their inconsequential lives.
Seth Craddock heaved up to his knees, struggled to his feet with quick, frantic lumbering, like a horse clambering out of the mire. He stood weaving, his red eyes watching those around him, perhaps reading something of the crowd's threat in the growl that ran through it, beginning in the center as it died on the edge, quieting not at all. His hat was off, dust was in his hair, a great welted wound was black on his temple, the blood of it caked with dust on his face.
The two prisoners on horseba
ck, one of them wounded so badly his life did not seem worth a minute's reprieve, were pulled down; all were bunched with Morgan in the middle of the mob. Gray began again with his denunciation, Morgan hearing him only as the wind, for his attention was fixed on the activities of Dell Hutton, working with insidious swiftness and apparent success among the mob.
Hutton did not look at Morgan as he passed with low word from man to man, sowing the poison of his vindictive hate against this man who had compelled him to be honest once against his bent. A moment Hutton paused in conference with the blacksmith, and that man came forward now, silenced Gray with a word and pushed him aside.
The blacksmith was a knotty short man of Slavic features, a cropped mustache under his stubby nose. His shop was burning in the ruin of that tragic morning; the blame of it was Morgan's. Others whose business places had been erased in the fire were recognized by Morgan in the crowd. The proprietor of the Santa Fé café, the cobbler, the Mexican who sold tamales and chili—none of them of any consequence ordinarily, but potent of the extreme of evil now, merged as they were into that unreasoning thing, the mob.
There were murmured suggestions, rejections; talk of the cross-arms on the telegraph poles, which at once became determined, decisive. Men pushed through the press with ropes. Seth Craddock looked across at Morgan, and cursed him. One of the prisoners, the unwounded man, a youth no older than Fred Stilwell, began to beg and cry.
Morgan had not been alarmed up to the moment of his seeing Hutton inflaming the crowd against him, for the mob was composed of men whose faces were for the greater part familiar, mild men in their way, whom the violence in which they had lived had passed and left untouched. But they held him with strong hands; they were making ready a noose to throw over his head and strangle his life out in the shame that belongs to murderers and thieves.
This had become a matter beyond his calculation; this should not be. There were guns in men's hands all about him where guns did not belong. Morgan threw his determination and strength into a fling that cleared his right arm, and began a battle that marked for life some of them who clung to him and tried to drag him down.
They were crushing him, they were overwhelming him. Only a sudden jerk of the head, a dozen determined, silent men hanging to him, saved Morgan's neck from the flung rope. The man who cast it cursed; was drawing it back with eager haste to throw again, when Rhetta Thayer came.
She came pushing through the mad throng about Morgan, he heard her command to clear the way; she was beside him, the mystery of her swift passage through the mob made plain. Seth Craddock's guns, given her as a trophy of that day when Morgan lassoed the meat hunter, were in her hands, and in her eyes there was a death warrant for any wretch that stood in her way. She gave the weapons to Morgan, her breathing audible over the hush that fell in the failing of their cowed hearts.
"Drop your guns!" Morgan commanded.
There was a panic to comply. Steel and nickel, ivory handle, old navy and new Colt's, flashed in the sun as they were dropped in the little open space at Morgan's feet.
"Clear out of here!"
Morgan's sharp order was almost unnecessary. Those on the edge of the crowd were beginning already to sneak off; a little way, looking back over shoulders, and they began to run. They dispersed like dust on the wind, leaving behind them their weapons which would identify them for the revenge this terrible, invincible, miraculously lucky man might come to their doors and exact.
The thought was terrifying. They did not stop at the margin of the square to look back to see if he pressed his vengeance at their heels. Only the shelter of cyclone cellar, sequestered patches of corn, the willows along the distant river, would give them the respite from the terror of this outreaching hand necessary to a full, free breath.
The sheriff had released himself from jail, with Judge Thayer and the valorous Riley Caldwell, and twenty or more others who had been locked up with them. The sheriff, humiliated, resentful, red with the anger that choked him—for it was safe now to be as angry as he could lash himself—came stalking up to where Morgan held Craddock and the unwounded raider off from the tempting heap of weapons thrown down by the mob. The sheriff began to abuse Craddock, laying to him all the villainy of ancestry and life that his well-schooled tongue could shape. Morgan cut him off with a sharp word.
"Take these men and lock them up!"
"Yes, sir, Mr. Morgan, you bet your life I'll lock 'em up!" the sheriff agreed.
"Hold them for a charge of arson and murder," Judge Thayer commanded sternly. "And see that you do hold them!"
Judge Thayer came on to where Morgan stood, the surrendered weapons at his feet, Rhetta beside him, pride higher than the heavens in her eyes.
"I can't apologize for them, I can't even try," said the judge, with a humility in his word and manner quite new and strange, indicating the members of the fast-scattering mob. He made himself as small as he felt by his way of approaching this man who had pitched his life like a coin of little value into the gamble of that tragic day.
"Never mind trying—it's only an incident," Morgan told him, full of another thought.
"I'll see that he locks Craddock and the other two up safe, then I'll have these guns picked up for evidence. I'm going to lay an information against every man of them in that mob with the prosecuting attorney!"
"Let them go, Judge Thayer—I'd never appear against them," Morgan said.
Judge Thayer appeared to be dazed by the events of that day, crowded to their fearful climax of destruction of property and life. He was lacking in his ready words, older, it seemed, by many years, crushed under the weight of this terrible calamity that had fallen on his town. He went away after the sheriff, leaving Morgan and Rhetta, the last actors on the stage in the drama of Ascalon's downfall, alone.
Beyond them the fire raged in the completion of the havoc that was far beyond any human labor to stay. The heat of it was scorching even where they stood; coals, blazing fragments, were blown about their feet on the turbulent wind. The black-green smoke still rose in great volume, through which the sun was red. On the flank of the fire those who labored to confine its spread shouted in the voice of dismay. It was an hour of desolation; it was the day of doom.
"Thank you for my life," said Morgan. "I've put a new valuation on it since you've gone to so much trouble to save it."
"Don't speak cynically about it, Mr. Morgan!" she said, hurt by his tone.
"I'm not cynical," he gravely assured her. "My life wasn't worth much to me this morning when I left Stilwell's. It has acquired a new value now."
All this time Morgan had stood holding Seth Craddock's big revolvers in his hands, as if he distrusted the desolation of the fire-sown square. Now he sheathed one of them in his holster, and thrust the other under his belt. His right hand was bleeding, from wounds of the bullet that had struck his rifle-barrel and sprayed hot lead into his flesh, and from the blows he had dealt in his fury amongst the mob.
Rhetta put out her hand and took his, bleeding and torn and battle-maimed as it was, and lifted it tenderly, and nestled it against her cheek.
"Dear, brave hand!" she said.
"You're not afraid of it now!" he wondered, putting out his free hand as if he offered it also for the absolution of her touch.
"It was only the madness of the wind," she told him, the sorrow of her penance in her simple words.
* * *
CHAPTER XXVIII
SUNSET
Evening saw the fires of Ascalon subdued and confined. With the falling of the wind the danger of the disaster spreading to embrace the entire town decreased almost to safety, although the wary, scorched townsmen stood watch over the smoldering coals which lay deep where the principal part of Ascalon lately stood.
Fred Stilwell had been taken to Judge Thayer's house, where his mother and Violet attended him. The doctor said youth and a clean body would carry him through. As for Drumm, whose bullet had brought the young man down, his horse with the black saddle-roll ha
d stood hitched to Judge Thayer's fence until evening, when the sheriff came with a writ of attachment in Stilwell's favor and took it away. Drumm's body was lying on a board in the calaboose, diverted for that dark day in Ascalon's history into a morgue.
The sheriff reported that the Texas cattleman had carried more than fifty thousand dollars in currency behind his saddle. That was according to the custom of the times, and usage of the range, where many a man's word was as good as his bond, but no man's check was as good as money.
Tom Conboy was already hiring carpenters to rebuild the hotel, his eye full of the business that would come to his doors when the railroad shops were running, and the trainmen of the division point were there to be housed and fed. Dora and Riley had been wandering around town all afternoon, very much like two pigeons looking for a place to nest.
And so evening found peace in Ascalon, after all its tragedy and pain.
Calvin Morgan and Rhetta Thayer stood at the bank corner at sunset, looking down the square where the great gap in its front made the scene unfamiliar. Morgan's disabled hand was bandaged; there was a cross of surgical tape on his chin, closing a deep cut where some citizen had tapped him with a revolver in the last fight of that tumultuous day.
Little groups of desolate, disheartened people stood along the line of hitching racks; dead coals, which the wind had sown as living fire over the square, littered the white dust. Morgan had taken off his badge of office, having made a formal resignation to Judge Thayer, mayor of the town. Nobody had been sworn in to take his place, for, as Judge Thayer had said, it did not appear as if any further calamity could be left in store among the misfortunes for that town, except it might be an earthquake or a cyclone, and a city marshal, even Morgan, could not fend against them if they were to come.
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