Trail's End

  CHAPTER X

  THE HOUR OF VENGEANCE

  The proscribed of the earth were sleeping late in Ascalon that morning,as they slept late every morning, bright or cloudy, head-heavy with thelate watch and debaucheries of the night. Few were on the street inpursuit of the small amount of legitimate business the town transactedduring the burning hours when the moles of the night lay housed ingloom, when Morgan walked from the baggage-room of the railroad depot.

  Few who saw Morgan on the day of his arrival in Ascalon would haverecognized him now. He had been obliged to go to the bottom of his trunkfor the outfit that he treasured out of sentiment for the old daysrather than in any expectation of needing it again--the rig he had worninto the college town, a matter of six hundred miles from his range, tobegin a new life. Now he had fallen from the eminence. He was going backto the old.

  The gray wool shirt was wrinkled and stained by weather and wear, theroomy corduroy trousers were worn from saddle chafing, the big spurswere rusted of rowel and shank. But the boots were new--he had boughtthem before leaving the range, to wear in college, laying them asidewith regret when he found them not just the thing in vogue--and theywere still brave in glossy bronze of quilted tops, little marred bythat last long ride out of his far-away past. His cream-colored hat wasbattered and old, for he had worn it five years in all weather, crushedfrom the pressure of packing, but he pinched the tall crown to a pointas he used to wear it, and turned the broad brim back from his foreheadaccording to the habit of his former days.

  This had been his gala costume in other times, kept in the bunkhouse atthe ranch for days of fiesta, nights of dancing, and wild dissipationwhen he rode with his fellows to the three-days' distant town. His oldpistol was in his holster, and his empty cartridge belt about hismiddle, the rifle, in saddle holster, that he used to carry for wolvesand rustlers, in his hand.

  Morgan stood a moment, leaning the rifle against the depot end, to takethe bright silk handkerchief from about his neck, as if he considered itas being too festive for the somber business before him. The stationagent stood at the corner of the building, watching him curiously.

  The horse that Morgan had borrowed from Stilwell lifted its head with astart as he approached where it stood at the side of the stationplatform, as if it questioned him on the reason for this transformationand the honesty of his purpose. Morgan did not mount the horse, althoughhe walked with difficulty in the tight boots which had lain like theshed habits of his past so many years unstretched by a foot. He wentleading the horse, rein over his arm, to the hitching rack in front ofthe hotel, under the plank canopy of which Stilwell and his son waitedhis coming.

  Stilwell had made it plain to Morgan at the beginning, to save hisfeelings and his pride, that they were not attending him on theexpedition against his enemies with any intention of helping him. Justto be there in case of outside interference, and to enjoy the spectacleof justice being done by a strong hand. Stilwell's account, personally,was not against these men, he said, although they had driven their herdupon his range and spread infection among his cattle. That would betaken up with Sol Drumm when he came back from Kansas City with themoney from his cattle sale.

  Morgan went to the hardware store, two doors from the hotel, from whichhe presently emerged with a coil of new rope, a row of new cartridges inhis belt, and pockets heavy with a reserve supply. Tom Conboy wasstanding in his door, looking up and down the street in the manner of aman who felt his position insecure. Morgan saw that he was haggard andworn as from long vigils and anxieties, although he had about him stillan air of assurance and self-sufficiency. Morgan passed him in the doorand entered the office unrecognized, although Conboy searched him with adisfavoring and suspicious eye.

  In the office there was evidence of conflict and turmoil. The showcasewas broken, the large iron safe lay overturned on the floor. The bluedoor leading into the dining-room had been burst from its hinges, itspanels cracked, and now stood in the office leaning against thepartition like a champion against the ropes. Conboy turned from hiswatch at the street door with reluctance, to see what the visitordesired, and at the same moment Dora appeared in the doorless framewithin.

  "Mr. Morgan!" she cried, incredulity, surprise, pleasure, mingled in hervoice.

  She paused a moment, eyes round, hands lifted, her pretty mouth agape,but came on again almost at once, eagerness brushing all other emotionsout of her face. "Wherever in the world have you been? What in the nameof goodness is the matter with your face?" She turned Morgan a little tolet the light fall on his wound.

  Grim as Morgan's business was that morning, bitter as his savage heart,he had a nook in his soul for sympathetic Dora, and a smile that came sohard and vanished so quickly that it seemed it must have hurt him in thegiving more than the breaking of a bone.

  "_Mister_ Morgan!" said Dora, hardly a breath between her last word andthe next, "what_ever_ have you been doin' to your face?"

  "No niggers in Ireland, now--no-o-o niggers in Ireland!" Conboy warnedher, coming forward with no less interest than his daughter's to peerinto Morgan's bruised and marred face. "Well, well!"--with much surprisealtogether genuine, "you're back again, Mr. Morgan?"

  "Wherever _have_ you been?" Dora persisted, no more interested inniggers in Ireland than elsewhere.

  "I fell among thieves," Morgan told her, gravely. Then to Conboy: "Isthat gang from Texas stopping here?"

  "No, they lay up at Peden's on the floor where they happen to fall,"Conboy replied. "If there ever was a curse turned loose on a town thatgang--look at that showcase, look at that door, look at that safe. Theytook the town last night, a decent woman didn't dare to show her faceoutside the door and wasn't safe in the house. They tried to blow thatsafe with powder when I wouldn't open it and give them the money. Butthey didn't even jar it--your money's in there, Mr. Morgan, safe."

  "Oh, it was awful!" said Dora. "Oh, you've got your gun! If someman----"

  "Sh-h-h! No nig----"

  "Where's the marshal?" Morgan asked.

  "Took the train east last night. The operator told me he got a wire fromSol Drumm, boss of the outfit, to meet him in Abilene today. He sworethem six ruffians in as deputies before he went and left them in chargeof the town."

  "Six? Where's the other one?"

  Conboy looked at him with quick flashing of his shifty eyes. "Don't youknow?" he asked, with significant shrewdness, smiling a little as if toshow his friendly appreciation of the joke.

  "What in the hell do you mean?" Morgan demanded.

  "No niggers in Ireland, now," Conboy said soothingly, his face growingwhite. "One of them was killed down by the railroad track the night youleft. They said you shot him and hopped a freight."

  Morgan said no more, but turned toward the door to leave.

  "The inquest hasn't been held over him yet, we've been kept so busy withthe marshal's cases we didn't get around to him," Conboy explained."Maybe you can throw some light on that case?"

  "I can throw a lot of it," Morgan said, and walked out with that word towhere he had left his horse.

  There Morgan cut six lengths from his new rope, drawing the piecesthrough his belt in the manner of a man carrying string for sewing grainsacks. He took the rifle from the saddle, filled its magazine, andstarted toward Peden's place, which was on the next corner beyond thehotel, on the same side of the square. When he had gone a few rods,halting on his lame feet, alert as a hunter who expects the game tobreak from cover, Stilwell and Fred got up from their apparentlydisinterested lounging in front of the hotel and followed leisurelyafter him.

  Many of the little business houses around the square were closed. Therewas a litter of glass on the plank sidewalk, where proprietors stoodgloomily looking at broken windows, or were setting about replacing themwith boards after the hurricane of deviltry that swept the town thenight past. Those who were abroad in the sunlight of early morningmaking their purchases for the day, moved with trepidation, puttingtheir feet down quietly, hastening on their way.


  An old man who walked ahead of Morgan appeared to be the only unshakenand unconcerned person in this place of sleeping passions. He carried athick hickory stick with immense crook, which he pegged down in time tohis short steps, relying on it for support not at all, his lean old jawchopping his cud as nimbly as a sheep's. But when Morgan's shadow,stretching far ahead, fell beside him, he started like a dozing horse,whirled about with stick upraised, and stood so in attitude of menaceand defense until the stranger had passed on.

  Conboy was alert in his door, watching to see what new nest of troubleMorgan was about to stir with that threatening rifle. Others seemed tofeel the threat that stalked with this grim man. Life quickened in thesomnolent town as to the sound of a fire bell as he passed; people stoodwatching after him; came to doors and windows to lean and look. A fewmoments after his passing the street behind him became almost magicallyalive, although it was a silent, expectant, fearful interest thatcommunicated itself in whispers and low breath.

  Who was this stranger with the mark of conflict on his face, thisunusual weapon in the brawls and tragedies of Ascalon held ready in hishands? What grievance had he? what authority? Was he the bringer ofpeace in the name of the law that had been so long degraded and defied,or only another gambler in the lives of men? They waited, whispering, insilence as of a deserted city, to see and hear.

  There was only one priest of alcohol attending the long altar where mensacrificed their manhood in Peden's deserted hall that morning. He wasquite sufficient for all the demands of the hour, his only customersbeing the unprofitable gang of cattle herders whom Morgan sought. Trueto their training in early rising, no matter what the stress of thenight past, no matter how broken by alarm and storm, they were allawake, like sailors called to their watch. They were improving while itmight last the delegated authority of Seth Craddock, which opened thetreasures of a thousand bottles at a word.

  The gambling tables in the front of the house were covered with blackcloths, which draped them almost to the floor, like palls of the dead.Down at the farther end of the long hall a man was sweeping up thedebris of the night, his steps echoing in the silence of the place. Forthere was no hilarity in the sodden crew lined up at the bar for thefirst drink of the day. They were red-eyed, crumpled, dirty; frowsled ofhair as they had risen from the floor.

  Peden's hall was not designed for the traffic of daylight. There wasgloom among its bare girders, shadows lay along its walls. Only throughthe open door came in a broad and healthy band of light, which spread asit reached and faltered as it groped, spending itself a little waybeyond the place where the lone bartender served his profitlesscustomers.

  Morgan walked into the place down this path of light unnoticed by themen at the bar or the one who served them, for they were wrangling withhim over some demand that he seemed reluctant to supply. At the end ofthe bar, not a rod separating them, Morgan stopped like a casualcustomer, waiting his moment.

  The question between bartender and the gang quartered upon the town wasone of champagne. It was no drink, said the bartender, to lay thefoundation of a day's business with the bottle upon. Whisky was thearticle to put inside a man's skin at that hour of the morning, and thenin small shots, not too often. They deferred to his experience,accepting whisky. As they lined up with breastbones against the bar topour down the charge, Morgan threw his rifle down on them.

  No chance to drop a hand to a gun standing shoulder to shoulder withgizzards pressed against the bar; no chance to swerve or duck and make aquick sling of it and a quicker shot, with the bore of that big rifleready to cough sixteen chunks of lead in half as many seconds, any oneof them hitting hard enough to drill through them, man by man, down tothe last head in the line. So their arms went up and strained high abovetheir heads, as if eager to show their desire to comply withoutreservation to the unspoken command. Morgan had not said a word.

  The bartender, accepting the situation as generally inclusive, put hishands up along with his deadbeat patrons. And there they stood onestraining moment, the man with the broom down in the gloom of thefarther end of the building, unconscious of what was going on, whistlingas he swept among the peanut hulls.

  Morgan signaled with his head for the bartender to come over thebarrier, which he did, with alacrity, and stood at the farther end ofthe line, hands up, a raw-fisted, hollow-faced Irishman with bristlingshort hair. Morgan jerked his head again, repeating the signal when thebartender looked in puzzled fright into his face to read the meaning.Then the fellow got it, and came forward, a vast relief spreading in hiscombative features.

  Morgan indicated the rope ends dangling at his belt. Almost beaming,quite triumphant in his eagerness, the bartender grasped his meaning ata glance. He began tying the ruffians' hands behind their backs, andtying them well, with a zest in his work that increased as he traveleddown the line.

  "Champagne, is it?" said he, mocking them, a big foot in the small ofthe victim's back as he pulled so hard it made him squeal. "Nothingshort of champoggany wather will suit the taste av ye this fine marin',and you with a thousand dollars' wort' of goods swilled into yourpaunches the past week! I'll give you a dose of champoggany watheryou'll not soon forget, ye strivin' devils! This sheriff is the manthat'll hang ye for your murthers and crimes, ye bastes!" And with eachexpletive a kick, but not administered in any case until he had turnedhis head with sly caution to see whether it would be permitted by thissilent avenger who had come to Ascalon in the hour of its darkest need.

  While Morgan's captives cursed him, knowing now who he was, and cursedthe bartender whom they had overriden and mocked, insulted and abused inthe security of their collective strength and notorious deeds, theshadow of two men fell across the threshold of Peden's door. There theshadows lay through the brief moments of this little drama's enactment,immovable, as though cast by men who watched.

  The porter came forward from his sweeping to look on this degradation ofthe desperados, mocking them, returning them curse for curse, voluble inpicturesque combinations of damning sentences as if he had practicedexcommunication longer than the oldest pope who ever lived. In theexcess of his scorn for their fallen might he smeared his filthy broomacross their faces, paying back insult for insult, bold and secure underthe protection of this stern eagle of a man who had dropped on Ascalonas from a cloud.

  When the last man was bound, the last kick applied by the bartender'sgreat, square-toed foot, Morgan motioned his sullen captives toward thedoor.

  "Wait a minute--have something on the house," the bartender urged.

  Morgan lifted his hand in gesture at once silencing and denying, andmarched out after the heroes of the Chisholm Trail. Through it all hehad not spoken.

  They cursed Morgan as he drove them into the street, and surged againsttheir bonds, the only silent one among them the Dutchman, and the onlysober one. Now and then Morgan saw his face as the others bunched andshifted in their struggles to break loose, his mocking, sneering, pastywhite face, his wide-set teeth small and white as a young pup's. Hiseyes were hateful as a rattlesnake's; lecherous eyes, debased.

  Morgan herded them into the public square beyond the line of hitchingracks which stood like a skeleton fence between courthouse and businessbuildings. People came pouring from every house to see, hurrying,crowding, talking in hushed voices, wondering in a hundred conjectureswhat this man was going to do. Gamblers and nighthawks, roused by thevery feeling of something unusual, hastened out half dressed, to standin slippers and collarless shirts, looking on in silent speculation.

  Citizens, respectable and otherwise, who had suffered loss andhumiliation, danger and terror at the hands of these men, exulted now intheir downfall. Some said this man was a sheriff from Texas, who hadtracked them to Ascalon and was now taking them to jail to await atrain; some said he was a special government officer, others that thegovernor had sent him in place of troops, knowing him to be sufficientin himself. Boys ran along in open-mouthed admiration, pattering theirbare feet in the thick dust, as Morgan drove his captives down th
einside of the hitching racks; the outpouring of citizens, parasites,outcasts of the earth, swept after in a growing stream.

  From all sides they came to witness this great adventure, unusual forAscalon in that the guilty had been humbled and the arrogant broughtlow. Across the square they came running, on the courthouse steps theystood. In front of the hotel there was a crowd, which moved forward tomeet Morgan as he came marching like an avenger behind his captives, whowere now beginning to show alarm, sobered by their unexampled situation,sweating in the agony of their quaking hearts.

  At the hitching rack where his horse stood, Morgan halted the six men.He took the remainder of his new rope from the saddle, laced it throughthe bonds on the Texans' wrists, backed them up to the horizontal poleof the hitching rack, and tied them there in a line, facing inward uponthe square. As he moved about his business with deliberate, yet swiftand sure hand of vengeance well plotted in advance, Morgan kept hisrifle leaning near, watching the crowd for any outbreak of friends whomight rise in defense of these men, or any movement that might threateninterference with his plans.

  When he had finished binding the six men, backs to the rack, Morganbeckoned a group of boys to him, spoke to them in undertone that eventhe nearest in the crowd did not hear. Off the youngsters ran, so fullof the importance of their part in that great event that they would notstay to be questioned nor halt for the briefest word.

  In a little while the lads came hurrying back, with empty goods boxesand barrels, fragments of packing cases, all sorts of dry wood to whichthey could lay their eager hands. This they piled where Morganindicated, to stand by panting, eyes big in excitement and wonderingadmiration for this mighty man.

  Mrs. Conboy, standing at the edge of the sidewalk before her door, notmore than ten yards from the spot where Morgan was making theseunaccountable preparations, leaned with a new horror in her fear-hauntedeyes to see.

  "My God! he's goin' to burn them!" she said. "Oh, my God!"