Trail's End

  CHAPTER XI

  THE PENALTY

  Whatever the stranger's intention toward the rough riders of theChisholm Trail who had terrorized good and bad alike in Ascalon for aweek, whether to roast them alive as they stood in a row with backs tothe hitching rack, or to inflict some other equally terrible punishment;or whether he was simply staking them there while he cooked hisbreakfast cowboy fashion, not willing to trust them out of sight whilehe regaled himself in a restaurant, nobody quite understood. Mrs.Conboy's exclamation appeared to voice the general belief of the crowd.Murmurs of disapproval began to rise.

  One of the leading moralists of the town, proprietor of aknock-down-and-drag-out, was loudest in his protestations that such ahappening in the public square of Ascalon, in the broad light of day,the assembled inhabitants looking on, would give the place a name fromwhich it never would recover. This fellow, a gross man of swingingpaunch, a goitre enlarging and disfiguring his naturally thick, uglyneck, had scrambled from his bed in haste at the thrilling of thegeneral alarm of something unusual in the daylight annals of the town.His bare feet were thrust into slippers, his great white shirt wascollarless, dainty narrow blue silk suspenders held up hishogshead-measure pantaloons. The redness of unfinished sleep was in hiseyes.

  "I tell you, men, this ain't a goin' to do--this ain't no town downsouth where they take niggers out and burn 'em," he said. "I ain't gotno use for that gang, myself, but I've got the good of the town and mybusiness to consider, like all the rest of you have."

  There must have been in town that day forty or more cowboys from Texasand the Nation, as the Cherokee country south was called. These for thegreater part were still sober, not having been paid off, still on dutycaring for the horses left behind them when the cattle were loaded andshipped, or for the herds resting and grazing close by after the longdrive. They began to gather curiously around the fat man who had thefair repute of Ascalon so close to his heart, listening to his effortsto set a current of resentment against the stranger stirring in the awedcrowd. They began to turn toward Morgan now, with close talk amongthemselves, regarding him yet as something more than a common man, notkeen to spring into somebody else's trouble and get their fingersscorched.

  "What's he going to do with them?" one of these inquired.

  "Burn 'em," the fat man replied, as readily as if he had it fromMorgan's own mouth, and as strongly denunciatory as though the disgraceof it reached to his fair fame and good business already. "You boysain't goin' to stand around here and see men from your own country burntlike niggers, are you? Well, you don't look like a bunch that'd doit--you don't look like it to me."

  "What did they do to him?" one of the cowboys asked, not greatly firedby the fat man's sectional appeal.

  Stilwell came loitering among them at that point, a man of their owncalling, sympathies, and traditions, with the shoulder-lurching gait ofa man who had spent most of his years in the saddle. He told them in afew feeling, picturesque words the extent of Morgan's grievance againstthe six, and left it with them to say whether he was to be interferedwith in his exaction of a just and fitting payment.

  "I don't know what he's goin' to do," Stilwell said, "but if he wants toroast 'em and eat 'em"--looking about him with stern eyes--"this is hisday."

  "If he needs any help there's plenty of it here," said a cowboy from theNation, hooking his thumb with lazy but expressive movement under thecartridge belt around his slim waist.

  The fat publican subsided, seeing his little ripple of protest flattenedout by the spirit of fair play. He backed to the sidewalk, where hestood in conference with Tom Conboy, and there was heard a reference toniggers in Ireland, pronounced with wise twisting of the head.

  Morgan selected, in the face of this little flurry of opposition anddefense, a box from among the odds and ends brought him by the boys, saton it facing his prisoners and broke bits of wood for a fire. Peoplebegan pressing a little nearer to see what was to come, but when Morgan,with eye watchful to see even the shifting of a foot in the crowd,reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, there was an immediatescramble to the sidewalk. This left twenty feet of dusty white roadunoccupied, a margin on the page where this remarkable incident inAscalon's record of tragedies was being written.

  Midway of his line of captives, six feet in front of the nearest man,Morgan kindled a fire, adding wood as the blaze grew, apparently asoblivious of his surroundings as if in a camp a hundred miles from ahouse. When he had the fire established to his liking, he took from hissaddle an iron implement, at the sight of which a murmur and a movementof new interest stirred the crowd.

  This iron contrivance was a rod, little thicker than a man's finger,which terminated in a flat plate wrought with some kind of open-workdevice. This flat portion, which was about as broad as the span of aman's two hands and perhaps six or eight inches long, appeared to be acontinuation of the handle, bent and hammered to form the crude pattern,and the wonderment and speculation, contriving and guessing, all passedout of the people when they beheld this thing. That was a cattlecountry; they knew it for a branding iron.

  Morgan thrust the brand into the fire, piled wood around it, leaningover it a little in watchful intent. This relic of his past he also hadretrieved from the bottom of his trunk along with boots and spurs,corduroys and hat, and it had been a long time, indeed, since he heatedit to apply the Three Crow brand to the shoulder of a beast. That brand,his father's brand in the early days in the Sioux country where he wasthe pioneer cattleman, never had been heated to come in contact withsuch base skins as these, Morgan reflected, and it would not be sodishonored now if cattle were carrying it on any range.

  When the Indians killed his father and drove off the last of the herd,the Three Crow became a discontinued brand in the Northwest. The son hadkept this iron which his father had carried at his saddle horn as asouvenir of the times when life was not worth much between the BlackHills and the Platte. The brand was not recorded anywhere today; thebrand books of the cattle-growers' associations did not contain it. Butit was his mark; he intended to set it on these cattle, disfiguration offace for disfiguration, and turn them loose to return smelling of thehot iron among their kind.

  Sodden with the dregs of last night's carousel, slow-headed, surly asthe Texans were when Morgan encountered them, they were all alert andfully cognizant of their peril now. No rough jest passed from mouth tomouth; there was no sneer, no laugh of bravado, no defiance. Some ofthem had curses left in them as they sweated in the fear of Morgan'ssilent preparations and lunged on their ropes in the hope of breakingloose. All but the Dutchman appealed to the crowd to interfere,promising rewards, making pledges in the name of their absent patron,Seth Craddock, the dreaded slayer of men.

  Now and again one of them shouted a name, generally Peden's name, or thename of some dealer or bouncer in his hall. Nobody answered, nobodyraised hand or voice to interfere or protest. During their short reignof pillage and debauchery under the protection of the city marshal, themembers of the gang had not made a friend who cared to risk his skin tosave theirs.

  To add to their disgrace and humiliation, their big pistols hung in theholsters on their thighs. People, especially the men of the range,remarked this full armament, marveling how the stranger had taken sixmen of such desperate notoriety all strapped with their guns, but theyunderstood at once his purpose in allowing the weapons to hang undertheir impotent hands. It was a mockery of their bravado, a belittlementof their bluff and swagger in the brief day of their oppression.

  Morgan withdrew the brand from the fire, knocking the clinging bits ofwood from it against the ground.

  The Dutchman was first in the line at Morgan's right hand as he turnedfrom the fire with the branding iron red-hot in his hand. Near theDutchman stood Morgan's borrowed horse, drowsing in the sun with headdown, its weight on three legs, one ear set in its inherited caution tocatch the least alarm. From the first moment of his encounter with thesescoundrels Morgan had not lowered himself to address them a single word
.Such commands as he had given them had been in dumb show, as to drivencreatures. This rule of silence he held still as he approached the firstobject of his vengeance.

  The Dutchman started back from the iron in sudden rousing from hisbrooding silence, fear and hate convulsing his snarling face, shrinkingback against the timber of the hitching rack as far as he couldwithdraw, where he stood with shoulders hunched about his neck, savageas a chained wolf. He began to writhe and kick as Morgan laid hold ofhis neck to hold him steady for the cruel kiss of the iron.

  The fellow squirmed and lunged, with head lowered, trying to get on theother side of the rack, his companions who were within reach joining inkicking at Morgan, adding their curses and cries to the Dutchman'ssilent fight to save his skin. They raised such a commotion of noise anddust that it spread to the crowd, which pressed up with a great clamorof derision, pity, laughter, and shrill cries.

  The cowboys, feeling themselves privileged spectators by reason of craftaffiliation, made a ring around the scene of punishment, shouting inenjoyment of the spectacle, for it was quite in harmony with the crueljokes and wild pranks which made up the humorous diversions of theirlives.

  "You'll have to hog-tie that feller," said one, drawing nearer than therest in his interest.

  Morgan paused a moment, brand uplifted, as if he considered the friendlysuggestion. The Dutchman was cringing before him, head drawn between hisshoulders, face as near the ground as he could strain the ropes whichbound him. Morgan kicked the fellow's feet from under him, leaving himhanging by his hands.

  The spectators cheered this adroit movement, laughing at the spectacleof the Dutchman hanging face downward on his ropes, and Morgan, sweatingin the heat of the fire and sun, exertion and passion, careless ofeverything, thoughtless of all but his unsatisfied vengeance, straddledthe Dutchman's neck as if he were a calf. He brought the iron downwithin an inch or two of the Dutchman's face, calculating how much ofthe crude device of three flying crows he could get between mouth andear, and as Morgan stood so with the hot iron poised, the Dutchmanchoking between his clamping knees, a hand clutched his arm, jerking thehovering brand away.

  Morgan had not heard a step near him through the turmoil of his hate,nor seen any person approaching to interfere. Now he whirled, pistolslung out, facing about to account with the one who dared break in tostay his hand in the administration of a punishment that he consideredall too inadequate and humane.

  There was a girl standing by him, her restraining hand still on his arm,the sun glinting in the gloss of her dark hair, her dark eyes fixed onhim in denial, in a softness of pity that Morgan knew was not for hisvictims alone. And so in that revel of base surrender to his primalpassions she had come to him, she whom his heart sought among the facesof women; in that manner she had found him, and found him, as Morganknew in his abased heart, at his worst.

  There was not a word, not the whisper of a word, in the crowd aroundthem. There was scarcely the moving of a breath.

  "Give me that iron, Mr. Morgan!" she demanded in voice that trembledfrom the surge of her perturbed breast.

  Morgan stood confronting her in the fierce pose of a man prepared tocontend to the last extreme with any who had come to stay his hand inhis hour of requital. The glowing iron, from which little wavers of heatrose in the sun, he grasped in one hand; in the other his pistol, elbowclose to his side, threatening the quarter from which interference hadcome. Still he demurred at her demand, refusing the outstretched hand.

  "Give it to me!" she said again, drawing nearer, but a little spacebetween them now, so near he fancied her breath, panting from her openlips, on his cheek.

  Silent, grim, still clouded by the vapors of his passion, Morgan stooddenying her, not able to adjust himself in wrench so sudden to the calmplane of his normal life.

  "Not for their sake--for your own!" she pleaded, her hand gentle on hisarm.

  The set muscles of his pistol arm relaxed, the muzzle of the weapondropped slowly with the surge of dark passion in his breast.

  "They deserve it, and worse, but not from you, Mr. Morgan. Leave them tothe law--give me that iron."

  Morgan yielded it into her hand, slowly slipped his pistol back into theholster, slowly raised his hand to his forehead, pushed back his hat,swept his hand across his eyes like one waking from an oppressive dream.He looked around at the silent people, hundreds of them, it seemed tohim, for the first time fully conscious of the spectacular drama he hadbeen playing before their astonished eyes.

  The Dutchman had struggled to his knees, where he leaned with neckoutstretched as if he waited the stroke of the headsman's sword, unableto regain his feet. The girl looked with serious eyes into Morgan'sface, the hot branding iron in her hand.

  "I think you'd better lock them up in jail, Mr. Morgan," she said.

  Morgan did not reply. He stood with bent head, his emotions roiled likea turgid brook, a feeling over him of awakening daze, such as oneexperiences in a sweat of agony after dreaming of falling from someterrifying height. Morgan had just struck the bottom of the precipice inhis wild, self-effacing dream. The shock of waking was numbing; therewas no room for anything in his righted consciousness but a vast,down-bearing sense of shame. She had seen a side of his nature longsubmerged, long fought, long ago conquered as he believed; thevindictive, the savage part of him, the cruel and unforgiving.

  Public interest in the line of captives along the hitching rack waswaking in a new direction all around the sun-burned square. It wasbeginning to come home to every staid and sober man in the assembly thathe had a close interest in the disposition of these men.

  "I don't know about that jail business and the law, Miss Retty," said asevere dark man who pushed into the space where Morgan and the girlstood. "We've been dressin' and feedin' and standin' the loss throughbreakin' and stealin' these fellers have imposed on this town for a weekand more now, and I'm one that don't think much of lockin' them up injail to lay there and eat off of the county and maybe be turned looseafter a while. You'd just as well try to carry water up here from theriver in a gunny sack as convict a crook in this county any more."

  This man found supporters at once. They came pushing forward, theresentment of insult and oppression darkening their faces, to shakethreatening fists in the faces of the Dutchman and his companions.

  "The best medicine for a gang like this is a cottonwood limb and arope," the man who had spoken declared.

  It began to look exceedingly dark for the unlucky desperadoes inside ofthe next minute. The suggestion of hanging them immediately became anavowed intention; preparations for carrying it into effect began on thespot. While some ran to the hardware store for rope, others discussedthe means of employing it to carry out the public sentence.

  Hanging never had been popular in Ascalon, mainly because of thebarrenness of the country, which offered no convenient branches excepton the cottonwoods along the river. Wagon tongues upended and propped byneckyokes had been known to serve in their time, and telegraph poleswhen the railroad built through. But gibbets of this sort had theirshortcomings and vexations. There was nothing so comfortable for allconcerned as a tree, and trees did not grow by nature or by art inAscalon. So there was talk of an expedition to the river, where all thesix might be accommodated on one tree.

  The girl who had taken the branding iron from Morgan and cooled the heatof his resentment and vengeance quicker than the iron had cooled, stoodlooking about into the serious faces of the men who suddenly haddetermined to finish for Morgan the business he had begun. Her face waswhite, horror distended her eyes; she seemed to have no words for a pleaagainst this rapidly growing plan.

  One of the doomed men behind her began to whimper and beg, appealing toher in his mother's name to save him. He was a young man, whose weakface was lined by the excesses of his unrestrained days in Ascalon. Hishat had fallen off, his foretop of brown hair straggled over his wildeyes.

  "Come away from here," said Morgan, turning to her now, his voice roughand still shaken by his su
bsiding passion. He took the hot iron fromher, thinking of the trough at the public well where he might cool it.

  "Don't let them do it," she implored, putting out her hands to him inappeal.

  "Now Miss Rhetta, you'd better run along," a man urged kindly.

  Morgan stood beside her in the narrowing circle about the six men whohad been condemned by public sentiment in less than sixty seconds andscarcely more words, the hot end of the branding iron in the dust at hisfeet. He was silent, yet apparently agitated by a strong emotion, as aman might be who had leaped a crevasse in fleeing a pressing peril, uponwhich he feared to look back.

  She whom the man had called Rhetta picked up the young cowboy's hat andput it on his head.

  "Hush!" she charged, in reply to his whimpering intercession for mercy."Mr. Morgan isn't going to let them hang you."

  Morgan started out of his thoughtful glooming as if a reviving wind hadstruck his face, all alert again in a moment, but silent and inscrutableas before. He leaned his brand against the hitching post, recovered hisrifle where it lay in the dust beside the scattered sticks of his fire,making himself a little room as he moved about.

  Those who had talked of hanging the six now suspended sentence whilewaiting the outcome of this new activity on the part of the avenger. Aman who came from somewhere with a coil of rope on his arm stood at theedge of the newly widened circle with fallen countenance, like one whoarrived too late at some great event in which he had expected to be theleading actor.

  Morgan began stripping belts and pistols from his captives, throwing thegear at the foot of the post where his branding iron stood. When he hadstripped the last one he paused a moment as if considering something,the weapon in his hand. The girl Rhetta had not added a word to herappeal in behalf of the unworthy rascals who stood sweating in terrorbefore the threatening crowd. But she looked now into Morgan's face withhopeful understanding, the color coming back to her drained cheeks, alight of admiration in her eyes. As for Morgan, his own face appeared tohave cleared of a cloud. There was a gleam of deep-kindling humor in hiseyes.

  "Gentlemen, there will not be any hanging in Ascalon this morning," heannounced.

  He threw the last pistol down with the others, nodded Stilwell to him,whispered a word or two. Stilwell went shouldering off through thecrowd. Morgan sheathed his rifle in the battered scabbard that hung onhis saddle. In a little while Stilwell came back with a saw.

  Morgan took the tool and sawed through the pole to which his captiveswere made fast. Stilwell held up the severed end while Morgan cut theother, freeing from the bolted posts the four-inch section of pole towhich the cowboys were tied, leaving it hanging from the ropes at theirwrists, dangling a little below their hands.

  The late lords of the plains were such a dejected and altogethersneaking looking crew, shorn of their power by the hands of one man,stripped of their roaring weapons, tied like cattle to a hurdle, thatthe vengeful spirit of Ascalon veered in a glance to humorousappreciation of the comedy that was beginning before their eyes.

  The cowboys who had stood ready a few minutes past to help hang theoutfit, fairly rolled with laughter at the sight of this miserableexample of complete degradation, through which the meanness of theirkind was so ludicrously apparent. The citizenry and floating populationof the town joined in the merriment, and the lowering clouds of tragedywere swept away on a gale of laughter that echoed along the jaggedbusiness front.

  But the girl Rhetta was not laughing. Perplexed, troubled, she laid herhand on Morgan's arm as he stood beside his horse about to mount.

  "What are you going to do with them now, Mr. Morgan?" she inquired.

  "They're going to start for Texas down the Chisholm Trail," he said,smiling down at her from the saddle.

  And in that manner they set out from Ascalon, carrying the pole at theirbacks, Morgan driving them ahead of him, starting them in a trot whichincreased to a hobbling run as they bore away past the railroad stationand struck the broad trampled highway to the south.

  Afoot and horseback the town and the visitors in it came after them,shooting and shouting, getting far more enjoyment out of it than theywould have got out of a hanging, as even the most contrary among themadmitted. For this was a drama in which the boys and girls took part,and even the Baptist preacher, who had a church as big as a mouse trap,stood grinning in appreciation as they passed, and said something aboutit being a parallel of Samson, and the foxes with their tails tiedtogether being driven away into the Philistines' corn.

  The crowd followed to the rise half a mile south of town, where most ofit halted, only the cowboys and mounted men accompanying Morgan to theriver. There they turned back, also, leaving it to Morgan to carry outthe rest of his program alone, it being the general opinion that heintended to herd the six beyond the cottonwoods on the farther shore anddespatch them clean-handed, according to what was owing to him on theiraccount.

  Morgan urged his captives on, still keeping them on the trot, althoughit was becoming a staggering and wabbling progression, the weaker inthe line held up by the more enduring. They were experiencing in a smalland colorless measure, as faint by comparison, certainly, as the smellof smoke to the feel of fire on the naked skin, what they had givenMorgan in the hour of their cruel mastery.

  At last one of them could stumble on no farther. He fell, dragging downtwo others who were not able to sustain his weight. There Morgan leftthem, a mile or more beyond the river, knowing they would not have farto travel before they came across somebody who would set them free.

  The Dutchman, stronger and fresher than any of his companions, turned asif he would speak when Morgan started to leave. Morgan checked his horseto hear what the fellow might have to say, but nothing came out of theugly mouth but a grin of such derision, such mockery, such hate, thatMorgan felt as if the bright day contracted to shadows and a chill creptinto the pelting heat of the sun. He thought, gravely and soberly, thathe would be sparing the world at large, and himself specifically, futurepain and trouble by putting this scoundrel out of the way as a man wouldremove a vicious beast.

  Whatever justification the past, the present, or the future might pleadfor this course, Morgan was too much himself again to yield. He turnedfrom them, giving the Dutchman his life to make out of it what he might.

  From the top one of the ridges such as billowed like swells of the seathat gray-green, treeless plain, Morgan looked back. All of them butthe Dutchman were either lying or sitting on the ground, beaten andwinded by the torture of their bonds and the hard drive of more thanthree miles in the burning sun. The Dutchman still kept his feet,although the drag of the pole upon him must have been sore and heavy, asif he must stand to send his curse out after the man who had bent him tohis humiliation.

  And Morgan knew that the Dutchman was not a conquered man, nor bowed inhis spirit, nor turned one moment away from his thought of revenge.Again the bright day seemed to contract and grow chill around him, likethe oncoming shadow and breath of storm. He felt that this man wouldreturn in his day to trouble him, low-devising, dark and secret andmeanly covert as a wolf prowling in the night.

  The last look Morgan had of the Dutchman he was gazing that way still,his face peculiarly white, the weight of the pole and his fallencomrades dragging down on his bound arms. Morgan could fancy still, evenover the distance between them, the small teeth, wide set in the redgums like a pup's, and the loathsome glitter of his sneering eyes.