Trail's End Part 22

"A lady asked me to undertake it. I'm doing it for her," he replied.

"She was a thoughtless, selfish person!" Rhetta said, her deep feeling stressed in the flush of her face, her accusation as vehement as if she laid charges against another. "Last night she thought it over; she had time to realize the danger she'd asked a generous stranger to a.s.sume.

She wants to withdraw the request today--she asks you to give it up and let Ascalon go on its wicked way."

"Tell her," said he gently, holding her pleading, pained eyes a moment with his a.s.suring gaze, "that a man can't drop a piece of work like this and turn his back on it and walk away. They'd say in Ascalon that he was a coward, and they'd be telling the truth."

"Oh! I oughtn't have argued you into it!" she regretted, bitter in her self-blame. "But the thought of that terrible, cruel man, of all he's killed, all he will kill if he comes back--made a selfish coward of me.

We had gone through a week of terror--you can't understand a woman's terror of that kind of men, storming the streets at night uncurbed!"

"A man can only guess."

"I was so grateful to you for driving them away from here, for purifying the air after them like a rain, that I urged you to go ahead and finish the job, just as if we were conferring a great favor! I didn't think at the time, but I've thought it all over since."

"You mustn't worry about it any more. It is a great favor, a great honor, to be asked to serve you at all."

"You're too generous, Mr. Morgan. There are only a few of us here who care about order and peace--you can see that for yourself this morning--no matter what a.s.surance they gave you yesterday. Let it go. If you don't want to get your horse and ride away, you can at least resign.

You've got justification enough for that, you've seen the men that promised to support you yesterday turn their backs on you when you came up the street today. They don't want the town shut up, they don't want it changed--not when it hits their pocketbooks. You can tell pa that, and resign--or I'll tell him--it was my fault, I got you into it."

"You couldn't expect me to do that--you don't expect it," he chided, his voice grave and low.

"I can want you to do it--I don't expect it."

"Of course not. We'll not talk about it any more."

They continued toward her father's office in silence, crossing the stretch of barren in which the little catalpa tree stood. Rhetta looked up into his face.

"You've never killed a man, Mr. Morgan," she said, more as a positive statement than as a question.

"No, I never have, Miss Thayer," Morgan answered her, as ingenuously sincere as she had asked it.

"I think I know it by the touch of a man's hand," she said, her face growing pale from her deep revulsion. "I shudder at the touch of blood.

If you could be spared that in the ordeal ahead of you!"

"There's no backing out of it. The challenge has pa.s.sed," he said.

"No, there's no way. He's coming--he knows you're waiting for him. But I hope you'll not have to--I hope you'll come out of it _clean_! A curse of blood falls on every man that takes this office. I wish--I hope, you can keep clear of that."

CHAPTER XVI

THE MEAT HUNTER COMES

The few courageous and hopeful ones who remained loyal to Morgan were somewhat a.s.sured, the doubtful ones agitated a bit more in their indecision, when he appeared on horseback a little past the turn of day.

These latter people, whose courage had leaked out overnight, now began to weigh again their business interests and personal safety in the balance of their wavering judgment.

Morgan, on horseback, looked like a lucky man; they admitted that. Much more lucky, indeed, than he had appeared that morning when he went limping around the square. It was a question whether to come over to his side again, openly and warmly, or to hold back until he proved himself to be as lucky as he looked. A man might as well nail up his door and leave town as fall under the disfavor of Seth Craddock. So, while they wavered, they were still not quite convinced.

Prominent among the business men who had revised their att.i.tude on reform as the shadow of Seth Craddock approached Ascalon was Earl Gray, the druggist, one of the notables on Dora Conboy's waiting list.

Druggist Gray was a man who wore bell-bottomed trousers and a moleskin vest without a coat. His hair had a fetching crinkle to it, which he prized above all things in bottles and out, and wore long, like the man on the label.

There was so much hair about Mr. Gray, counting mustache and all, that his face and body seemed drained and attenuated by the contribution of sustenance to keep the adornment flourishing in its brown abundance. For Gray was a tall, thin, bony-kneed man, with long flat feet like wedges of cheese. His eyes were hollow and melancholy, as if he bore a sorrow; his nose was high and bony, and bleak in his sharp, thin-cheeked face.

Gray expressed himself openly to the undertaker, in whom he found a cautious, but warm supporter of his views. There would be fevers and ills with Ascalon closed up, Gray said he knew very well, just as there would be deaths and burials in the natural course of events under the same conditions. But there would be neither patches for the broken, st.i.tches for the cut nor powders for the headaches of debauchery called for then as now; and all the burying there would be an undertaker might do under his thumb nail.

They'd go to drugging themselves with boneset tea, and mullein tea, and bitter-root powders and wahoo bark, said Gray. Likewise, they'd turn to burying one another, after the ways of pioneers, who were as resourceful in deaths and funerals as in drugs and fomentations. Pioneers, such as would be left in that country after Morgan had shut Ascalon up and driven away those who were dependent on one another for their skinning and fleecing, filching and plundering, did not lean on any man. Such as came there to plow up the prairies would be of the same stuff, rough-barked men and women who called in neither doctor to be born nor undertaker to be buried.

It was a gloomy outlook, the town closed up and everybody gone, said Gray. What would a man do with his building, what would a man do with his stock?

"Maybe Craddock ain't no saint and angel, but he makes business in this town," said Gray.

"Makes business!" the undertaker echoed, with abstraction and looking far away as if he already saw the train of oncoming, independent, self-burying pioneers over against the horizon.

"If this feller's luck don't go ag'in' him, you might as well ship all your coffins away but one--they'll need one to bury the town in. What do you think of him ridin' around the depot down there, drawin' a deadline that no man ain't goin' to be allowed to cross till the one-twenty pulls out? Kind of high-handed deal, I call it!"

"I've got a case of shrouds comin' in by express on that train, two cases layin' in my place waitin' on 'em," the undertaker said, resentfully, waking out of his abstraction and apparent apathy.

"_You_ have!" said Gray, eying him suddenly.

"He stopped me as I was goin' over to wait around till the train come in, drove me back like I was a cow. He said it didn't make no difference how much business I had at the depot, it would have to wait till the train was gone. When a citizen and a taxpayer of this town can't even cross the road like a shanghai rooster, things is comin' to a h.e.l.l of a pa.s.s!"

"Well, I ain't got no business at the depot this afternoon, or I bet you a cracker I'd be over there," Gray boasted. "I think I'll close up a while and go down to the hotel where I can see better--it's only forty minutes till she's due."

"Might as well, everybody's down there. You won't sell as much as a pack of gum till the train's gone and this thing's off of people's minds."

Gray went in for his hat, to spend a good deal of time at the gla.s.s behind his prescription case setting it at the most seductive slant upon his luxuriant brown curls. This was an extremely enticing small hat, just a shade lighter brown than the druggist's wavy hair. It looked like a cork in a bottle placed by a tipsy hand as Druggist Gray pa.s.sed down the street toward the hotel, to post himself where he might see how well Morgan's luck was going to hold in this encounter with the meat hunter of the Cimarron.

As the undertaker had said, nearly everybody in Ascalon was already collected in front and in the near vicinity of the hotel, fringing the square in gay-splotched crowds. Beneath the canopy of the Elkhorn hotel many were a.s.sembled, as many indeed, as could conveniently stand, for that bit of shade was a blessing on the sun-parched front of Ascalon's bleak street.

Business was generally suspended in this hour of uncertainty, public feeling was drawn as tight as a banjo head in the sun. In the courthouse the few officials and clerks necessary to the county's business were at the windows looking upon the station, all expecting a tragedy of such stirring dimensions as Ascalon never had witnessed.

The stage was set, the audience was in waiting, one of the princ.i.p.al actors stood visible in the wings. With the rush of the pa.s.senger train from the east Seth Craddock would make his dramatic entry, in true color with his violent notoriety and prominence in the cast.

Unless friends came with Craddock, these two men would hold the stage for the enactment of that swift drama alone. Morgan, silent, determined, inflexible, had drawn his line around the depot, across which no man dared to pa.s.s. No friend of Craddock should meet him for support of warning word or armed hand; no innocent one should be jeopardized by a curiosity that might lead to death.

The moving question now was, had Peden's gun-notable friends joined Craddock? If so, it would call for a vast amount of luck to overcome their combined numbers and dexterity.

Morgan was troubled by this same question as he waited in the saddle where the sun bore hot upon him at the side of the station platform.

About there, at that point, the station agent had told him, the smoking-car would stand when the train came to a stop, the engine at the water tank. When Craddock came down out of the train, would he come alone?

Morgan was mounted on the horse borrowed from Stilwell, an agile young animal, tractable and intelligent. A yellow slicker was rolled and tied at the cantle of the saddle; at the horn a coil of brown rope hung, pliant and smooth from much use upon the range among cattle. Morgan's rifle was slung on the saddle in its worn scabbard, its battered stock, from which the varnish had gone long ago in the hard usage of many years, close to the rider's hand.

It needed no announcement of wailing whistle or clanging bell to tell Ascalon of the approach of a train from the east. In that direction the fall of the land toward the Arkansas River began many miles distant from the town, seeming to blend downward from a great height which dimmed out in blue haze against the horizon. A little way along this high pitch of land, before it turned down the grade that led into the river valley, the railroad ran transversely.

The moment a train mounted this land's edge and swept along the straight transverse section of track, it was in full sight of Ascalon, day or night, except in stormy weather, although many miles away. A man still had ample time to shine his shoes, pack his valise, put on his collar and coat--if he wore them--walk to the depot and buy his ticket, after the train came in sight on top of this distant hill.

Once the train headed straight for Ascalon it dropped out of sight, and one unused to the trend of things might wonder if it had gone off on another line. Presently it would appear again, laboring up out of a dip, rise the intervening billow of land, small as a toy that one could hold in the hand, and sink out of sight again. This way it approached Ascalon, now promising, now denying, drawing into plainer sight with every rise.