Trail's End Part 25

"Most dangerous job in town!" she reproved him, giving him to understand very plainly that she could name one attended by greater perils.

"They've only killed _one_ editor, so far."

"Can you shoot?" he asked, as seriously concerned as if the fate of editors in Ascalon darkened over her already.

"Everybody in this town can shoot," she sighed. "It's every boy's ambition to own and carry a pistol, and most of them do."

"I hope you'll never have to defend the independence of the press with arms," he said, making a small pleasantry of it. "More than likely they're gentlemen enough to let you say whatever you want to, and make no kick."

"The _Headlight_ is going to be an awful joke with Riley Caldwell and me getting it out. But I'm not going to try to please anybody. That way I may please them all."

"It sounds like the sensible way. Have you edited before?"

"I used to help Mr. Smith, the editor they killed. That was in the summer vacation, just. I taught school the rest of the time."

"You must have been the busiest person in town," he said, with pride in her activities as if they had touched his own life long ago.

"I'm a poor stick of an editor, I'm afraid, though--I seem to be all mussed up with legal notices and this sudden flood of news. And I can't set type worth a cent!"

"Just let the news go," he suggested, not without concern for the part he might bear in her chronicle of late events in Ascalon.

"Let the news go!" She censured him with her softly chiding eyes. "I wish I could write like Mr. Smith--I'd wake this town up! Poor man, his coat is hanging in the office by the desk, so suggestive of him it makes me cry. I haven't had the heart to take it away--it would seem like expelling his spirit from the place. He was a slender, gentle little man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to shoot him down that way."

"You're right; I met him," Morgan said, remembering Dell Hutton among the wagons, his smoking gun in his hand.

"Sneaking little coward!"

"Well, he'll hardly sling his gun down on you," Morgan reflected, as if he communed with himself, yet thinking that Hutton scarcely would be beyond even that.

"Hardly," she replied, in abstraction. "What are you going to do with that old brigand you've got locked in the calaboose?"

"I expect we'll turn him loose in the morning. There doesn't seem to be anything we can hold him for, guilty as he is."

"If he'll leave, and never come back," doubtfully. "I'm glad now it turned out the way it did, I'm so thankful you didn't have to--that you came through _without blood on your hands_!"

"It would have been a calamity the other way," he said.

When Morgan went his way presently, leaving her in the door of the little boxlike newspaper office, from where she gave him a parting smile, it was with a revised opinion of the day's achievements. He felt peculiarly exalted and satisfied. He had accomplished something, after all.

Whatever this was, he did not confess, but he smiled, and felt renewed with a lifting gladness, as he went on to the livery barn, his horse at his heels.

CHAPTER XVIII

A BONDSMAN BREATHES EASIER

There was a little ripple, more of mirth than excitement or concern, in Ascalon next morning when it became known that Seth Craddock had kicked a hole in the burned corner of the calaboose and leaked out of it into the night.

Let him go; it was as well that way as any, they said, since it relieved them at once of the charge of his keep and the trouble of disposing of him in the end. He never would come back to that town, let him ravage in other parts of the world as he might. What the town had lost in notoriety by his going would be offset by the manner of his degradation, already written at length by the local correspondent of the _Kansas City Times_ and sent on to be printed with a display heading in a prominent position in that paper and copied by other papers all over the land.

Seth Craddock and his reign were behind the closed door of the past, through which he was not likely to kick a hole and emerge again, after his manner of going from the calaboose. That matter off the town's mind, it ranged itself along the shady side of the street to watch the present contest between the law and those who lived beyond it.

Up to this point it appeared that the law was going to have it according to its mandate. Peden made no attempt to open his place on the night following Craddock's deposition, the lesser lights following his virtuous example.

But there was in this quiescent confidence, in this lull almost threatening, something similar to the impertinent repression of an incorrigible child who yields to authority immediately above him, knowing that presently it will be overruled. Something was clouding up to break over Ascalon; the sleepiest in the town was aware of that.

How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance, but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.

Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force, when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.

Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the _Headlight_ during that time.

In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its blind-striking hand.

On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta Thayer stopped Morgan as he was pa.s.sing the _Headlight_ office at the beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some pa.s.sing terror had opened their windows.

"He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully, facing him just inside the door.

"Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful a.s.surance in his words. "I can a.s.sure you I was at no time in any danger."

"Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on her quick-coming breath.

"It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it--I never stepped in front of him anywhere."

"That woman in the tent--the rustler's wife--told me--she told me just a little while ago. Oh! if he--if he'd have hit you!"

"The kids all came running out of the tent--I thought he'd hit one of them," Morgan said, humorously, thinking only to calm her great agitation and quiet her friendly--if there could be no dearer interest--concern.

"It was Peden got him to do it," she declared.

"Peden? Why should Hutton go out to do that fellow's gunning?"

"Dell Hutton's gambling the county's money, he killed Mr. Smith because he charged him with it! Pa knows it, pa's on his bond, and if he keeps on losing the county funds there on Peden's game we'll have to make it good. It will take everything we've got--if he keeps on."

"That's bad, that's mighty bad," Morgan said, deeply concerned, curiously awakened to the inner workings of things in Ascalon. "Still, I don't see what connection I have in it, why he'd want to take a shot at me on the quiet that way."

"He shoots from behind, he shot Mr. Smith in the back, and it was at night, besides. Don't you see how it was? Peden must have bribed him to do it, promised to make good his losses, or something like that."

"Plain as a wagon track," Morgan said.

"I don't know why I ever got you into this tangle," she lamented, "I don't know what made me so selfish and so blind."

"It's just one more little complication in Ascalon's sickness," he comforted her, "it doesn't amount to beans. The poor little fool was so scared that morning he could hardly lift his gun. He'll never make another break."

"If I only thought he wouldn't! He's as treacherous as a snake, you can't tell where he's sneaking to bite you. Give it up, Mr. Morgan, won't you, please?" She turned to him suddenly, appealing with her eyes, with her wistful lips, with every line of her sympathetic, anxious face.

"Give it up?" he repeated, her meaning not quite clear.