Trail's End Part 31

But there was as much business as before in lumber and hardware, implements, groceries, and supplies for the cattle ranches and the many settlers who were arriving without solicitation or proclamation and establishing themselves to build success upon the ruins of failure left by those who had gone before.

It was only the absence of the wastrels and those who preyed upon them, and the quiet of nights after raucous revelry, that made the place seem dead. Ascalon was as much alive as any town of its kind that had no more justification for being in the beginning. It had more houses than it could use now, since so many of its population had gone; empty stores were numerous around the square, and more would be seen very soon. The fair was over, the holiday crowd was gone. That was all.

Rhetta Thayer came back the same evening the last correspondent faced away from Ascalon. Morgan saw her in the _Headlight_ office, where she worked late that night to overtake her acc.u.mulated affairs, her pretty head bent over a litter of proofs. Her door stood open as he pa.s.sed, but he hastened by softly, and did not return that way again.

He felt that she had gone away from Ascalon on his account, fearful that she would meet him with blood fresh upon his hands. The att.i.tude of Judge Thayer was but a faint reflection of her own, he was sure. It was best that they should not meet again, for blood had blotted out what had seemed the beginning of a tender regard between them. That was at an end.

During the next few days little was seen of Morgan in Ascalon. When he was not riding on long excursions into the outlying country he could have been found, if occasion had arisen demanding his presence on the square, in the station agent's office at the depot. There he spent hours hearing the little agent, whose head was as bald as a gra.s.shopper's, nothing but a pale fringe from ear to ear at the back of his neck, recount the experiences that had fallen in his way during his five-years' occupancy of that place.

This period covered the most notorious history of the town. In that time, according to the check the agent had kept on them, no fewer than fifty-nine men had met violent death on the street and in the caves of vice in Ascalon. This man also noted keenly every arrival in these slack days, duly reporting them all to Morgan, for whom he had a genuine friendship and respect. So there was little chance of anybody slipping in to set a new brewing of trouble over the dying embers of that stamped-out fire.

Morgan avoided the _Headlight_ office, for there was a sensitive spot in his heart that Rhetta's abhorrence of him hurt keenly. But more than that he had the thought of sparing her the embarra.s.sment of a meeting, even of his shadow pa.s.sing her door.

Twice he saw her at a distance in the street, and once she stood waiting as if to speak to him. But the memory of her face at Peden's door that night was with him always; he could not believe she would seek a meeting out of a spontaneous and honest desire to see him. Only because their lives were thrown together for a little while in that dice-box of fate, and avoidance seemed studied and a thing that might set foolish tongues clapping, she paused and looked his way as if waiting for him to approach. She was serving convention, not with a wish of her heart. So he believed, and turned the other way.

Cattlemen from the range at hand, and several from Texas who had driven their herds to finish on the far-famed Kansas gra.s.s for the fall market, were loading great numbers of cattle in Ascalon every day. The drouth was driving them to this sacrifice. Lean as their cattle were, they would be leaner in a short time.

This activity brought scores of cowboys to town daily. Under the old order business would have been lively at night, when most of the herdsmen were at leisure. As it was, they trooped curiously around the square, some of them who had looked forward on the long drive to a hilarious blowout at the trail's end resentfully sarcastic, but the greater number humorously disposed to make the most of it.

Sober, these men of the range were very much like reservation Indians in town on a holiday. They walked slowly around and around the square, looking at everything closely, saying little, to dispose themselves along the edge of the sidewalk after a while and smoke. There were no fights, n.o.body let off a gun. When Morgan pa.s.sed them on his quiet rounds, they nudged each other, and looked after him with low comments, for his fame had gone far in a little while.

These men had no quarrel with Morgan, disappointed of their revelry, thirsty after their long waiting, sour as some of them were over finding this oasis of their desert dry. They only looked on him with silent respect. n.o.body cared to provoke him; it was wise to give the road when a fellow met that man. So they talked among themselves, somewhat disappointed to find that Morgan was not carrying his rifle about with him these peaceful days, unusual weapon for a gun-fighting man in that country.

In this way, with considerable coming and going through its doors, yet all in sobriety and peace, Ascalon pa.s.sed the burning, rainless summer days. But not without a little cheer in the hard glare of the parching range, not without a laugh and a chuckle, and a grin behind the hand.

The town knew all about the rainmaker at work behind the shielding rows of tall corn in Judge Thayer's garden. An undertaking of such scope was too big to sequester in any man's back yard.

Whether the rainmaker believed in his formula, or whether he was a plain fraud who was a little sharper on weather conditions than most men, and good on an estimate of a drouth's duration, he seemed to be doing something to earn his money. Day and night he kept something burning in a little tin stove with a length of pipe that came just above the corn, sending up a smoke that went high toward the cloudless sky before the wind began to blow in the early morning hours, and after it ceased at evening, after its established plan. During the day this smoke dispersed very generally over town, causing some coughing and sneezing, and not a little swearing and scoffing.

Sulphur, mainly, the doctor and Druggist Gray p.r.o.nounced the chemical to be. It was a sacrilege, the Baptist preacher declared, an offering to Satan, from the smell of it, rather than a scientific a.s.sault upon the locked heavens to burst open the windows and let out a dash of rain. If the effort of the mysterious stranger brought anything at all, it would bring disaster, the preacher declared. A cyclone, very likely, and lightning, in expression of the Almighty's wrath.

Those who did not accept it wrathfully, as the preacher, or resentfully, as Druggist Gray, from whom the experimenter bought none of his chemicals, or humorously, as the doctor and many of higher intelligence, had a sort of sneaking hope that something might come of it. If the rain man could stir up a commotion and fetch a soaker, it would be the salvation of that country. The range would revive, streams would flow, water would come again into dry wells, and the new farmers who had come in would be given hope to hang on another year and by their trade keep Ascalon from perishing utterly.

But mainly the disposition was to laugh. Judge Thayer was a well-meaning man, but easy. He believed he was bringing a doctor in to cure the country's sickness, where all of his hopes were staked out in town lots, when he had brought only a quack. A hundred dollars, even if the faker made no more, was pretty good pay for seven days' work, they said. A dollar's worth of sulphur would cover his expenses. And if it happened to turn out a good guess, and a rain did blow up on time, Judge Thayer was just fool enough to give the fellow a letter that would help him put his fraud through in another place.

It did not appear, as the days pa.s.sed, that the rainmaker was driving much of a hole in the hot air that pressed down upon that tortured land.

No commotion was apparent in the upper regions, no cloud lifted to cut off for an hour the shafts of the fierce sun. Ascalon lay panting, exhausted, dry as tow, the dust of driven herds blowing through its bare, bleak streets.

Gradually, as dry burning day succeeded the one in all particulars like it that had gone before, what little hope the few had in Judge Thayer's weather doctor evaporated and pa.s.sed away. Those who had scoffed at the beginning jeered louder now, making a triumph of it. The Baptist preacher said the evil of meddling in the works of the Almighty was becoming apparent in the increasing severity of the hot wind. Ascalon, for its sins past and its sacrilege of the present, was to writhe and scorch and wither from the face of the earth.

For all this, interest in the rainmaker's efforts did not lax. People sniffed his smoke, noting every change in its flavor, and pressed around Judge Thayer's garden fence trying to get a look at the operations.

Judge Thayer was not a little indignant over the scoffings and denunciations, and this impertinent curiosity to pry upon what he gave them to understand was his own private venture.

Keep off a safe distance from this iniquitous business, he warned with sarcasm; don't lean on the fence and risk the wrath of the Almighty.

Let the correction of Providence fall on his own shoulders, which had been carrying the sins of Ascalon a long time; don't get so close as to endanger their wise heads under the blow. At the same time he gave them to understand that if any rain came of the efforts of his weather doctor it would be his, the judge's, own private and individual rain, wrung from denying nature by science, and that science paid for by the judge's own money.

The scoffers laughed louder at this, the sniffers wrinkled their noses a little more. But the Baptist preacher only shook his head, the hot wind blowing his wide overalls against his thin legs.

Morgan stood aloof from doubters, hopers, scoffers, and all, saying no word for or against the rainmaker. Every morning now he took a ride into the country, to the mystification of the town, coming back before the heat mounted to its fiercest, always on hand at night to guard against any outbreak of violence among the visitors.

There were not a few in town who watched him away each morning in the hope that something would overtake him and prevent his return; many more who felt their hearts sink as he rode by their doors with the fear that each ride would be his last. Out there in the open some enemy might be lying behind a clump of tangled briars. These women's prayers went with the city marshal as he rode.

On a certain morning Morgan overtook Joe Lynch, driving toward town with his customary load of bones. Morgan walked his horse beside Joe's wagon to chat with him, finding always a charm of originality and rather more than superficial thinking about the old fellow that was refreshing in the intellectual stagnation of the town.

"Is that rain-crow feller still workin' over in town?" Joe inquired as soon as greetings had pa.s.sed.

"I suppose he is, I don't believe his seven days are up yet."

"This is his sixth, I'm keepin' notches on him. I thought maybe he'd skinned out. Do you think he'll be able to fetch it?"

"I hope he can, but I've got my doubts, Joe."

"Yes, and I've got more than doubts. Science is all right, I reckon, as fur as I ever heard, but no science ain't able to rake up clouds in the sky like you'd rake up hay in a field and fetch on a rain. Even if they did git the clouds together, how're they goin' to split 'em open and let the rain out?"

"That would be something of a job," Morgan admitted.

"You've got to have lightnin' to bust 'em, and no science that ever was can't make lightnin', I'm here to tell you, son. If some feller _did_ happen on how it was done, what do you reckon'd become of that man?"

"Why, they do make it, Joe--they make it right over at Ascalon, keep it in jars under that table at the depot. Didn't you ever see it?"

"That ain't the same stuff," Joe said, with high disdain, almost contempt. "Wire lightnin' and sky lightnin' ain't no more alike than milk's like whisky. Well, say that science _did_ make up a batch of sky lightnin'--but I ain't givin' in it can be done--how air they goin' to git up to the clouds, how're they goin' to make it do the bustin' at the right time?"

"That's more than I can tell you, Joe. It's too deep for me."

"Yes, or any other man. They'd let it go all at once and cause a waterspout, that's about what they'd do, and between a waterspout and a dry spell, give me the dry spell!"

"I never was in one, but I've seen 'em tearin' up the hills."

"Then you know what they air. It'd suit me right up to the han'le if this feller could bring a rain, for I tell you I never saw so much sufferin' and misery as these settlers are goin' through out here on this cussid pe-rairie right now. Some of these folks is haulin' water from the river as much as thirty mile!"

"I notice all the creeks and branches are dry. But it's only a little way to plenty of water all over this country if they'll dig. Some of them have put down wells during this dry spell and hit all the water they need. There's a sheet of water flowing under this country from the mountains in Colorado."

"Oh, you git out!"

"Just the same as the Arkansas River, only spread out for miles," Morgan insisted. "A drouth here doesn't mean anything to that water supply; I've been riding around over this country trying to show people that.

Most of them think I'm crazy--till they dig."

"I don't guess you're cracked yit," Joe allowed, "but you will be if you stay in this country. If it wasn't for the bones you wouldn't find me hangin' around here--I'd make for Wyoming. They tell me there's any amount of bones that's never been touched up in that country."

"I noticed several other wagons out gathering bones. They'll soon clean them up here, Joe."

"They're all takin' to it," Joe said, with the resentment of a man who feels compet.i.tion, "hornin' in on my business, what's mine by rights of bein' the first man to go into it in this blame country. Let 'em--let 'em run their teams down scourin' around after bones--I'll be here to pick up the remains of 'em all. I was here first, I've stuck through the rushes of them fellers that's come into this country and dried up, and I'll be here when this crowd of 'em dries up. Them fellers haul in bones and trade 'em at the store for flour and meal, they don't git half out of 'em what I do out of mine, and they're hurtin' the business, drivin'

it down to nothin'."

"Hotter than usual this morning," Morgan remarked, not so much interested in bones and the compet.i.tion of bones.

"Wind's dying down; I noticed that some time ago. Goin' to leave us to sizzle without any fannin'. Ruther have it that way, myself. This eternal wind dries a man's brains up after a while. I'd say, if I was anywhere else, it was fixin' up to rain."

"Or for a cyclone."