ASCALON AWAKE
Ascalon was laid out according to the Spanish tradition for arranging
towns that dominated the builders of the West and Southwest in the days
when Santa Fé extended its trade influence over a vast territory.
Although Ascalon was only a stage station in the latter days of traffic
over the Santa Fé Trail, its builders, when it came occasion to expand,
were men who had traded in that capital of the gray desert wastes at the
trail's end, and nothing would serve them but a plaza, with the
courthouse in the middle of it, the principal business establishments
facing it the four sides around.
There were many who called it _the plaza_ still, especially visitors
from along the Rio Grande who came driving their long-horned,
lean-flanked cattle northward over the Chisholm Trail. Santa Fé, at its
worst, could not have been dustier than this town of Ascalon, and
especially the plaza, or public square, in these summer days. Galloping
horses set its dust flying in obscuring clouds; the restless wind that
blew from sunrise till sunset day in and day out from the southwest,
whipped it in sudden gusts of temper, and drove it through open doors,
spreading it like a sun-defying hoarfrost on the low roofs. All
considered, Ascalon was as dry, uncomfortable, unpromising of romance,
as any place that man ever built or nature ever harassed with wearing
wind and warping sun.
The courthouse in the middle of the public square was built of bricks,
of that porous, fiery sort which seem so peculiarly designed to the
monstrous vagaries of rural architecture. Here in Ascalon they fitted
well with the arid appearance of things, as a fiery face goes best with
white eyebrows, anywhere.
The courthouse was a two-storied structure, with the cupola as
indispensable to the old-time Kansas courthouse as a steeple to a
church. The jail was in the basement of it, thus sparing culprits a
certain punishment by concealing the building's raw, red, and crude
lines from the eye. Not that anybody in jail or out of it ever thought
of this advantage, or appreciated it, indeed, for Ascalon was proud of
the courthouse, and fired with a desire and determination to keep it
there in the plaza forever and a day.
There were precedents before them, and plenty of them in that part of
the country, where county seats had been changed, courthouses of red
bricks and gray stones put on skids and moved away, leaving desolation
that neither maledictions could assuage nor oratory could repair. For
prosperity went with the courthouse in those days, and dignity, and
consequence among the peoples of the earth.
Hitching racks, like crude apparatus for athletic exercises, were built
around the courthouse, with good driving distance between them and the
plank sidewalks. Here the riders from distant ranges tied their jaded
mounts, here such as made use of wagons in that land of horseback-going
men hitched their teams when they drove in for supplies.
There was not a shrub in the courthouse square, not the dead and
stricken trunk of a tree standing monument of any attempt to mitigate
the curse of sun. There was not a blade of grass, not a struggling,
wind-blown flower. Only here and there chickweed grew, spreading its
green tracery over the white soil in such sequestered spots as the hoofs
of beast and the feet of men did not stamp and chafe and wear; and in
the angles of the courthouse walls, the Russian thistle, barbed with its
thousand thorns. Men did not consider beauty in Ascalon, this Tophet at
trail's end, save it might be the beauty of human flesh, and then it
must be rouged and powdered, and enforced with every cosmetic mixture to
win attention in an atmosphere where life was lived in a ferment of ugly
strife.
There was in Ascalon in those bloody days a standing coroner's jury, of
which Tom Conboy was the foreman, composed of certain gamblers and town
politicians whose interests were with the vicious element. To these men
the wide notoriety of the town was capital. Therefore, it was seldom,
indeed, that anybody was slain in Ascalon without justification,
according to the findings of this coroner's jury. In this way the
gamblers and divekeepers, and such respectable citizens as chose to
exercise their hands in this exhilarating pastime, were regularly
absolved.
The result of this amicable agreement between the county officials and
the people of the town was that Ascalon became, more than ever, a refuge
for the outlawed and proscribed of other communities. Every train
brought them, and dumped them down on the station platform to find their
way like wolves to their kind into the activities of the town.
Gamblers and gun-slingers, tricksters and sharpers, attended by the
carrion flock of women who always hover after these wreckers and
wastrels, came to Ascalon by scores. It began to appear a question, in
time, of what they were to subsist upon, even though they turned to the
ravening of one another.
But the broad notoriety of Ascalon attended to this, bringing with the
outlawed and debased a fresh and eager train of victims. The sons of
families came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries of
eastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat their
surfeited blood. Unsophisticated young men came, following the lure of
romance; farm boys from the midwestern states came, with a thought of
pioneering and making a new empire of the plow, as their fathers had
smoothed the land in the states already called old.
All of these came with money in their pockets, and nearly all of them,
one day first or last, became contributors to the support of Ascalon's
prostituted population. New victims came to replace the plucked, new
crowds of cowherders rode in from the long trails to the south, relays
of them galloped night after night from the far ranches stretching along
the sandy Arkansas. There was no want of grain to sow in the gaping
furrows struck out by the hands of sin in the raw, treeless, unpainted
city of Ascalon.
And into all this fever of coming and going, this heartbreak of shame
and loss, of quickly drawn weapon, of flash, despairing cry, and
death--this sowing of recklessness and harvesting of despair--into all
this had come Calvin Morgan, a man with a clean heart, a clean purpose
in his soul.
Ascalon once had been illuminated at night about the public square by
kerosene lamps set on posts, after the manner of gas lights in a city,
but the expense of supplying glass day after day to repair the damage
done by roysterers during the night had become so heavy that the town
had abandoned lights long before Morgan's advent there. Only the posts
stood now, scarred by bullets, gnawed by horses which had stood hitched
to them forgotten by their owners who reveled their wages in Ascalon's
beguiling fires. At the time of Morgan's coming, starlight and
moonlight, and such beams as fell through the windows of houses upon the
uneven sidewalk around the square, provided all the illumination that
brightened the streets of Ascalon by night.
On the evening of his mildly adventurous first day in the town, Morgan
sat in front of the Elkhorn hotel, his chair in the gutter, according to
the custom, his feet braced comfortably against the outer edge of the
sidewalk, flanked by other guests and citizens who filled the remaining
seats. Little was said to him of his encounter with the new city
marshal, and that little Morgan made less, and brought to short ending
by his refusal to be led into the matter at all. And as he sat there,
chatting in desultory way, the fretting wind died to a breath, the line
of men in the chairs grew indistinct in the gloom of early night, and
Ascalon rose up like a sleeping wolf, shaking off the drowse of the day,
and sat on its haunches to howl.
This awakening began with the sound of fiddles and pianos in the big
dance hall whose roof covered all the vices which thrive best in the
dark. Later a trombone and cornet joined the original musical din,
lifting their brassy notes on the vexed night air. Bands of horsemen
came galloping in, yelping the short, coyote cries of the cattle lands.
Sometimes one of them let off his pistol as he wheeled his horse up to
the hitching rack, the relief of a simple mind that had no other
expression for its momentary exuberance.
Sidewalks became thronged with people tramping the little round of the
town's diversions, but of different stamp from those who had sparsely
trickled through its sunlight on legitimate business that afternoon.
Cowboys hobbled by in their peggy, high-heeled gait, as clumsy afoot as
penguins; men in white shirts without coats, their skin too tender to
withstand the sun, walked with superior aloofness among the sheep which
had come to their shearing pens, preoccupied in manner, yet alert,
watching, watching, on every hand.
Now and then women passed, but they, also, were of the night, gaudily
bedecked in tinsel and glittering finery that would have been fustian by
day to the least discriminating eye. Respectability was not abroad in
Ascalon by night. With the last gleam of day it left the stage to
wantonness.
As the activity of the growing night increased, high-pitched voices of
cowboys who called figures of the dances quavered above the confusion of
sounds, a melancholy note in the long-drawn syllables that seemed a
lament for the waste of youth, and a prophecy of desolation. When the
music fell to momentary silence the clash of pool balls sounded, and the
tramp of feet, and quavering wild feminine laughter rising sharply,
trailing away to distance as if the revelers sailed by on the storm of
their flaming passions, to land by and by on the shores of morning,
draggled, dry-lipped, perhaps with a heartache for the far places left
behind forever.
Morgan was not moved by a curiosity great enough to impel him to make
the round. All this he had seen before, time over, in the frontier towns
of Nebraska, with less noise and open display, certainly, for here in
Ascalon viciousness had a nation-wide notoriety to maintain, and must
intensify all that it touched. He was wondering how the townspeople who
had honest business in life managed to sleep through that rioting, with
the added chance of some fool cowboy sending a bullet through their thin
walls as he galloped away to his distant camp, when Tom Conboy came
through the sidewalk stream to sit beside him in a gutter chair.
The proprietor of the Elkhorn hotel appeared to be under a depression of
spirits. He answered those who addressed him in short words, with manner
withdrawn. Morgan noted that the diamond stud was gone out of the desert
of Conboy's shirt bosom, and that he was belted with a pistol. Presently
the man on Conboy's other hand, who had been trying with little result
to draw him into a conversation, got up and made his way toward the
bright front of the dance hall. Conboy touched Morgan's knee.
"Come into the office, kind of like it happened, a little while after
me," he said, speaking in low voice behind his hand. He rose, stretching
and yawning as if to give his movements a casual appearance, stood a
little while on the edge of the sidewalk, went into the hotel. Morgan
followed him in a few minutes, to find him apparently busy with his
accounts behind the desk.
A little while the proprietor worked on his bookkeeping, Morgan lounging
idly before the cigar case.
"Some fellers up the street lookin' for you," Conboy said, not turning
his head.
"What fellows? What do they want?"
"That bunch of cowboys from the Chisholm Trail."
"I don't know them," said Morgan, not yet getting the drift of what
Conboy evidently meant as a warning.
"They're friends of the city marshal; he belonged to the same outfit,"
Conboy explained, ostensibly setting down figures in his book.
"Thank you," said Morgan, starting for the door.
"Where you goin' to?" Conboy demanded, forgetting caution and possible
complications in his haste to interpose.
"To find out what they want."
"There's no sense in a man runnin' his arm down a lion's throat to see
if he's hungry," Conboy said, making a feint now of moving the cigar
boxes around in the case.
"This town isn't so big that they'd miss a man if they went out to hunt
him. Where are they?"
"I left them at Peden's, the big dance hall up the street. Ain't you got
a gun?"
"No," Morgan returned thoughtfully, as if he had not even considered one
before.
"The best thing you can do is to take a walk out into the country and
forget your way back, kid. Them fellers are goin' to be jangled up just
about right for anything in an hour or so more. I'd advise you to
go--I'll send your grip to you wherever you say."
"You're very kind. How many of them are there?"
"Seven besides Craddock, the rest of them went to Kansas City with the
cattle you saw leave in them three extras this evening. Craddock's
celebratin' his new job, he's leadin' 'em around throwin' everything
wide open to 'em without a cent to pay. 'Charge it to me' he said to
Peden--I was there when they came in--'charge it to me, I'm payin' this
bill.' You know what that means."
"I suppose it means that the collection will be deferred," Morgon said,
grinning over the city marshal's easy cut to generosity.
"Indefinitely postponed," said Conboy, gloomily. "I'm goin' to put all
my good cigars in the safe, and do it right now."
"Here's something you may put in the safe for me, too," said Morgan,
handing over his pocketbook.
"Ain't you goin' to leave town?" Conboy asked, hand stayed hesitantly to
take the purse.
"I've got an appointment with Judge Thayer to look at a piece of land in
the morning," Morgan returned.
"Well, keep out enough to buy a gun, two of 'em if you're a
double-handed man," Conboy counseled.
"I've got what I need," said Morgan, putting the purse in Conboy's hand.
"I'd say for you to take a walk out to Judge Thayer's and stay all night
with him, but them fellers will be around here a couple of weeks, I
expect--till the rest of the outfit comes back for their horses. Just
one night away wouldn't do you any good."
"I couldn't think of it," said Morgan, coldly.
"You know your business, I guess," Conboy yielded, doubtfully, "but
don't play your luck too far. You made a good grab when you took that
feller's gun away from him, but you can't grab eight guns."
"You're right," Morgan agreed.
"If you're a reasonable man, you'll hit the grit out of this burg,"
Conboy urged.
"You said they were at Peden's?"
"First dance house you come to, the biggest one in town. You don't need
to tip it off that I said anything. No niggers in Ireland, you know."
"Not a nigger," said Morgan.
As he stepped into the street, Morgan had no thought of going in any
direction save that which would bring him in conjunction with the men
who sought him. If he began to run at that stage of his experiences, he
reasoned, he would better make a streak of it that would take him out of
the country as fast as his feet would carry him. If those riders of the
Chisholm Trail were going to be there a week or two, he could not dodge
them, and it might be that by facing them unexpectedly and talking it
over man to man before they got too far along in their spree, the
grievance they held against him on Seth Craddock's account could be
adjusted.
He had come to Ascalon in the belief that he could succeed and prosper
in that land which had lured and beckoned, discouraged and broken and
driven forth again ten thousand men. Already there was somebody in it
who had looked for a moment into his soul and called it courageous, and
passed on her way again, he knew not whither. But if Ascalon was so
small that a man whom men sought could not hide in it, the country
around it was not vast enough to swallow one whom his heart desired to
find again.
He would find her; that he had determined hours ago. That should be his
first and greatest purpose in this country now. No man, or band of men,
that ever rode the Chisholm Trail could set his face away from it. He
went on to meet them, his dream before him, the wild sound of Ascalon's
obscene revelry in his ears.