NEWS FROM ASCALON
"Down here in the river bottom, where the water rises close to the top
of the ground, you can raise a little corn and stuff, but take it back
on the prairie a little way and you can't make your seed back, year in
and year out. Plenty of them have come here from the East and tried
it--I suppose you must 'a' seen the traces of them scattered around as
you come through the country east of Ascalon."
Morgan admitted that he had seen such traces, melancholy records of
failure that they were.
"It's all over this country the same way. It broke 'em as fast as they
came, starved 'em and took the heart out of 'em and drove 'em away. You
can't farm this country, Morgan; no man ever learnt anything out of
books that will make him master of these plains with a plow."
So spoke Stilwell, the cattleman, sitting at night before his long, low,
L-shaped sod house with his guest who had been dragged into his
hospitality at the end of a rope. Eight days Morgan had been sequestered
in that primitive home, which had many comforts in spite of the crudity
of its exterior. His soreness had passed from the green and
superficially painful stage to the deeper ache of bruised bones. He
walked with a limp, stiff and stoved in his joints as a foundered horse.
But his hands and arms had recovered their suppleness, and, like an
overgrown fledgling at the edge of the nest, he was thinking of
projecting a flight.
During the time Morgan had been in the Stilwell ranchhouse no news had
come to him from Ascalon. Close as they lived to the town, the Stilwells
had been too deeply taken up with their own problem of pending ruin due
to the loss of their herd from Texas fever infection, to make a trip
even to the post-office for their mail. Violet, the daughter, was on the
range more than half the time, doing what she could to drive the sick
cattle to the river where they might have a better chance to fight the
dread malady.
Morgan's injuries had turned out to be deeper seated and more serious
than he had at first supposed. For several days he was racked with a
fever that threatened to floor him, due to the mental torture of that
terrible night. It had passed, and with it much of his pain, and he
would have gone to Ascalon for his reckoning with the men from the
Nueces two days ago if Stilwell had not argued the folly of attempting
an adjustment under the handicap of his injuries.
Wait a few days longer, the rancher sagely advised, eat and rest, and
rub that good fiery horse liniment of his on the sore spots and swollen
joints. Even if they were gone, which Stilwell knew would not be the
case for Drumm would not have made it back from Kansas City yet, Morgan
could follow them. And to do that he must be sound and strong.
Stilwell had put off even his own case against the Texas stockman, he
had been so urged for time in getting his sick cattle down to the shade
and water along the river. Now the job seemed over, for all he could
do, and was taking his ease at home this night, intending to go early in
the morning and put his case for damages against Drumm into Judge
Thayer's hands.
Through Morgan's days of sickness and waiting for strength, he was
attended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, when
Violet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on her
new piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason to
expect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of the shallow
Arkansas.
Violet was a girl of large frame, large bones in her wrists, large
fingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhat
too long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by a
wistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizon
of her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two men
talked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of the
trampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple melody with a
soft, expressive tenderness as sweet to him as any music Morgan ever had
heard. For he understood that the instrument was the medium of
expression for this prairie girl's soul, reaching out from its shelter
of sod laid upon sod to what aspirations, following what longings,
mounting to what ambitions, none in her daily contact ever knew.
Stilwell was downcast by the blow he had received in the loss of more
than half his herd through the Texas scourge. It had taken years of
hardship and striving, fighting drouth and winter storm, preying wolves
and preying men, to build the herd up to the point where profits were
about ready to be enjoyed.
Nothing but a frost would put an end to the scourge of Texas fever; in
those days no other remedy had been discovered. Before nature could send
this relief Stilwell feared the rest of his cattle would die, although
he had driven them from the contaminated range. If that happened he
would be wiped out, for he was too old, he said, to start at the bottom
and build up another herd.
It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soil
instead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called down
the cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage that
country had made of men's hopes. He dismissed that subject very soon as
one unworthy of even acrimonious debate or further denunciation, to
dwell on his losses and the bleakness of the future as it presented
itself through the bones of his dead cattle.
As they sat talking, the soft notes of Violet's melody soothing to the
ears as a distant song, the young man Fred came riding in from Ascalon,
the bearer of news. He began to talk before he struck the ground,
breathlessly, like a man who had beheld unbelievable things.
"That gang from Texas has took the town--everybody's hidin' out," he
reported.
"Took the town?" said Stilwell, incredulously.
"Stores all shut up, post-office locked and old man Flower settin' in
the upstairs winder with his Winchester across his leg waitin' for them
to bust in the door and steal the gover'ment money!"
"Listen to that!" said Stilwell, as the young man stood there hat off,
mopping the sweat of excitement from his forehead. "Where's that
man-eatin' marshal feller at?"
"He's killin' off everybody in town but his friends--he's killed eight
men, a man a day, since he's been in office. He's got everybody lookin'
for a hole."
"A man a day!" said Morgan, scarcely able to believe the news.
"Who was they?" Stilwell inquired, bringing his chair down from its easy
slant against the sod wall, leaning forward to catch the particulars of
this unequaled record of slaughter.
"I didn't hear," said Fred, panting faster than his hard-ridden horse.
"I hope none of the boys off of this range around here got into it with
him," Stilwell said.
"They say he's closed up all the gamblin' joints and saloons but
Peden's, and the bank's been shut four or five days, Judge Thayer and a
bunch of fellers inside of it with rifles. Tom Conboy told me the judge
had telegraphed to the governor asking him to send soldiers to restore
law and order in the town."
"Law and order!" Stilwell scorned. "All the law and order they ever had
in that hell-hole a man'd never miss."
"Where's the sheriff--what's he doing to restore order?" Morgan
inquired.
"The sheriff ain't doin' nothing. I ain't been over there, but I know
that much," Stilwell said.
"They say he's out after some rustlers," Fred replied.
"Yes, and he'll stay out till the trouble's over and come back without a
hide or hair of a rustler. What else are they doin'?"
"Rairin' and shootin'," said Fred, winded by the enormity of this
outlawry, even though bred in an atmosphere of violence.
"Are they hittin' anybody, or just shootin' for noise?" Stilwell asked.
"Well, I know they took a crack at me when I went out of Conboy's to git
my horse."
Mrs. Stilwell and Violet, who had hastened out on Fred's excited
arrival, exclaimed in concern at this, the mother going to her boy to
feel him over as for wounds, standing by him a little while with arm
around him.
"Did you shoot back?" Stilwell wanted to know.
"I hope I did," Fred replied.
Stilwell got up, and stood looking at the moon a little while as if
calculating the time of night.
"They need a man or two over there to clean that gang up," he said.
"Well, it ain't my business to do it, as long as they didn't hit you."
Mrs. Stilwell chided him sharply, perhaps having history behind her to
justify her alarm at these symptoms.
"Let them fight it out among themselves, the wolves!" she said.
Morgan had drawn a little apart from the family group, walking to the
corner of the house where he stood looking off toward Ascalon, still and
tense as if he listened for the sounds of conflict. He was dressed in
Stilwell's clothes, which were somewhat too roomy of body but nothing
too large otherwise, for both of them had the stature of proper men.
His feet were in slippers, his ankles bandaged and soaked with the
penetrating liniment designed alike for the ailments of man and beast.
Violet studied him as he stood there between her and the moon, his face
sterner for the ordeal of suffering that had tried his manhood in that
two-mile run beside the train, where nothing but a sublime defiance of
death had held him to his feet.
He had told her of his seven-years' struggle upward from the cowboy's
saddle to a place of honor in the faculty of the institution where he
had beaten out the hard, slow path to learning; she knew of his purpose
in coming to the western Kansas plains. Until this moment she had
believed it to be a misleading and destructive illusion that would break
his heart and rive his soul, as it had the hearts and souls of thousands
of brave men and women before him.
Now she had a new revelation, the moonlight on his face, bright in his
fair hair, picturing him as rugged as a rock uplifted against the dim
sky. She knew him then for a man such as she never had met in the narrow
circle of her life before, a man strong to live in his purpose and
strong to die in it if the need might be. He would conquer where others
had failed; the strength of his soul was written in his earnest face.
"I think I'll go over to Ascalon," Morgan said presently, turning to
them, speaking slowly. "Will you let me have a horse?"
"Go to Ascalon! Lands save us!" Mrs. Stilwell exclaimed.
"No, no--not tonight!" Violet protested, hurrying forward as if she
would stay him by force.
"You wait till morning, son," Stilwell counseled calmly, so calmly,
indeed, that his wife turned to him sharply. "Maybe I'll go with you in
the morning."
"You've got no business there--let them kill each other off if they want
to, but you keep out of it!" said his wife.
"If you'll let me have a horse--" Morgan began again, with the
insistence of a man unmoved.
"You forgot about our cattle, Mother," Stilwell chided, ignoring
Morgan's request. "I'm goin' to sue Sol Drumm, I'm goin' to have the
papers ready to serve on him the minute he steps off of the train. If
there's any way to make him pay for the damage he's done me I'm goin' to
do it."
"There's more than one way," said Fred. "If the law can't----"
"Then we lose," his father finished for him, in the calm resignation of
a just man.
Morgan's intention of going to Ascalon to square accounts with his
persecutors as soon as he had the strength to warrant such a move was no
secret in the Stilwell family. Fred had offered his services at the
beginning, and the one cowboy now left out of the five but recently
employed by Stilwell had laid his pistol on the table and told Morgan
that he was the man who went with it, both of them at his service when
the hour of reckoning should arrive. Now Stilwell himself was beginning
to show the pistol itch in his palm.
Morgan was grateful for all this uprising on the part of his new
friends in his behalf, to whom his suffering and the cruelty of his
ordeal appealed strongly for sympathy, but he could not accept any
assistance at their hands. There could be no satisfaction in justice
applied by any hand but his own. If otherwise, he might as well go to
the county attorney, lodge complaints, obtain warrants and send his
enemies to jail.
No, it was a case for personal attention; it was a one-man job. What
they were to suffer for their great wrong against him, he must inflict
with his own weapon, like the savage Comanche whose camp fires were
scarcely cold in that place.
So Morgan spoke again of going that night to Ascalon, only to be set
upon by all of them and argued into submission. Eager as Fred was to go
along and have a hand in the fray, he was against going that night.
Violet came and laid her good wholesome, sympathetic hand on Morgan's
arm and looked into his face with a plea in her eyes that was stronger
than words. He couldn't bear his feet in the stirrups with his ankles
all swollen and sore as they were, she said; wait a day or two--wait a
week. What did it matter if they should leave in the meantime, and go
back down the wild trail to Texas? So much the better; let them go.
Morgan smiled to hear her say it would be better if they should get
away, for she was one of the forgiving of this world, in whose breast
the fire of vengeance would find no fuel to nurse its hot spark and
burst into raging flame. He yielded to their entreaties and reasoning,
agreeing to defer his expedition against his enemies until morning, but
not an hour longer.
When the others had gone to bed, Morgan went down to the river through
the broad notch in the low bank where the Santa Fé Trail used to cross.
This old road was brush-grown now, with only a dusty path winding along
it where the cattle passed to drink. The hoof-cut soil was warm and soft
to his bruised feet; the bitter scent of the willows was strong on the
cooling night as he brushed among them. Out across the broad golden bars
he went, seeking the shallow ripple to which the stream shrunk in the
summer days between rains, sitting by it when he came to it at last,
bathing his feet in the tepid water.
There he sat for the cure of the water on his bruised, fevered joints,
raking the fire of his hatred together until it grew and leaped within
him like a tempest. As the Indian warrior watches the night out with
song of defiance and dance of death to inflame him to his grim purpose
of the dawn, so this man fallen from the ways of gentleness into the
abyss of savagery spurred himself to a grim and terrible frenzy by
visiting his wrath in anticipation upon his enemies.
Unworthy as they were, obscure and trivial; riotous, ignorant, bestial
in their lives, he would lower himself to their level for one blood-red
hour to carry to them a punishment more terrible than the noose. As from
the dead he would rise up to strike them with terror. In the morning,
when the sun was striking long shadows of shrub and bunched bluestem
over the prairie levels; in the morning, when the wind was as weak as a
young fawn.