THE HAND OF THE LAW
The stars came out over a strange, silent, astonished, confounded,
stupefied Ascalon that night. The wolf-howling of its revelry was
stilled, the clamor of its obscene diversions was hushed. It was as if
the sparkling tent of the heavens were a great bowl turned over the
place, hushing its stridulous merriment, stifling its wild laughter and
dry-throated feminine screams.
The windows of Peden's hall were dark, the black covers were drawn over
the gambling tables, the great bar stood in the gloom without one priest
of alcohol to administer the hilarious rites across its glistening altar
boards.
As usual, even more than usual, the streets around the public square
were lively with people, coming and passing through the beams of light
from windows, smoking and talking and idling in groups, but there was no
movement of festivity abroad in the night, no yelping of departing
rangers. It was as if the town had died suddenly, so suddenly that all
within it were struck dumb by the event.
For the new city marshal, the interloper as many held him to be, the
tall, solemn, long-stepping stranger who carried a rifle always ready
like a man looking for a coyote, had put the lock of his prohibition on
everything within the town. Everything that counted, that is, in the
valuation of the proscribed, and the victims who came like ephemera on
the night wind to scorch and shrivel and be drained in their bright,
illusive fires. The law long flouted, made a joke of, despised, had come
to Ascalon and laid hold of its alluring institutions with stern and
paralyzing might.
Early in the first hours of his authority the new city marshal, or
deputy marshal, to be exact, had received from unimpeachable source, no
less than a thick volume of the statutes, that the laws of the state of
Kansas, which he had sworn to enforce, prohibited the sale of
intoxicating liquors; prohibited gambling and games of chance;
interdicted the operation of immoral resorts--put a lock and key in his
hand, in short, that would shut up the ribald pleasures of Ascalon like
a tomb. As for the ordinances of the city, which he also had obligated
himself to apply, Morgan had not found time to work down to them. There
appeared to be authority in the thick volume Judge Thayer had lent him
to last Ascalon a long time. If he should find himself running short
from that source, then the city ordinances could be drawn upon in their
time and place.
Exclusive of the mighty Peden, the other traffickers in vice were
inconsequential, mere retailers, hucksters, peddlers in their way. They
were as vicious as unquenchable fire, certainly, and numerous, but
small, and largely under the patronage of the king of the proscribed,
Peden of the hundred-foot bar.
And this Peden was a big, broad-chested, muscular man, whose neck rose
like a mortised beam out of his shoulders, straight with the back of his
head. His face was handsome in a bold, shrewd mold, but dark as if his
blood carried the taint of a baser race. He went about always dressed in
a long frock coat, with no vest to obscure the spread of his white shirt
front; low collar, with narrow black tie done in exact bow;
broad-brimmed white sombrero tilted back from his forehead, a cigar that
always seemed fresh under his great mustache.
This mustache, heavy, black, was the one sinister feature of the man's
otherwise rather open and confidence-winning face. It was a cloud that
more than half obscured the nature of the man, an ambush where his
passions and dark subterfuges lay concealed.
Peden had met the order to close his doors with smiling loftiness, easy
understanding of what he read it to mean. Astonished to find his offer
of money silently and sternly ignored, Peden had grown contemptuously
defiant. If it was a bid for him to raise the ante, Morgan was starting
off on a lame leg, he said. Ten dollars a night was as much as the
friendship of any man that ever wore the collar of the law was worth to
him. Take it or leave it, and be cursed to him, with embellishments of
profanity and debasement of language which were new and astonishing even
to Morgan's sophisticated ears. Peden turned his back to the new officer
after drenching him down with this deluge of abuse, setting his face
about the business of the night.
And there self-confident defiance, fattened a long time on the belief
that law was a thing to be sneered down, met inflexible resolution. The
substitute city marshal had a gift of making a few words go a long way;
Peden put out his lights and locked his doors. In the train of his
darkness others were swallowed. Within two hours after nightfall the
town was submerged in gloom.
Threats, maledictions, followed Morgan as he walked the round of the
public square, rifle ready for instant use, pistol on his thigh. And the
blessing of many a mother whose sons and daughters stood at the perilous
crater of that infernal pit went out through the dark after him, also;
and the prayers of honest folk that no skulking coward might shoot him
down out of the shelter of the night.
Even as they cursed him behind his back, the outlawed sneered at Morgan
and the new order that seemed to threaten the world-wide fame of
Ascalon. It was only the brief oppression of transient authority, they
said; wait till Seth Craddock came back and you would see this range
wolf throw dust for the timber.
They spoke with great confidence and kindling pleasure of Seth's return,
and the amusing show that would attend his resumption of authority. For
it was understood that Seth would not come alone. Peden, it was said,
had attended to that already by telegraph. Certain handy gun-slingers
would come with him from Kansas City and Abilene, friends of Peden who
had made reputations and had no scruples about maintaining them.
As the night lengthened this feeling of security, of pleasurable
anticipation, increased. This little break in its life would do the town
good; things would whirl away with recharged energy when the doors were
opened again. Money would simply accumulate in the period of stagnation
to be thrown into the mill with greater abandon than before by the
fools who stood around waiting for the show to resume.
And the spectacle of seeing Seth Craddock drive this simpleton clear
over the edge of the earth would be a diversion that would compensate
for many empty days. That alone would be a thing worth waiting for, they
said.
Time began to walk in slack traces, the heavy wain of night at its slow
heels, for the dealers and sharpers, mackerels and frail, spangled women
to whom the open air was as strange as sunlight to an earthworm. They
passed from malediction and muttered threat against the man who had
brought this sudden change in their accustomed lives, to a state of
indignant rebellion as they milled round the square and watched him
tramp his unending beat.
A little way inside the line of hitching racks Morgan walked, away from
the thronged sidewalk, in the clear where all could see him and a shot
from some dark window would not imperil the life of another. Around and
around the square he tramped in the dusty, hoof-cut street, keeping his
own counsel, unspeaking and unspoken to, the living spirit of the mighty
law.
It was a high-handed piece of business, the bleached men and kalsomined
women declared, as they passed from the humor of contemplating Seth
Craddock's return to fretful chafing against the restraint of the
present hour. How did it come that one man could lord it over a whole
town of free and independent Americans that way? Why didn't somebody
take a shot at him? Why didn't they defy him, go and open the doors and
let this thirsty, money-padded throng up to the gambling tables and
bars?
They asked to be told what had become of the manhood of Ascalon, and
asked it with contempt. What was the fame of the town based upon but a
bluff when one man was able to shut it up as tight as a trunk, and strut
around that way adding the insult of his tyrannical presence to the act
of his oppressive hand. There were plenty of questions and suggestions,
but nobody went beyond them.
The moon was in mid-heaven, untroubled by a veil of cloud; the day wind
was resting under the edge of the world, asleep. Around and around the
public square this sentinel of the new moral force that had laid its
hand over Ascalon tramped the white road. Rangers from far cow camps,
disappointed of their night's debauch, began to mount and ride away,
turning in their saddles as they went for one more look at the lone
sentry who was a regiment in himself, indeed.
The bleached men began to yawn, the medicated women to slip away. Good
citizens who had watched in anxiety, fearful that this rash champion of
the new order would find a bullet between his shoulders before midnight,
began to breathe easier and seek their beds in a strange state of
security. Ascalon was shut up; the howling of its wastrels was stilled.
It was incredible, but true.
By midnight the last cowboy had gone galloping on his long ride to carry
the news of Ascalon's eclipse over the desolate gray prairie; an hour
later the only sign of life in the town was the greasy light of the
Santa Fé café, where a few lingering nondescripts were supping on cove
oyster stew. These came out at last, to stand a little while like
stranded mariners on a lonesome beach watching for a rescuing sail, then
parted and went clumping their various ways over the rattling board
walks.
Morgan stopped at the pump in the square to refresh himself with a
drink. A dog came and lapped out of the trough, stood a little while
when its thirst was satisfied, turning its head listening, as though it
missed something out of the night. It trotted off presently, in angling
gait like a ferry boat making a crossing against an outrunning tide. It
was the last living thing on the streets of the town but the weary city
marshal, who stood with hat off at the pump to feel the cool wind that
came across the sleeping prairie before the dawn.
At that same hour another watcher turned from her open window, where she
had sat a long time straining into the silence that blessed the town.
She had been clutching her heart in the dread of hearing a shot, full of
upbraidings for the peril she had thrust upon this chivalrous man. For
he would not have assumed the office but for her solicitation, she knew
well. She stretched out her hand into the moonlight as if she wafted him
her benediction for the peace he had brought, a great, glad surge of
something more tender than gratitude in her warm young bosom.
In a little while she came to the window again, when the moonlight was
slanting into it, and stood leaning her hands on the sill, her dark hair
coming down in a cloud over her white night dress. She strained again
into the quiet night, listening, and listening, smiled. Then she stood
straight, touched finger tips to her lips and waved away a kiss into the
moonlight and the little timid awakening wind that came out of the east
like a young hare before the dawn.