WITH CLEAN HANDS
Seth Craddock was a defiant, although a fallen man. He refused to resign
the office of marshal of the third-class city of Ascalon when Morgan
released his feet at Judge Thayer's direction, allowing him to stand.
Somebody brought his hat and put it down harshly on his small,
turtle-like head, flaring out his big red ears. There he stood,
glowering, dusty, blood on his face from an abrasion he had got in the
rough handling at the end of Morgan's rope.
Judge Thayer said it made no difference whether he gave up the office
willingly, he was without a voice in the matter, anyhow. He was fired,
and that's all there was to it. But no, said Seth; not at all. The
statutes upheld him, the constitution supported him, and hell and
damnation and many other forces which he enumerated in his red-tongued
defiance, could not move him out of that office. He demanded to be
allowed to consult his lawyer, he glared around and cursed the curious
and unawed public which laughed at his plight and the figure he cut,
ordering somebody to go and fetch the county attorney, on pain of death
when he should come again into the freedom of his hands.
But nobody moved, except to shift from one foot to the other and laugh.
The terror seemed to have departed out of Seth Craddock's name and
presence; a terrible man is no longer fearful when he has been dragged
publicly at the end of a cow rope and tied up in the public place like a
calf for the branding iron.
The county attorney was discreet enough to keep his distance. He did not
come forward with advice on habeas corpus and constitutional rights.
Only Earl Gray, the druggist, with seven kinds of perfumery on his hair,
came out of the crowd with smirking face, ingratiating, servile,
offering Morgan a cigar. The look that Morgan gave him would have wilted
the tobacco in its green leaf. It wilted Druggist Gray. He turned back
into the crowd and eliminated himself from the day's adventure like
smoke on the evening wind.
Peden was seen, soon after Craddock's dusty downfall, making his way
back to the shelter of his hall, a cloud on his dark face, a sneer of
contempt in his eyes. His bearing was proclamation that he had expected
a great deal more of Seth Craddock, and that the support of his
influence was from that moment withdrawn. But there was nothing in his
manner of a disturbed or defeated man. Those who knew him best, indeed,
felt that he had played only a preliminary hand and, finding it weak,
had taken up the deck for a stronger deal.
Seth Craddock stood with his back to the station platform, hands bound
behind him, his authority gone. A little way to one side Morgan waited
beside his horse, his pistol under his hand, rifle on the saddle, not so
confident that all was won as to lay himself open to a surprise. Judge
Thayer was holding a session with Craddock, the town, good and bad,
looking on with varying emotions of mirth, disappointment, and disgust.
Judge Thayer unbuckled Craddock's belt and remaining pistol, picked up
the empty weapon from the ground, sheathed it in the holster opposite
its once terrifying mate, and gave them to Morgan. Morgan hung them on
his saddle horn, and the wives and mothers of Ascalon who had trembled
for their husbands and sons when they heard the roar of those guns in
days past, drew great breaths of relief, and looked into each other's
faces and smiled.
"We can't hold you for any of the killings you've done here, Seth,
though some of them were unjustified, we know," Judge Thayer said.
"You've been cleared by the coroner's jury in each case, there's no use
for us to open them again. But you'll have to leave this town. Your
friends went yesterday, escorted by Mr. Morgan across the Arkansas
River. You can follow them if you want to--you might overtake 'em
somewhere down in the Nation--you'll have to go in the same direction,
in peace if you will, otherwise if you won't."
"I'm marshal of this town," Seth still persisted, in the belief that
forces were gathering to his rescue, one could see. "The only way I'll
ever leave till I'm ready to go'll be in a box!"
Certainly, Seth did not end the defiance and the declaration that way,
nor issue it from his mouth in such pale and commonplace hues. Judge
Thayer argued with him, after his kindly disposition, perhaps not a
little sorry for the man who had outgrown his office and abused the
friend who had elevated him to it.
Seth remained as obdurate as a trapped wolf. He roved his eyes around,
craned his long, wrinkled neck, looking for the succor that was so long
in coming. He repeated, with blasting enlargement, that the only way
they could send him out of Ascalon would be in a box.
Judge Thayer drew apart to consult Morgan, in low tones. Morgan was
undisturbed by Craddock's unbending opinion that he had plenty of law
behind him to sustain his contention that he could not be removed from
office. It did not matter how much ammunition a man had if he couldn't
shoot it. It was Morgan's opinion, given with the light of humor
quickening in his eyes, that they ought to take Craddock at his word.
"Ship him out?" said Judge Thayer.
"In a box," Morgan nodded, face as sober as judgment, the humor growing
in his eyes.
"But we can't butcher the fellow like a hog!" Judge Thayer protested.
"Live hogs are shipped in boxes, right along," Morgan explained.
Judge Thayer saw the light; his pepper-and-salt whiskers twinkled and
spread around his mouth, and rose so high in their bristling over his
silent laughter that they threatened his eyes. He turned to Craddock,
forcing a sober front.
"All right, Seth, we'll take you up on it. You're going out of town in a
box," he said.
Judge Thayer ordered the undertaker to bring over a coffin box, the
longest one he had. The word ran like a prairie fire from those who
heard the order given, that they were going to shoot Craddock for his
crimes and bury him on the spot.
There was not a little disappointment, but more relief, in the public
mind when it became understood that Craddock was not to be shot. As a
mockery of his past oppression and terrible name, he was to be nailed up
in a box and shipped out like a snake. And so it turned out again in
Ascalon that comedy came in to end the play where tragedy had begun it.
Morgan bore no part in this unexpected climax to his hard-straining and
doubt-clouded day. He stood by watchful and alert, a great peace in his
mind, a great lightness. He had come through it according to Rhetta
Thayer's wish, according to his own desire, with no man's blood upon his
hands.
There were many willing ones who came forward to make light the labor of
Seth Craddock's packing. They unbound his hands with derision and
bundled him into the capacious long box against his strivings and curses
with scorn. Morgan suggested the enclosure of a jug of water. Let him
frizzle and fry, they said. They'd bore an auger hole or two in the box
to give him air, and that was greater humanity than he deserved. Morgan
insisted on at least a bottle of water, and had his way, against
grumbling.
The undertaker officiated, as if it were a regular funeral, putting the
long screws in the stout lid while citizens sat on it to hold the
explosive old villain down. They fastened him in as securely as if he
were a dead man, in all sobriety, boxed up againt the worms of the
grave.
Then the question rose of where to send him, and how. On the first part
of it the public was of undivided mind. No matter where he went, or in
what direction, let it be far. On the second division there was some
argument. Some held for shipping him by freight, as livestock, and some
were for express as the quickest way to the end of a long journey. For
the farther out of sight he could be carried in the shortest possible
time, they said, the better for all concerned.
There the station agent was called in to lend the counsel of his
official position. A man could not be shipped by freight if alive, he
said. He could be sent as a corpse is sent, by paying the rate of a fare
and a half and stowing him in the baggage-car with trunks and dogs. The
undertaker was of the same opinion, which he expressed gravely, with
becoming sadness and gloom.
Judge Thayer wrote the address on the shipping tag, the undertaker
tacked it on Seth Craddock's case, and then the amazed people of Ascalon
came forward surrounding the case, and read:
Chief of Police,
Kansas City, Missouri.
That was the consignee of the strangest shipment ever billed out of
Ascalon. People wondered what the chief of police would do with his
gift. They wished him well of it, with all their hearts.
Meantime Seth Craddock, with the blood of eight men on his hands, was
making more noise in the coffin box than a sack of cats. It was a most
undignified way for a man of his sanguinary reputation to accept this
humiliation at the hands of a public that he had outraged. A mule in a
box stall could not have made a greater clatter with heels against
planks than the fallen city marshal of Ascalon drummed up with his on
the stout end of the coffin box. He cursed as he kicked, and called in
muffled voice on the friends of his brief day of power to come and set
him free.
But the sycophants who had hung to his heels like hand-fed dogs when
power glorified him like a glistening garment and exalted him high above
other men, turned out as all time-servers and cowardly courtiers always
finish when the object of their transitory adulation falls with his
belly in the dust. They sneered, they jeered, they turned white-shirted
coatless backs upon his box with derisive, despising laughter on their
night-pale faces. Seth Craddock was a mighty man as long as he had a
license to walk about and slay, but fastened up in a box like a corpse
for shipment at the rate of the dead, he was only a hull and an empty
husk of a man.
They said he was a coward; they had known it all along. It called for a
coward to shoot men down like rabbits. That was not the way of a brave
and worthy man. This great moral conclusion they reached readily enough,
Seth Craddock securely caged before them. If Morgan's rope had missed
its mark, if a snarl had shortened it a foot; if Craddock had been a
second sooner in starting to draw his gun, this wave of moral exaltation
would not have descended upon Ascalon that day.
There was some concern over the holding quality of the box. People
feared Craddock might burst out of it before going far, and return
against them for the reckoning so volubly threatened. The undertaker
quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing
out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out
of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that
thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help if _he_ screwed him
shut in that most competent container of the mortal remains of man.
Thus assured, the citizens carried the box in festive spirit, with more
charity and kindness toward old Seth than he deserved, and stood it on
end in the shadow of the depot. There was an auger hole on a level with
Seth's eye, through which he could glower out for his last look on
Ascalon, and the people who gathered around to deride him and triumph in
his overthrow.
Through this small opening Seth cursed them, checking such of them off
by name as he recognized, setting them down in his memory for the
vengeance he declared he would return speedily and exact. There he
stood, like Don Quixote in his cage, his red eye to the hole, swearing
as terribly as any man that marched in that hard-boiled army in Flanders
long ago.
Those who had been awed by his grim silence in the days when he ruled
above all law in Ascalon, were surprised now by his volubility. Under
provocation Craddock could say as much as the next man, it appeared.
Unquestionably, he could express his limited thoughts in words luridly
strange. He wearied of this arraignment at last, and subsided. Long
before the train came he lapsed into his natural blue sulkiness,
remaining as quiet behind his auger hole as one ready for the grave.
They loaded Craddock on a truck when the train from the west whistled,
trundled him down the platform and posted him ready to load in the
baggage-car, attended by a large, jubilant crowd. There was so much
hilarity in this gathering for a funeral, indeed, and so much profanity,
denunciation, and threat issuing out of the coffin box--for Seth broke
out again the minute they moved him--that the baggage-man aboard the
train demurred on receiving the shipment. He closed the door against the
eager citizens who mounted the truck to shove the box aboard, leaving
only opening enough for him to stand flatwise in and shout up the
platform to the conductor.
This conductor was a notable man in his day on that pioneer railroad. He
was a bony, irascible man, fiery of face, with a high hook nose that had
been smashed to one side in some battle when he was construction foreman
in his days of lowly beginning. He wore a pistol strapped around his
long coat, which garment was braided and buttoned like an ambassador's,
and he was notable throughout the land of cattle and cards as a man who
could reach far and hit hard. If Seth Craddock had applied to him for
instruction in invective and profanity, veteran that he was he would
have been put at the very foot of the primer class.
Now this mighty man came striding down the platform, thrusting his way
through the crowd with no gentle elbow, hand on his gun, displeasure
ready to explode from his mouth. The baggage-man asked advice on
accepting the proffered box, with fare and a half ticket attached as in
the case of a corpse.
The conductor remarked, with terrible sarcasm, that the corpse was the
noisiest one he ever had encountered, even in that cursed and benighted
and seven times outcast hole. He knocked on the box and demanded of the
occupant an account of himself, and the part he was bearing in this
pleasant little episode, this beautiful little joke.
Seth lifted up his muffled voice to say that it was no joke, at least to
him. He explained his identity and denounced his captors, swearing
vengeance to the last eyebrow. The conductor faced the crowd with
disdainful severity.
What were they trying to play off on him, anyhow? Who did they suppose
he was? Maybe that was fun in Ascalon, but his company wasn't going to
carry no man from nowhere against his will and be sued for it. Burn him
and box up the ashes, boil him and bottle the soup; reduce him by any
comfortable means they saw fit, according to their humane way, fetch him
there in any guise but that of a living man, and the company would haul
him to Hades if they billed him to that destination.
But not in his present shape and form; not as a living, swearing,
suit-threatening man. Take him to hell out of there, the conductor
ordered in rising temper. Don't insult him and his road by coming around
there to make them a part in their idle, life-wasting, time-gambling,
blasted to the seventh depth of Hades tricks.
The baggage-man closed the door, the conductor gave the signal to pull
out, and the train departed, leaving Seth Craddock on the truck, the
rather shamed and dampened citizens standing around. They concluded they
would have to hang him, after all their trouble for a more romantic,
picturesque, and unusual exit. And hanging was such a common, ordinary
way of getting rid of a distasteful man that the pleasure was taken out
of their day.
Judge Thayer was firmly against hanging. He ordered the undertaker to
open the box, which he did with fear and trembling, seeing in a future
hour the vengeance of Seth Craddock descending on his solemn head.
Craddock, sweat-drenched and weak from his rebellion and the heat of his
close quarters, sat up with scarcely a breath left in him for a curse.
Judge Thayer delivered him to Morgan, with instructions to lock him up.
The city calaboose was an institution apart from the county jail. Due to
some past rivalry between the county and city officials, the palatial jail
was closed to offenders against the lowly and despised-by-the-sheriff
town ordinances. So, out of its need, the city had built this little
house with bars across the one small window, and a barred door formed of
wagon tires to close outside the one of wood.
No great amount of business ever had been done in this calaboose, for
minor infractions of the law were not troubled with in that town. If
there ever was anybody left over from a shooting he usually went along
about his business or his pleasure until the coroner's jury assembled
and let him off. The last man confined in the calaboose had stolen a
bottle of whisky, a grave and reprehensible offense which set all the
town talking and speculating on the proper punishment. This poor bug had
made a fire of his hay bedding in the night, and perished as miserably
as everybody said he deserved. The charred boards in one corner still
attested to his well-merited end.
Morgan was not at all confident of the retaining powers of the
calaboose, neither was he greatly concerned. He believed that if
Craddock could break out he would make a streak away from Ascalon,
hooked up at high speed, never to return. It was not in the nature of a
man humbled from a high place, mocked by the lowly, derided by those
whom he had oppressed, contemned by the false friends he had favored, to
come back on an errand of revenge. The job was too general in a case
like Craddock's. He would have to exterminate most of the town.
They left him in the calaboose with whatever reflections were his. The
window was too high in the wall for anybody on the outside to see in, or
for Craddock, tall as he was, to see anything out of it but the sky.
Public interest had fallen away since he was neither to be shipped out
nor hanged, only locked up like a whisky thief. Only a few boys hung
around the calaboose, which stood apart in the center of at least half
an acre of ground, as if ashamed of its office in a community that used
it so seldom when it was needed so often.
Morgan returned to the square for his horse, rather dissatisfied now
with the day's developments. It was going to be troublesome to have this
fellow on his hands. Judge Thayer should not have interfered with the
last decree of public justice. It would have been over with by now.
Rhetta Thayer was in the door of the newspaper office. She came to the
edge of the sidewalk as Morgan approached, leading his horse. She did
not reflect the public satisfaction from her handsome face and troubled
eyes that Ascalon in general enjoyed over Craddock's humiliation. Morgan
wondered why.
"I asked too much of you, Mr. Morgan," she said, coming at once to the
matter that clouded her honest eyes.
"You couldn't ask too much of me," he returned, with no unction of
flattery, but the cheerfully frank expression of an ingenuous heart.
"I didn't realize the disadvantage you would be under, I didn't know
what I expected of you when I urged you into this. Meeting that
desperate man with a rope instead of a gun!"
"You didn't know I was going to meet him with a rope," he said.
He stood before her, hat in hand, wholesomely honest in his homely
ruggedness, a flush of embarrassment tinging his face. The sun in his
short hair seemed laughing, picking out little flecks of gold as mica
flakes in the sea waves turn and flash.
"You might have been killed! When I saw him throw his hand to his gun!
Oh! it was terrible!"
"So you're the editor now?" he said, cheerfully, trying to turn her from
this disturbing subject.
"My heart jumped clear out of my mouth when you threw your rope!"
"It came over and helped me," he said, in manner sincere and grave.
A little flame of color lifted in her pale cheek. She looked at the
dusty road, her hand pressed to her bosom as if to make certain that the
truant heart had come back to her like a dove to its cote out of the
storm. She looked up presently, and smiled a bit; looked down again, the
hot blood writing a confession in her face.
"I hope it did," she said.
Morgan felt himself in such a suffocation of strange delight he could
find no word that seemed the right word, and left it to silence, which,
perhaps was best. He looked at the road, also, as if he would search
with her there for grains of gold, or for lost hearts which leap out of
maidens' breasts, in the white dust marked by many feet.
Together they looked up, faces white, breath faltering on dry lips. So
the fire leaps in a moment such as this and enwraps the soul. It is no
mystery, it is no process of long distillation. In a moment; so.
"Here are his guns," said he, his voice trembling as if it strained in
leaping the subject that lay in its door to go back to the business of
the day.
"His guns!" she repeated after him, shuddering at the thought.
"Hang them over your desk--you might need them, now you're the editor."
She accepted them from his hand, but dubiously, holding them far out
from contact with her dress as something unclean. Morgan reproached
himself for offering her these instruments which had sent so many men
to sudden, undefended death. He reached to relieve her hand.
"Let me do it for you, Miss Thayer."
"No," she denied him, putting down her qualm, clutching the heavy belt
firmly. "It is a notable trophy, a great distinction you're giving me,
Mr. Morgan. I'm afraid you'll think I'm a coward," smiling wanly as she
lifted her face.
"You're not afraid to edit the paper. That seems to me the most
dangerous job in town."
"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.