A BONDSMAN BREATHES EASIER
There was a little ripple, more of mirth than excitement or concern, in
Ascalon next morning when it became known that Seth Craddock had kicked
a hole in the burned corner of the calaboose and leaked out of it into
the night.
Let him go; it was as well that way as any, they said, since it relieved
them at once of the charge of his keep and the trouble of disposing of
him in the end. He never would come back to that town, let him ravage in
other parts of the world as he might. What the town had lost in
notoriety by his going would be offset by the manner of his degradation,
already written at length by the local correspondent of the _Kansas City
Times_ and sent on to be printed with a display heading in a prominent
position in that paper and copied by other papers all over the land.
Seth Craddock and his reign were behind the closed door of the past,
through which he was not likely to kick a hole and emerge again, after
his manner of going from the calaboose. That matter off the town's mind,
it ranged itself along the shady side of the street to watch the present
contest between the law and those who lived beyond it.
Up to this point it appeared that the law was going to have it according
to its mandate. Peden made no attempt to open his place on the night
following Craddock's deposition, the lesser lights following his
virtuous example.
But there was in this quiescent confidence, in this lull almost
threatening, something similar to the impertinent repression of an
incorrigible child who yields to authority immediately above him,
knowing that presently it will be overruled. Something was clouding up
to break over Ascalon; the sleepiest in the town was aware of that.
How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and
explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely
tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that
Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance,
but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although
friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.
Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of
hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force,
when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite
the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was
to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.
Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours
in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the
arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and
having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the
pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls
than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line
concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the _Headlight_ during that
time.
In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of
this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and
growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged
to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle
were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks
ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a
barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its
blind-striking hand.
On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta
Thayer stopped Morgan as he was passing the _Headlight_ office at the
beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that
she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some passing terror had
opened their windows.
"He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully,
facing him just inside the door.
"Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful assurance in
his words. "I can assure you I was at no time in any danger."
"Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on
her quick-coming breath.
"It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had
heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it--I never
stepped in front of him anywhere."
"That woman in the tent--the rustler's wife--told me--she told me just
a little while ago. Oh! if he--if he'd have hit you!"
"The kids all came running out of the tent--I thought he'd hit one of
them," Morgan said, humorously, thinking only to calm her great
agitation and quiet her friendly--if there could be no dearer
interest--concern.
"It was Peden got him to do it," she declared.
"Peden? Why should Hutton go out to do that fellow's gunning?"
"Dell Hutton's gambling the county's money, he killed Mr. Smith because
he charged him with it! Pa knows it, pa's on his bond, and if he keeps
on losing the county funds there on Peden's game we'll have to make it
good. It will take everything we've got--if he keeps on."
"That's bad, that's mighty bad," Morgan said, deeply concerned,
curiously awakened to the inner workings of things in Ascalon. "Still, I
don't see what connection I have in it, why he'd want to take a shot at
me on the quiet that way."
"He shoots from behind, he shot Mr. Smith in the back, and it was at
night, besides. Don't you see how it was? Peden must have bribed him to
do it, promised to make good his losses, or something like that."
"Plain as a wagon track," Morgan said.
"I don't know why I ever got you into this tangle," she lamented, "I
don't know what made me so selfish and so blind."
"It's just one more little complication in Ascalon's sickness," he
comforted her, "it doesn't amount to beans. The poor little fool was so
scared that morning he could hardly lift his gun. He'll never make
another break."
"If I only thought he wouldn't! He's as treacherous as a snake, you
can't tell where he's sneaking to bite you. Give it up, Mr. Morgan,
won't you, please?" She turned to him suddenly, appealing with her eyes,
with her wistful lips, with every line of her sympathetic, anxious face.
"Give it up?" he repeated, her meaning not quite clear.
"The office, I mean. Surely, as I coaxed you into taking it, I've got a
right to ask you to give it up. You've done what you took the place to
do, you've got Craddock out of it and away from here. Your work's done,
you can quit now with a good conscience and no excuse to anybody."
"Why," said Morgan, reflectively, "I don't believe I could quit right
now, Miss Rhetta. There's something more to come, it isn't quite
finished yet."
"There's a great deal more to come, the end of all this fighting and
killing and grinning treachery never will come!" she said, in great
bitterness. "What's the use of one man putting his life against all this
viciousness? There's no cure for the curse of Ascalon but time. Let it
go, Mr. Morgan--I beg you to give it up."
Morgan took the hand that she reached out to him in her appeal. The
great fervor of her earnest heart had drawn the blood away from it,
leaving it cold. He clasped it, tightly, to warm it in his big palm, and
spoke comfortingly, yet he would not, could not, tell her that he would
give over the office and leave the town to its devices. The work he had
begun on her account, at her appeal, was not finished. He wanted to give
her a peace that would make permanent the placidity of her eyes such as
had warmed his heart during those three days. But he could not tell her
that.
"If it goes on," she said, sad that he would not yield to her appeal,
"you'll have to--you'll have to--do what the rest of them have done. And
I don't want you to do that, Mr. Morgan. I want you to keep clean."
"As it must be, so it will be," he said. "But I don't see any reason why
I can't keep on the way I've started. There's nobody doing any shooting
here now."
"They're only waiting," she said.
"I'll have to watch them a little longer, then," he told her; "somebody
might shoot your windows out."
He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its
sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a
little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back.
"He's over there in the courthouse now--that's his office where you see
the light--trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know,"
she declared.
Morgan left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town
according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he
watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on
his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to
hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and
considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him,
guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.
Rhetta Thayer, leaving the _Headlight_ office at nine o'clock, saw two
men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk
of starlight and early night. She paused on her way, wondering, and her
wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in
the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell
Hutton. The other she had no need to name.
When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of
the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood
surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. And
when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of gratitude rose
out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in
the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was
holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.