ASCALON CURLS ITS LIP
It was the marvel and regret of people who made their adventures
vicariously, and lived the thrill of them by reading the newspapers,
that Ascalon had come to a so sudden and unmistakable end of its
romance. For a little while there was hope that it might rise against
this Cromwell who had reached out a long arm and silenced it; for a few
days there was satisfaction in reading of this man's exploits in this
wickedest of all wicked towns, for newspapers sent men to study him, and
interview him, and write of his conquest of Ascalon on the very battle
ground.
Little enough they got out of Morgan, who met them kindly and talked of
the agricultural future of the country lying almost unpeopled beyond the
notorious little city's door. Such as they learned of his methods of
taming a lawless community they got from looser tongues than the city
marshal's.
Even from Chicago and St. Louis these explorers among the fallen temples
of adventure came, some of them veterans who had talked with Jesse James
in his day but recently come to a close. They waited around a few days
for the shot that would remove this picturesque crusader, not believing,
any more than the rest of the world, including Ascalon itself, believed
that this state of quiescence could prevail without end.
While they waited, sending off long stories by telegraph to their
papers every night, they saw the exodus of the proscribed begin,
increase, and end. The night-flitting women went first, urged away by
the necessities of the flaccid fish which lived upon their shame. The
gamblers and gamekeepers followed close behind.
A little while the small saloon-keepers who had nosed the floor and
licked up the crumbs which fell from Peden's bar hung around, hoping
that it was a flurry that would soon subside. They had big eyes for
future prosperity, the overlord being now out of the way, and talked
excitedly among themselves, even approached Morgan through an emissary
with proposals of a handsome subsidy.
But when they saw a Kansas City gambler come and strip Peden's hall of
its long bar and furnishings, of its faro tables and doctored roulette
wheels, load them all on a car and ship them to his less notorious but
safer town, they knew it was the end. Ascalon had fallen with its most
notable man, never to rise up again.
The last of the correspondents left on the evening of the day that Judge
Thayer set the rainmaker to work. He sent the obituary of Ascalon, as he
believed, ahead of him by wire.
Not that Ascalon was as dead as it appeared on the surface, or the
gamblers would make it out to be. True, the undertaker's business had
gone, and he with it; Druggist Gray's trade in the bromides and
restoratives in demand after debauches, and repairs for bunged heads
after the nightly carousels, had fallen away to nothing; the Elkhorn
hotel and the Santa Fé café were feeding few, and the dealers in
vanities and fancies, punctured hosiery, lacy waists, must pack up and
follow those upon whom they had prospered.
But there was as much business as before in lumber and hardware,
implements, groceries, and supplies for the cattle ranches and the many
settlers who were arriving without solicitation or proclamation and
establishing themselves to build success upon the ruins of failure left
by those who had gone before.
It was only the absence of the wastrels and those who preyed upon them,
and the quiet of nights after raucous revelry, that made the place seem
dead. Ascalon was as much alive as any town of its kind that had no more
justification for being in the beginning. It had more houses than it
could use now, since so many of its population had gone; empty stores
were numerous around the square, and more would be seen very soon. The
fair was over, the holiday crowd was gone. That was all.
Rhetta Thayer came back the same evening the last correspondent faced
away from Ascalon. Morgan saw her in the _Headlight_ office, where she
worked late that night to overtake her accumulated affairs, her pretty
head bent over a litter of proofs. Her door stood open as he passed, but
he hastened by softly, and did not return that way again.
He felt that she had gone away from Ascalon on his account, fearful that
she would meet him with blood fresh upon his hands. The attitude of
Judge Thayer was but a faint reflection of her own, he was sure. It was
best that they should not meet again, for blood had blotted out what
had seemed the beginning of a tender regard between them. That was at an
end.
During the next few days little was seen of Morgan in Ascalon. When he
was not riding on long excursions into the outlying country he could
have been found, if occasion had arisen demanding his presence on the
square, in the station agent's office at the depot. There he spent hours
hearing the little agent, whose head was as bald as a grasshopper's,
nothing but a pale fringe from ear to ear at the back of his neck,
recount the experiences that had fallen in his way during his
five-years' occupancy of that place.
This period covered the most notorious history of the town. In that
time, according to the check the agent had kept on them, no fewer than
fifty-nine men had met violent death on the street and in the caves of
vice in Ascalon. This man also noted keenly every arrival in these slack
days, duly reporting them all to Morgan, for whom he had a genuine
friendship and respect. So there was little chance of anybody slipping
in to set a new brewing of trouble over the dying embers of that
stamped-out fire.
Morgan avoided the _Headlight_ office, for there was a sensitive spot in
his heart that Rhetta's abhorrence of him hurt keenly. But more than
that he had the thought of sparing her the embarrassment of a meeting,
even of his shadow passing her door.
Twice he saw her at a distance in the street, and once she stood waiting
as if to speak to him. But the memory of her face at Peden's door that
night was with him always; he could not believe she would seek a
meeting out of a spontaneous and honest desire to see him. Only because
their lives were thrown together for a little while in that dice-box of
fate, and avoidance seemed studied and a thing that might set foolish
tongues clapping, she paused and looked his way as if waiting for him to
approach. She was serving convention, not with a wish of her heart. So
he believed, and turned the other way.
Cattlemen from the range at hand, and several from Texas who had driven
their herds to finish on the far-famed Kansas grass for the fall market,
were loading great numbers of cattle in Ascalon every day. The drouth
was driving them to this sacrifice. Lean as their cattle were, they
would be leaner in a short time.
This activity brought scores of cowboys to town daily. Under the old
order business would have been lively at night, when most of the
herdsmen were at leisure. As it was, they trooped curiously around the
square, some of them who had looked forward on the long drive to a
hilarious blowout at the trail's end resentfully sarcastic, but the
greater number humorously disposed to make the most of it.
Sober, these men of the range were very much like reservation Indians in
town on a holiday. They walked slowly around and around the square,
looking at everything closely, saying little, to dispose themselves
along the edge of the sidewalk after a while and smoke. There were no
fights, nobody let off a gun. When Morgan passed them on his quiet
rounds, they nudged each other, and looked after him with low comments,
for his fame had gone far in a little while.
These men had no quarrel with Morgan, disappointed of their revelry,
thirsty after their long waiting, sour as some of them were over finding
this oasis of their desert dry. They only looked on him with silent
respect. Nobody cared to provoke him; it was wise to give the road when
a fellow met that man. So they talked among themselves, somewhat
disappointed to find that Morgan was not carrying his rifle about with
him these peaceful days, unusual weapon for a gun-fighting man in that
country.
In this way, with considerable coming and going through its doors, yet
all in sobriety and peace, Ascalon passed the burning, rainless summer
days. But not without a little cheer in the hard glare of the parching
range, not without a laugh and a chuckle, and a grin behind the hand.
The town knew all about the rainmaker at work behind the shielding rows
of tall corn in Judge Thayer's garden. An undertaking of such scope was
too big to sequester in any man's back yard.
Whether the rainmaker believed in his formula, or whether he was a plain
fraud who was a little sharper on weather conditions than most men, and
good on an estimate of a drouth's duration, he seemed to be doing
something to earn his money. Day and night he kept something burning in
a little tin stove with a length of pipe that came just above the corn,
sending up a smoke that went high toward the cloudless sky before the
wind began to blow in the early morning hours, and after it ceased at
evening, after its established plan. During the day this smoke dispersed
very generally over town, causing some coughing and sneezing, and not a
little swearing and scoffing.
Sulphur, mainly, the doctor and Druggist Gray pronounced the chemical to
be. It was a sacrilege, the Baptist preacher declared, an offering to
Satan, from the smell of it, rather than a scientific assault upon the
locked heavens to burst open the windows and let out a dash of rain. If
the effort of the mysterious stranger brought anything at all, it would
bring disaster, the preacher declared. A cyclone, very likely, and
lightning, in expression of the Almighty's wrath.
Those who did not accept it wrathfully, as the preacher, or resentfully,
as Druggist Gray, from whom the experimenter bought none of his
chemicals, or humorously, as the doctor and many of higher intelligence,
had a sort of sneaking hope that something might come of it. If the rain
man could stir up a commotion and fetch a soaker, it would be the
salvation of that country. The range would revive, streams would flow,
water would come again into dry wells, and the new farmers who had come
in would be given hope to hang on another year and by their trade keep
Ascalon from perishing utterly.
But mainly the disposition was to laugh. Judge Thayer was a well-meaning
man, but easy. He believed he was bringing a doctor in to cure the
country's sickness, where all of his hopes were staked out in town lots,
when he had brought only a quack. A hundred dollars, even if the faker
made no more, was pretty good pay for seven days' work, they said. A
dollar's worth of sulphur would cover his expenses. And if it happened
to turn out a good guess, and a rain did blow up on time, Judge Thayer
was just fool enough to give the fellow a letter that would help him put
his fraud through in another place.
It did not appear, as the days passed, that the rainmaker was driving
much of a hole in the hot air that pressed down upon that tortured land.
No commotion was apparent in the upper regions, no cloud lifted to cut
off for an hour the shafts of the fierce sun. Ascalon lay panting,
exhausted, dry as tow, the dust of driven herds blowing through its
bare, bleak streets.
Gradually, as dry burning day succeeded the one in all particulars like
it that had gone before, what little hope the few had in Judge Thayer's
weather doctor evaporated and passed away. Those who had scoffed at the
beginning jeered louder now, making a triumph of it. The Baptist
preacher said the evil of meddling in the works of the Almighty was
becoming apparent in the increasing severity of the hot wind. Ascalon,
for its sins past and its sacrilege of the present, was to writhe and
scorch and wither from the face of the earth.
For all this, interest in the rainmaker's efforts did not lax. People
sniffed his smoke, noting every change in its flavor, and pressed around
Judge Thayer's garden fence trying to get a look at the operations.
Judge Thayer was not a little indignant over the scoffings and
denunciations, and this impertinent curiosity to pry upon what he gave
them to understand was his own private venture.
Keep off a safe distance from this iniquitous business, he warned with
sarcasm; don't lean on the fence and risk the wrath of the Almighty.
Let the correction of Providence fall on his own shoulders, which had
been carrying the sins of Ascalon a long time; don't get so close as to
endanger their wise heads under the blow. At the same time he gave them
to understand that if any rain came of the efforts of his weather doctor
it would be his, the judge's, own private and individual rain, wrung
from denying nature by science, and that science paid for by the judge's
own money.
The scoffers laughed louder at this, the sniffers wrinkled their noses a
little more. But the Baptist preacher only shook his head, the hot wind
blowing his wide overalls against his thin legs.
Morgan stood aloof from doubters, hopers, scoffers, and all, saying no
word for or against the rainmaker. Every morning now he took a ride into
the country, to the mystification of the town, coming back before the
heat mounted to its fiercest, always on hand at night to guard against
any outbreak of violence among the visitors.
There were not a few in town who watched him away each morning in the
hope that something would overtake him and prevent his return; many more
who felt their hearts sink as he rode by their doors with the fear that
each ride would be his last. Out there in the open some enemy might be
lying behind a clump of tangled briars. These women's prayers went with
the city marshal as he rode.
On a certain morning Morgan overtook Joe Lynch, driving toward town with
his customary load of bones. Morgan walked his horse beside Joe's wagon
to chat with him, finding always a charm of originality and rather more
than superficial thinking about the old fellow that was refreshing in
the intellectual stagnation of the town.
"Is that rain-crow feller still workin' over in town?" Joe inquired as
soon as greetings had passed.
"I suppose he is, I don't believe his seven days are up yet."
"This is his sixth, I'm keepin' notches on him. I thought maybe he'd
skinned out. Do you think he'll be able to fetch it?"
"I hope he can, but I've got my doubts, Joe."
"Yes, and I've got more than doubts. Science is all right, I reckon, as
fur as I ever heard, but no science ain't able to rake up clouds in the
sky like you'd rake up hay in a field and fetch on a rain. Even if they
did git the clouds together, how're they goin' to split 'em open and let
the rain out?"
"That would be something of a job," Morgan admitted.
"You've got to have lightnin' to bust 'em, and no science that ever was
can't make lightnin', I'm here to tell you, son. If some feller _did_
happen on how it was done, what do you reckon'd become of that man?"
"Why, they do make it, Joe--they make it right over at Ascalon, keep it
in jars under that table at the depot. Didn't you ever see it?"
"That ain't the same stuff," Joe said, with high disdain, almost
contempt. "Wire lightnin' and sky lightnin' ain't no more alike than
milk's like whisky. Well, say that science _did_ make up a batch of sky
lightnin'--but I ain't givin' in it can be done--how air they goin' to
git up to the clouds, how're they goin' to make it do the bustin' at the
right time?"
"That's more than I can tell you, Joe. It's too deep for me."
"Yes, or any other man. They'd let it go all at once and cause a
waterspout, that's about what they'd do, and between a waterspout and a
dry spell, give me the dry spell!"
"I never was in one, but I've seen 'em tearin' up the hills."
"Then you know what they air. It'd suit me right up to the han'le if
this feller could bring a rain, for I tell you I never saw so much
sufferin' and misery as these settlers are goin' through out here on
this cussid pe-rairie right now. Some of these folks is haulin' water
from the river as much as thirty mile!"
"I notice all the creeks and branches are dry. But it's only a little
way to plenty of water all over this country if they'll dig. Some of
them have put down wells during this dry spell and hit all the water
they need. There's a sheet of water flowing under this country from the
mountains in Colorado."
"Oh, you git out!"
"Just the same as the Arkansas River, only spread out for miles," Morgan
insisted. "A drouth here doesn't mean anything to that water supply;
I've been riding around over this country trying to show people that.
Most of them think I'm crazy--till they dig."
"I don't guess you're cracked yit," Joe allowed, "but you will be if you
stay in this country. If it wasn't for the bones you wouldn't find me
hangin' around here--I'd make for Wyoming. They tell me there's any
amount of bones that's never been touched up in that country."
"I noticed several other wagons out gathering bones. They'll soon clean
them up here, Joe."
"They're all takin' to it," Joe said, with the resentment of a man who
feels competition, "hornin' in on my business, what's mine by rights of
bein' the first man to go into it in this blame country. Let 'em--let
'em run their teams down scourin' around after bones--I'll be here to
pick up the remains of 'em all. I was here first, I've stuck through the
rushes of them fellers that's come into this country and dried up, and
I'll be here when this crowd of 'em dries up. Them fellers haul in bones
and trade 'em at the store for flour and meal, they don't git half out
of 'em what I do out of mine, and they're hurtin' the business, drivin'
it down to nothin'."
"Hotter than usual this morning," Morgan remarked, not so much
interested in bones and the competition of bones.
"Wind's dying down; I noticed that some time ago. Goin' to leave us to
sizzle without any fannin'. Ruther have it that way, myself. This
eternal wind dries a man's brains up after a while. I'd say, if I was
anywhere else, it was fixin' up to rain."
"Or for a cyclone."
"Too late in the season for 'em," Joe declared, not willing to grant
even that diversion to the drouth-plagued land of bones.
Joe reverted to the bones; he could not keep away from bones. There was
not much philosophy in him today, not much of anything but a plaint and
a denunciation of competition in bones. Morgan thought the wind must be
having its effect on Joe's brains; they seemed to be so hydrated that
morning they would have rattled against his skull. Morgan considered
riding on and leaving him, at the risk of giving offense, dismissing the
notion when they rose a hill and looked down on Ascalon not more than a
mile away.
"I believe there's a cloud coming up over there," said Morgan, pointing
to the southwest.
"Which?" said Joe, rousing as briskly as if he had been doused with a
bucket of water. "Cloud? No, that ain't no cloud. That's dust. More wind
behind that, a regular sand storm. Ever been through one of 'em?"
"In Nebraska," Morgan replied, with detached attention, watching what he
still believed to be a cloud lifting above the hazy horizon.
"Nothin' like the sand storms in this country," Joe discounted, never
willing to yield one point in derogative comparison between that land
and any other. "Feller told me one time he saw it blow sand so hard here
it started in wearin' a knot hole in the side of his shanty in the
evenin', and by mornin' the whole blame shack was gone. Eat them boards
up clean, that feller said. Didn't leave nothin' but the nails. But I
always thought he was stretchin' it a little," Joe added, not a gleam of
humor to be seen anywhere in the whole surface of his wind-dried face.
"That's a cloud, all right," Morgan insisted, passing the reduction by
attrition of the settler's shack.
"Cloud?" said Joe, throwing up his head with renewed alertness. He
squinted a little while into the southwest. "Bust my hub if it _ain't_ a
cloud! Comin' up, too--comin' right along. Say, do you reckon that
rain-crow feller brought that cloud up from somewheres?"
"He didn't have anything to do with it," Morgan assured him, grinning a
little over the quick shift in the old man's attitude, for there was awe
in his voice.
"No, I don't reckon," said Joe thoughtfully, "but it looks kind of
suspicious."
The cloud was lifting rapidly, as summer storms usually come upon that
unprotected land, sullen in its threat of destruction rather than
promise of relief. A great dark fleece rolled ahead of the green-hued
rain curtain, the sun bright upon it, the hush of its oncoming over the
waiting earth. No breath of wind stirred, no movement of nature
disturbed the silent waiting of the dusty land, save the lunging of
foolish grasshoppers among the drooping, withered sunflowers beside the
road as the travelers passed.
"I'm goin' to see if I can make it to town before she hits," said Joe,
lashing out with his whip. "Lordy! ain't it a comin'!"
"I think I'll ride on," said Morgan, feeling a natural desire for
shelter against that grim-faced storm.
The oncoming cloud had swept its flank across the sun before Morgan rode
into town, and in the purple shadow of its threat people stood before
their houses, watching it unfold. In Judge Thayer's garden--it was the
house Morgan had fixed on that first morning of his exploration--the
rainmaker was firing up vigorously, sending up a smoke of such density
as he had not employed in his labors before. This black column rose but
a little way, where it flattened against the cool current that was
setting in ahead of the storm, and whirled off over the roofs of Ascalon
to mock the scoffers who had laughed in their day.
Morgan stabled his horse and went to the square, where many of the
town's inhabitants were gathered, all faces tilted to watch the storm.
Judge Thayer was there, glorifying in the success of his undertaking,
sparing none of those who had mocked him for a sucker and a fool. A cool
breath of reviving wind was moving, fresh, sweet, rain-scented; as
hopeful, as life-giving, as a reprieve to one chained among faggots at
the stake of intolerance.
"It looks like you're going to win, Judge," Morgan said.
"Win? I've won! Look at it, pourin' rain over at Glenmore, the advance
of it not three miles from here! It'll be here inside of five minutes,
rainin' pitchforks."
But it did not happen so. The rain appeared to have taken to dallying on
the way, in spite of the thickening of clouds over Ascalon. Straining
faces, green-tinted in the gloomy shadow of the overhanging cloud,
waited uplifted for the first drops of rain; the dark outriders of the
storm wheeled and mingled, turned and rolled, low over the dusty roofs;
lightning rived the rain curtain that swept the famished earth, so near
at hand that the sensitive could feel it in their hair; deep thunder
sent its tremor through the ground, jarring the windows of Ascalon that
had looked in their day upon storms of human passion which were but
insect strife to this.
Yet not a drop of rain fell on roof, on trampled way, on waiting face,
on outstretched hand, in all of Ascalon.
Judge Thayer was seen hurrying from the square, making for home and the
weather doctor, who was about to let the rain escape.
"He's goin' to head it off," said one of the scoffers to Morgan,
beginning to feel a return of his exultation.
"It's goin' to miss us," said Druggist Gray, his head thrown back, his
Adam's apple like an elbow of stovepipe in his thin neck.
"We may get a good shower out of one end of it," Conboy still hoped,
pulling for the rain as he might have boosted for a losing horse.
"Nothing more than a sprinkle, if that much," said the station agent,
shaking his head, which he had bared to the cool wind.
"He's got him firin' up like he was tryin' to hive a swarm of bees," one
reported, coming from the seat of scientific labors.
"It's breakin', it's passin' by us--we'll not get a drop of it!"
So it appeared. Overhead the swirling clouds were passing on; in the
distance the thunder was fainter. The wind began to freshen from the
track of the rain, the pigeons came out of the courthouse tower for a
look around, light broke through the thinning clouds.
Not more than a mile or two southward of Ascalon the rain was falling in
a torrent, the roar of it still quite plain in the ears of those whose
thirst for its cooling balm was to be denied. The rain was going on,
after soaking and reviving Glenmore, which place Judge Thayer would have
given a quarter of his possessions to have had it miss.
A mockery, it seemed, a rebuke, a chastisement, the way nature conducted
that rain storm. Judge Thayer urged the rainmaker to his greatest
efforts to stop it, turn it, bring it back; smoke green and black went
up in volumes, to stream away on the cool, refreshing wind. Sulphur and
rosin and pitch were identified in that smoke as surely as the spectrum
reveals the composition of the sun. But the wind was against the
rainmaker; nature conspired to mock him before men as the quack that he
was.
The gloom of storm cleared from the streets of Ascalon, the worn and
tired look came back into faces that had been illumined for a little
while with hope. Farther away, fainter, the thunder sounded, dimmer the
murmur of the withdrawing rain.
The cool wind still blew like whispered consolation for a great, a
pangful loss, but it could not soften the hard hearts of those who had
stood with lips to the fountain of life and been denied. The people
turned again to their pursuits, their planning, their gathering of
courage to hold them up against the blaze of sun which soon must break
upon them for a parching season again. The dust lay deep under their
feet, gray on their roofs where shingles curled like autumn leaves in
the sun. The rainmaker sent up his vain, his fatuous, foolish,
infinitesimal breath of smoke. The rain went on its way.
"Aw, hell!" said Ascalon, in its derisive, impious way; "Aw, hell!"