IN THE SQUARE AT ASCALON
Morgan had time for a bitter train of reflection as he rode, never
looking behind him to see who came after. Whether Stilwell would yield
to his wife's appeal and remain at home, whether Fred could be bent from
his fiery desire to be avenged on the author of their calamity, he took
no trouble to surmise. He only knew that he, Calvin Morgan, was rushing
again to combat at the call of this girl whose only appeal was in the
face of dreadful peril, whose only service was that of blood.
She had come again, this time like a messenger bearing a command, to
call him back to a duty which he believed he had relinquished and put
down forever. And solely because it would be treasonable to that duty
which still clung to him like a tenacious cobweb, he was riding into the
smoke of the burning town.
So he told himself as he galloped on, but never believing for a moment
in the core of his heart that it was true. Deep within him there was a
response to a more tender call than the stern trumpeting of duty--the
answer to an appeal of remorseful eyes, of a pleading heart that could
not bear the shame of the charge that he was hiding and afraid. For her,
and his place of honor in her eyes, he was riding to Ascalon that hour.
Not for Ascalon, and those in it who had snarled at his heels. For her,
not the larger duty of a sworn officer of the law riding to defend and
protect the lives and property under his jurisdiction.
Morgan pulled up his horse at the edge of town, to consider his
situation. He had left Stilwell's in such haste, and in the midst of
such domestic anguish, that he had neglected to bring one of the
rancher's rifles with him. His only weapon was his revolver, and the
ammunition at his belt was scant, due to the foolish security of the
days when he believed Seth Craddock never would return. He must pick up
a gun somewhere, and ammunition.
There was some scattered shooting going on in the direction of the
square, but whether the citizens were gathering to the defense of the
town, or the raiders were firing admonitory shots to keep them indoors,
Morgan could not at that distance tell. He rode on, considering his most
urgent necessity of more arms, concluding to ride straight for Judge
Thayer's house and borrow his buffalo rifle.
He swung into the road that led past Judge Thayer's house, which
thoroughfare entered the square at the bank corner, still about a
quarter of a mile away. As he came round the turn of the road he saw, a
few hundred yards ahead of him, a man hurrying toward the square with a
gun in his hand. A spurt of speed and Morgan was beside him, leaning
over, demanding the gun.
It was the old man who had jumped out of his reverie on the morning of
Morgan's first return to Ascalon, and menaced him with the crook of his
hickory stick. The veteran was going now without the comfort of his
stick, making pretty good time, eager in the rousing of fires long
stilled in his cooling heart. He began trotting on when he recognized
Morgan, shouting for him to hurry.
"Lend me your gun, Uncle John--I left mine in the hotel," Morgan said.
"Hell, what'll I do then?" said Uncle John, unwilling to give it up.
Morgan was insistent. He commandeered the weapon in the name of the law.
That being the case, Uncle John handed it up to him, with a word of
affection for it, and a little swearing over his bad luck.
It was a double-barreled buffalo rifle, a cap-and-ball gun of very old
pattern, belonging back in the days of Parkman and the California Trail,
and the two charges which it bore were all that Morgan could hope to
expend, for Uncle John carried neither pouch nor horn. But Morgan was
thankful for even that much, and rode on.
A little way ahead a man, hatless, wild-haired, came running out from
his dooryard, having witnessed Morgan's levying on Uncle John's gun and
read his reason for it. This citizen rushed into the road and offered a
large revolver, which Morgan leaned and snatched from his hand as he
galloped by. But it hadn't a cartridge in its chambers, and its caliber
was not of Morgan's ammunition. Still, he rode on with it in his hand,
hoping that it might serve its turn.
Morgan galloped on toward the square, where a great volume of smoke hid
the courthouse and all of the town that lay before the wind. He hoped to
meet somebody there with a gun worth while, although he had no
immediate plan for pitching into the fight and using it. That must be
fixed for him by circumstances when he confronted them.
Women and children stood in the dooryards watching the fire that was
cutting through the thin-walled buildings on that side of the
square--the hotel side--as if they were strawboard boxes. They were
silent in the great climax of fear; they stood as people stand,
straining and waiting, watching the approach of a tornado, no safety in
flight, no refuge at hand. There was but one man in sight, and he was
running like a jack rabbit across the staked ground behind Judge
Thayer's office, heading for the prairie. It was Earl Gray, the
druggist. He was covering sixteen feet at a jump. When he saw Morgan
galloping into the town, Gray stopped, darted off at an angle as if he
were going on some brave and legitimate excursion, and disappeared.
The Elkhorn hotel was well under way of destruction, its roof already
fallen, its thin walls bending inward, perforated in a score of places
by flames. The head of the street was unguarded; Morgan rode on and
halted at the edge of the square.
Smoke blotted out everything in the square, except for a little shifting
by the rising wind which revealed the courthouse, the pigeons in wild
flight around the tower. There was not a man in sight, neither raider
nor defender. Across on the other side of the square, as if they
defended that part from being set on fire, the citizens were doing some
shooting with rifles, even shotguns, as Morgan could define by the
sound. The raiders were there, for they were answering with shot and
yell.
Morgan caught the flutter of a dress at the farther corner of the
bank--a little squat brick building this was--where some woman stood and
watched. He rode around, and at the sound of his approach a gun-barrel
was trained on him, and a familiar fair head appeared, cheek laid
against the rifle stock in a most determined and competent way.
"Dora! don't shoot!" Morgan shouted. In a moment he was on the ground
beside her, and Dora Conboy was handing him his own rifle, pride and
relief in her blue eyes.
"I knew you'd come, I told them you'd come!" she said.
"How did you save it--what are you doing here, Dora?" he asked in
amazement.
"I was layin' for Craddock! If he'd 'a' come around that corner--but it
was you!"--with a sigh of relief.
"Have you got any shells, Dora?"
"No, I didn't have time to grab anything but your gun--I run to your
room when they set the hotel afire and drove us out."
"You're the bravest man in town!" he praised her, patting her shoulder
as if she were a very little girl, indeed. "Where are they all?"
"They've locked Riley, and Judge Thayer, and all the men that's got a
fight in 'em up in jail with the sheriff. Pa got away--he's over there
where you hear that shootin'--but he can't hit nothin'!" Dora said, in
hopeless disgust.
Morgan saw with relief that the magazine of his rifle was full, and a
shot in the barrel. He took Dora by the hand, turning away from his
haste to mount as if it came to him as an after-thought to thank her for
this great help.
"There's going to be a fight, Dora," he said. "You'd better get behind
the bank, and keep any of the women and children there that happen
along. You're a brave, good little soul, I'll never forget you for what
you've done for me today. Please take care of this gun--it belongs to
Uncle John."
He was up in the saddle with the last word, and gone, galloping into the
pitchy black smoke that swirled like a turgid flood from burning Ascalon
across the square.
Morgan's thought was to locate the raiders' horses and cut them off, if
it should be that some of the rascals were still on foot setting fires,
as it seemed likely from the smell of kerosene, that they were. It would
increase his doubtful chances to meet as many of them on foot as
possible. This was his thought.
He made out one mounted man dimly through the blowing smoke, watching in
front of the Santa Fé café, but recently set on fire. This fellow
doubtless was stationed there on the watch for him, Morgan believed,
from the close attention he was giving the front door of the place, out
of which a volume of grease-tainted smoke rolled. He wondered, with a
little gleam of his saving humor, what there was in his record since
coming to Ascalon that gave them ground for the belief that it was
necessary to burn a house to bring him out of it to face a fight.
Morgan rode on a little way across the square, not twenty yards behind
this raider, the sound of his horse silenced in the roar of fire and
growing wind. The heat of the place was terrific; burning shingles
swirled on the wind, coals and burning brands fell in a rain all over
the square. At the corner of the broad street that came into the square
at Peden's hall, another raider was stationed.
The citizens who were making a weak defense were being driven back, the
sound of firing was behind the stores, and falling off as if the raiders
pressed them hard. Morgan quickly concluded that Craddock and the rest
of the outfit were over there silencing this resistance, probably in the
belief that he was concerned in it.
This seemed to be his moment for action, yet arresting any of them was
out of the question, and he did not want to be the aggressor in the
bloodshed that must finish this fiendish morning's work. Hopeless as his
situation appeared, justified as he would have been in law and reason
for opening fire without challenge, he waited the further justification
of his own conscience. They had come looking for him; let them find him
here in their midst.
Fire was rising high among the stripped timbers of Peden's hall, purging
it of its debauchery and blood. On the rising wind the flames were
licking up Gray's drug-store, the barber shop beside it, the newspaper
office, the Santa Fé café and the incidental small shops between them
and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little while would
suffice to see their obliteration, a little longer to witness the
destruction of the town if the wind should carry the coals and blazing
shingles to other roofs, dry as the sered grasses of the plain.
The sound of this fire set by Seth Craddock in celebration of his return
to Ascalon was in Morgan's ears like the roar of the sea; the heat of it
drew the tough skin of his face as he rode fifty yards from it into the
center of the square. There he stopped, his rifle across his breast,
waiting for the discovery.
The man in the street near Peden's was the first to see and recognize
him as he waited there on his horse in the pose of challenge, in the
expectant, determined attitude of defense. This fellow yelled the alarm
and charged, breakneck through the smoke, shooting as he came.
Morgan fired one shot, offhand. The charging horse reared, stood so a
moment as rigidly as if fixed by bronze in that pose, its rider leaning
forward over its neck. Then, in whatever terrible pang that such sudden
stroke of death visits, it flung itself backward, the girths snapping
from its distended belly. The rider was flung aside, where Morgan saw
him lying, head on one extended arm, like a dog asleep in the sun.
The others came whooping their triumphant challenge and closed in on
Morgan then, and the battle of his life began.
How many were circling him as he stood in the center of the square, or
as close to the center as he could draw, near the courthouse steps,
Morgan did not know. Some had come from behind the courthouse, others
from the tame fight with the citizens back of the stores not yet on
fire.
The dust that rose from their great tumult of charge and galloping
attack, mingling with the smoke that trailed the ground, was Morgan's
protection and salvation. Nothing else saved him from almost immediate
death in the fury of their assault.
Morgan fired at the fleeting figures as they moved in obscurity through
this stifling cloud, circling him like Indians of the plains, shouting
to each other his location, drawing in upon him a little nearer as they
rode. He turned and shifted, yet he was a target all too plain for
anything he could do to lessen his peril.
A horse came plunging toward him through the blinding swirl, plain for a
flash of wild-flying mane and tossing rein, its saddle empty, fleeing
from the scene of fire-swept conflict as if urged on by the ghost of the
rider it had lost.
Bullets clipped Morgan's saddle as the raiders circled him in a wild
fête of shots and yells. One struck his rifle, running down the barrel
to the grip like a lightning bolt, spattering hot lead on his hand;
another clicked on the ornament of the Spanish bit, frightening his
horse, before that moment as steady as if at work on the range. The
shaken creature leaped, bunching its body in a shuddering knot. Blood
ran from its mouth in a stream.
A shot ripped through the high cantle of the saddle; one seared Morgan's
back as it rent his shirt. The horse leaped, to come down stiff-legged
like an outlaw, bleeding head thrust forward, nose close to the ground.
Then it reared and plunged, striking wildly with fore feet upon the
death-laden air.
In leaping to save himself from entanglement as the creature fell,
Morgan dropped his rifle. Before he could recover himself from the
spring out of the saddle, the horse, thrashing in the paroxysm of death,
struck the gun with its shod fore foot, snapping the stock from the
barrel.
Dust was in Morgan's eyes and throat, smoke burned in his scorched
lungs. The smell of blood mingling with dust was in his nostrils. The
heat of the increasing fire was so great that Morgan flung himself to
the ground beside his horse, with more thought of shielding himself from
that torture than from the inpouring rain of lead.
How many were down among the raiders he did not know; whether the people
had heard the noise of this fight and were coming to his assistance, he
could not tell. Dust and smoke flew so thick around him that the
courthouse not three rods away, was visible only by dim glimpses; the
houses around the square he could not see at all.
The raiders flashed through the smoke and dust, here seen in a rift for
one brief glance, there lost in the swathing pall that swallowed all but
their high-pitched yells and shots. Morgan was certain of only one thing
in that hot, panting, brain-cracking moment--that he was still alive.
Whether whole or hurt, he did not know, scarcely considered. The marvel
of it was that he still lived, like a wolf at the end of the chase
ringed round by hounds. Lived, lead hissing by his face, lead lifting
his hair, lead knocking dirt into his eyes as he lay along the carcass
of his horse, his body to the ground like a snake.
Morgan felt that it would be his last fight. In the turmoil of smoke and
dust, his poor strivings, his upward gropings out of the dark; his glad
inspirations, his thrilling hopes, must come to an obscure end. It was a
miserable way to die, nothing to come out of it, no ennobling sacrifice
demanding it to lift a man's name beyond his day. In the history of this
violent place, this death-struggle against overwhelming numbers would be
only an incident. Men would say, in speaking of it, that his luck failed
him at last.
Morgan discovered with great concern that he had no cartridges left but
those in the chambers of his revolver. He considered making a dash for
the side of the square not yet on fire, where he might find support, at
least make a further stand with the arms and ammunition every
storekeeper had at hand.
As these thoughts swept him in the few seconds of their passing, Morgan
lay reserving his precious cartridges. The momentary suspension of his
defense, the silence of his rifle's defiant roar, which had held them
from closing in, perhaps led his assailants to believe him either dead
or disabled. They also stopped shooting, and the capricious wind, now
rising to a gale as it rushed into the fiery vacuum, bent down and
wheeled away the dust and smoke like a curtain suddenly drawn aside.
Craddock and such of his men as were left out of that half-minute
battle were scattered about the square in a more or less definite circle
around the spot where Morgan lay behind his horse, the nearest to him
being perhaps thirty yards away. The citizens of the town who had been
resisting the raiders, had come rushing to the square at the diversion
of the fight to that center. These began firing now on the raiders from
windows and doors and the corners of buildings. Craddock sent three of
his men charging against this force, now become more courageous and
dangerous, and with two at his side, one of whom was the Dutchman, he
came riding over to investigate Morgan's situation.
Morgan could see the Dutchman's face as he spurred on ahead of the
others. Pale, with a pallor inborn that sun and wind could not shade, a
wide grin splitting his face, the Dutchman came on eagerly, no doubt in
the hope that he would find a spark of conscious life in Morgan that he
could stamp out in some predesigned cruelty.
The Dutchman was leaning forward as he rode, revolver lifted to throw
down for a quick shot. When he had approached within two lengths of his
horse, Morgan lifted himself from the ground and fired. The Dutchman
sagged over the horn of his saddle like a man asleep, his horse
galloping on in panic. As it passed Morgan the Dutchman pitched from the
saddle, drug a little way by one encumbered foot, the frantic horse
plunging on. Fred Stilwell, closely followed by his father, came riding
into the square.
Morgan leaped to his feet, new hope in him at sight of this friendly
force. Craddock's companion turned to meet Fred with the fire of two
revolvers. One of the three sent a moment before to dislodge the
citizens, turned back to join this new battle.
Morgan had marked this man as Drumm from the beginning. He was a florid,
heavy man, his long mustache strangely white against the inflamed
redness of his face. He carried a large roll covered with black oilcloth
behind his saddle.
Morgan wasted one precious cartridge in a shot at this man as he passed.
The raider did not reply. He was riding straight to meet Stilwell and
Fred, to whom Craddock also turned his attention when he saw Morgan's
rifle broken on the ground. It was as if Craddock felt him out of the
fight, to be finished at leisure.
Morgan left his dubious shelter of the fallen horse and ran to meet his
friends, hoping to reach one of them and replenish his ammunition. Fred
Stilwell was coming up with the wind, his dust blowing ahead of him on
the sweeping gale. At his first shot the man who had left Craddock's
side to attack him pitched from his saddle, hands thrown out before him
as if he dived into eternity. The next breath Fred reeled in his saddle
and fell.
The man with the oilcloth roll at his saddle yelled in exultation,
lifting his gun high in challenge to Stilwell, who rode to meet him. A
moment Stilwell halted where Fred lay, as if to dismount, then galloped
furiously forward to avenge his fall. The two raiders who had gone
against the townsmen, evidently believing that the battle was going
against them, spurred for the open country.
Craddock was bearing down on Morgan, the fight being apportioned now
man to man. Morgan heard Stilwell's big gun roaring when he turned to
face Craddock, vindictive, grim, who came riding upon him with no word
of challenge, no shout of triumph in what seemed his moment of victory.
Morgan was steady and unmoved. The ground was under his feet, his arm
was not disturbed by the rock of a galloping horse. He lifted his weapon
and fired. Craddock's horse went down to its knees as if it had struck a
gopher hole, and Craddock, horseman that he was, pitched out of the
saddle and fell not two yards from Morgan's feet.
In falling, Craddock dropped his gun. He was scrambling for it when
Morgan, no thought in him of mercy, threw his weapon down for the
finishing shot. The hammer clicked on an empty shell. And Craddock, on
hands and knees, agile as a bear, was reaching one long hairy arm to
clutch his lost gun.
Morgan threw himself headlong upon the desperado, crushing him flat to
the ground. With a sprawling kick he sent Craddock's gun far out of
reach, and they closed, with the weapons nature had given them, for the
last struggle in the drama of their lives.
The stage was empty for them of anything that moved, save only
Craddock's horse, which Morgan's last shot, confident as he was when he
aimed it, had no more than maimed with a broken leg. To the right of
them Fred Stilwell lay, his face in the dust, his arms outspread, his
hat close by; on the other hand the Dutchman's body sprawled, his legs,
flung out as if he had died running. And near this unsightly wreckage of
a worthless wretch Morgan's horse stretched, in the lazy posture of an
animal asleep in a sunny pasture.
Behind them the fire that was eating one side of the square away rose
and bent, roared and crackled, sighed and hissed, flinging up long
flames which broke as they stabbed into the smoke. Morgan felt the fire
hot on his neck as he bent over Craddock, throwing the strain of every
tendon to hold the old villain to the ground.
Craddock writhed, jointless as a snake, it seemed, under the grip of
Morgan's hand at his spiney throat, squirmed and turned and fought to
his knees. They struggled and battled breast to breast, until they stood
on their feet, locked in a clinch out of which but one of them, Morgan
was determined, should come a living man.
Morgan had dropped his empty revolver when he flung himself on Craddock.
There was no inequality between them except such as nature had given in
the strength of arm and back. They swayed in silent, terrible
determination each to have the other's life, and Morgan had a glimpse,
as he turned, of women and children watching them from the corner near
the bank, huddled groups out of which he knew many a hope went out for
his victorious issue.
Craddock was a man of sinews as hard as bow strings; his muscles were
like dried beef. Strong as Morgan was, he felt that he was losing
ground. Then, by some trick learned perhaps in savage camps, Craddock
lifted him, and flung him with stunning force against the hard ground.
There they rolled, clawing, striking, grappling at each other's
throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they
rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled
until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped
for it in the star-shot agony of sinewy fingers choking out his life.
His empty gun. It seemed that he grasped it in delirium, and struck with
it in the blindness of hovering death.
When Morgan staggered to his feet there was blood in his mouth; the
sound of the fiery turmoil around him was hushed in the roar of blood in
his ears. He stood weakly a moment, looking at the pistol in his hand.
The blow he had laid along Craddock's head had broken the cylinder pin.
Meditatively Morgan looked at it again, then threw it down as an
abandoned and useless thing. It fell close by where Craddock lay, blood
running from a wound on his temple.