"My girl's got a new piano--lucky I sent for it before that Texas outfit struck this range--she can try it out on you," Stilwell said, a laugh still left in him for an amusing situation in spite of the ruin he faced.

Morgan could hear the girl and her mother talking in the kitchen, their voices quite distinct at times as they pa.s.sed an open door that he could not see. Lame and aching, hands swollen and purple, he sat in a rocking-chair by the open window, not so broken by his experiences nor so depressed by his pains but he yet had the pleasure of antic.i.p.ation in meeting this girl. He had determined only a few hours ago that the country was not big enough to hide her from him. Now Fate had jerked him with rough hand to the end of his quest before it was fairly begun.

As he thought this, Stilwell came back, convoying his ample red-faced wife, and almost as ample, and quite as red-faced, daughter. So, there must have been more than one young lady after mail in Ascalon yesterday afternoon, thought Morgan, as he got up ruefully, with much pain in his feet and ankles, rather shamed and taken back, and bowed the best way he could to this girl who was not _his_ girl, after all his eager antic.i.p.ation.

CHAPTER IX

NEWS FROM ASCALON

"Down here in the river bottom, where the water rises close to the top of the ground, you can raise a little corn and stuff, but take it back on the prairie a little way and you can't make your seed back, year in and year out. Plenty of them have come here from the East and tried it--I suppose you must 'a' seen the traces of them scattered around as you come through the country east of Ascalon."

Morgan admitted that he had seen such traces, melancholy records of failure that they were.

"It's all over this country the same way. It broke 'em as fast as they came, starved 'em and took the heart out of 'em and drove 'em away. You can't farm this country, Morgan; no man ever learnt anything out of books that will make him master of these plains with a plow."

So spoke Stilwell, the cattleman, sitting at night before his long, low, L-shaped sod house with his guest who had been dragged into his hospitality at the end of a rope. Eight days Morgan had been sequestered in that primitive home, which had many comforts in spite of the crudity of its exterior. His soreness had pa.s.sed from the green and superficially painful stage to the deeper ache of bruised bones. He walked with a limp, stiff and stoved in his joints as a foundered horse.

But his hands and arms had recovered their suppleness, and, like an overgrown fledgling at the edge of the nest, he was thinking of projecting a flight.

During the time Morgan had been in the Stilwell ranchhouse no news had come to him from Ascalon. Close as they lived to the town, the Stilwells had been too deeply taken up with their own problem of pending ruin due to the loss of their herd from Texas fever infection, to make a trip even to the post-office for their mail. Violet, the daughter, was on the range more than half the time, doing what she could to drive the sick cattle to the river where they might have a better chance to fight the dread malady.

Morgan's injuries had turned out to be deeper seated and more serious than he had at first supposed. For several days he was racked with a fever that threatened to floor him, due to the mental torture of that terrible night. It had pa.s.sed, and with it much of his pain, and he would have gone to Ascalon for his reckoning with the men from the Nueces two days ago if Stilwell had not argued the folly of attempting an adjustment under the handicap of his injuries.

Wait a few days longer, the rancher sagely advised, eat and rest, and rub that good fiery horse liniment of his on the sore spots and swollen joints. Even if they were gone, which Stilwell knew would not be the case for Drumm would not have made it back from Kansas City yet, Morgan could follow them. And to do that he must be sound and strong.

Stilwell had put off even his own case against the Texas stockman, he had been so urged for time in getting his sick cattle down to the shade and water along the river. Now the job seemed over, for all he could do, and was taking his ease at home this night, intending to go early in the morning and put his case for damages against Drumm into Judge Thayer's hands.

Through Morgan's days of sickness and waiting for strength, he was attended tenderly by Mrs. Stilwell, and sometimes of an afternoon, when Violet came in from the hot, dry range, she would play for him on her new piano. She played a great deal better than he had any reason to expect of her, self-taught in her isolation on the banks of the shallow Arkansas.

Violet was a girl of large frame, large bones in her wrists, large fingers to her useful, kindly ministering hands. Her face was somewhat too long and thin to be called handsome, but it was refined by a wistfulness that told of inner striving for something beyond the horizon of her days there in her prairie-circled home. And now as the two men talked outside the door, the new moonlight white on the dust of the trampled yard, Violet was at her piano, playing a simple melody with a soft, expressive tenderness as sweet to him as any music Morgan ever had heard. For he understood that the instrument was the medium of expression for this prairie girl's soul, reaching out from its shelter of sod laid upon sod to what aspirations, following what longings, mounting to what ambitions, none in her daily contact ever knew.

Stilwell was downcast by the blow he had received in the loss of more than half his herd through the Texas scourge. It had taken years of hardship and striving, fighting drouth and winter storm, preying wolves and preying men, to build the herd up to the point where profits were about ready to be enjoyed.

Nothing but a frost would put an end to the scourge of Texas fever; in those days no other remedy had been discovered. Before nature could send this relief Stilwell feared the rest of his cattle would die, although he had driven them from the contaminated range. If that happened he would be wiped out, for he was too old, he said, to start at the bottom and build up another herd.

It was at this point that Morgan suggested Stilwell turn to the soil instead of range cattle as a future business, a thing that called down the cattleman's scorn and derision, and citation of the wreckage that country had made of men's hopes. He dismissed that subject very soon as one unworthy of even acrimonious debate or further denunciation, to dwell on his losses and the bleakness of the future as it presented itself through the bones of his dead cattle.

As they sat talking, the soft notes of Violet's melody soothing to the ears as a distant song, the young man Fred came riding in from Ascalon, the bearer of news. He began to talk before he struck the ground, breathlessly, like a man who had beheld unbelievable things.

"That gang from Texas has took the town--everybody's hidin' out," he reported.

"Took the town?" said Stilwell, incredulously.

"Stores all shut up, post-office locked and old man Flower settin' in the upstairs winder with his Winchester across his leg waitin' for them to bust in the door and steal the gover'ment money!"

"Listen to that!" said Stilwell, as the young man stood there hat off, mopping the sweat of excitement from his forehead. "Where's that man-eatin' marshal feller at?"

"He's killin' off everybody in town but his friends--he's killed eight men, a man a day, since he's been in office. He's got everybody lookin'

for a hole."

"A man a day!" said Morgan, scarcely able to believe the news.

"Who was they?" Stilwell inquired, bringing his chair down from its easy slant against the sod wall, leaning forward to catch the particulars of this unequaled record of slaughter.

"I didn't hear," said Fred, panting faster than his hard-ridden horse.

"I hope none of the boys off of this range around here got into it with him," Stilwell said.

"They say he's closed up all the gamblin' joints and saloons but Peden's, and the bank's been shut four or five days, Judge Thayer and a bunch of fellers inside of it with rifles. Tom Conboy told me the judge had telegraphed to the governor asking him to send soldiers to restore law and order in the town."

"Law and order!" Stilwell scorned. "All the law and order they ever had in that h.e.l.l-hole a man'd never miss."

"Where's the sheriff--what's he doing to restore order?" Morgan inquired.

"The sheriff ain't doin' nothing. I ain't been over there, but I know that much," Stilwell said.

"They say he's out after some rustlers," Fred replied.

"Yes, and he'll stay out till the trouble's over and come back without a hide or hair of a rustler. What else are they doin'?"

"Rairin' and shootin'," said Fred, winded by the enormity of this outlawry, even though bred in an atmosphere of violence.

"Are they hittin' anybody, or just shootin' for noise?" Stilwell asked.

"Well, I know they took a crack at me when I went out of Conboy's to git my horse."

Mrs. Stilwell and Violet, who had hastened out on Fred's excited arrival, exclaimed in concern at this, the mother going to her boy to feel him over as for wounds, standing by him a little while with arm around him.

"Did you shoot back?" Stilwell wanted to know.

"I hope I did," Fred replied.

Stilwell got up, and stood looking at the moon a little while as if calculating the time of night.

"They need a man or two over there to clean that gang up," he said.

"Well, it ain't my business to do it, as long as they didn't hit you."

Mrs. Stilwell chided him sharply, perhaps having history behind her to justify her alarm at these symptoms.

"Let them fight it out among themselves, the wolves!" she said.

Morgan had drawn a little apart from the family group, walking to the corner of the house where he stood looking off toward Ascalon, still and tense as if he listened for the sounds of conflict. He was dressed in Stilwell's clothes, which were somewhat too roomy of body but nothing too large otherwise, for both of them had the stature of proper men.

His feet were in slippers, his ankles bandaged and soaked with the penetrating liniment designed alike for the ailments of man and beast.

Violet studied him as he stood there between her and the moon, his face sterner for the ordeal of suffering that had tried his manhood in that two-mile run beside the train, where nothing but a sublime defiance of death had held him to his feet.