With the mounting of their hastily swilled liquor the hilarious patrons of Peden's hall became more contemptuous of the city marshal. His apparent avoidance of trouble, his unaccountable absence, his failure to step up and meet this challenge from Peden, became a grievance against him in their inflamed heads.

They had counted on him to make some kind of a bluff, to add something either of tragedy or comedy to this big show. Now he was hiding out, and they resented it in the proper spirit of men deprived of their rights.

They began to talk of going out to find him, of dragging him from his hole and starting a noise behind him that would scare him out of the country.

Peden encouraged this growing notion. If Morgan wouldn't bring his show there, go after him and make him stand on his hind legs like a dog.

After a few more drinks, after a dance, after another stake on the all-devouring tables of chance. They turned to these diversions in the zest of long abstinence, in the redundant vitality of youth, mocking all restraint, insolent of any reckoning of circ.u.mstance or time.

Peden distended with satisfaction to see the free spending, the free flinging of money into his games. A little virtuous recess seemed to be profitable; it was like giving a horse a rest. His two guards waited at the door, his lookout at the faro table swept the hall from his high chair with eyes keen to mark any hostile invasion. Morgan never could come six feet inside his door.

Well satisfied with himself and the beginning of that night's business, exceedingly comfortable in the thought that this defiance of the law would bring a newer and wider notoriety to himself and the town of which he was the spirit, Peden sauntered among the boisterous merrymakers on his floor.

Dancers were worming and shuffling in close embrace, couples breaking out of the whirl now and then to rush to the bar; players stood deep around the tables; men reached over each other's shoulders to take their drinks from the bar. All was haste and hilarity, all a crowding of pleasure with hard-pursuing feet, a s.n.a.t.c.hing at the elusive thing with rough boisterous hands, with loud laughter, with wild yells.

Pleasure, indeed, seemed on the flight before these coa.r.s.e revelers, who pursued it blindfold down the steeps of destruction unaware.

Peden shouldered his way through the throng toward the farther end of the long bar, nodding here with a friendly smile, stopping now and then to shake hands with some specially favored patron, throwing commands among his female entertainers from his cold, hard, soulless eyes as he pa.s.sed along.

And in that sociable progression down his thronging hall, ten feet from the farther end of his famous bar, Peden came face to face with Morgan, as grim as judgment among the crowd of wastrels and women of poisoned lips, who fell back in breathless silence to let him pa.s.s.

Morgan was carrying his rifle; his pistol hung at his side. The big shield of office once worn by Seth Craddock was pinned on the pocket of his shirt; his broad-brimmed hat threw a shadow over his stern face.

Peden stopped with a little start of withdrawal at sight of Morgan, surprised out of his poise, chilled, perhaps, at the thought of the long pistol shot between this unexpected visitor and the hired killers at his front door, the way between them blocked by a hundred revelers.

So, this was the cunning of this range wolf, to come in at his back door and fall upon him in surprise! Peden's resentment rose in that second of reflection with the dull fire that spread in his dark face. He flung his hand to his revolver, throwing aside the skirt of his long coat.

"Let your gun stay where it is," Morgan quietly advised him. "Get these people out of here, and close this place."

"Show me your authority!" Peden demanded, scouting for a moment of precious time.

The musicians in the little orchestra pit behind Morgan ceased playing on a broken note, the shuffle of dancing feet stopped short. Up the long bar the loud hilarity quieted; across the hall the clash of pool b.a.l.l.s cut sharply into the sudden stillness. As quickly as wind makes a rift in smoke the revelers fell away from Morgan and Peden, leaving a fairway for the shooting they expected to begin at the door. Peden stood as he had stopped, hand upon his gun.

Morgan stepped up to him in one long, quick stride, rifle muzzle close against Peden's broad white shirt front. In that second of hesitant delay, that breath of portentous bluff, Morgan had read Peden to the roots. A man who had it in him to shoot did not stop at anybody's word when he was that far along the way.

"Clear this place and lock it up!" Morgan repeated.

The temperature of the crowded hall seemed to fall forty degrees in the second or two Morgan stood pushing his rifle against Peden's breastbone.

Those who had talked with loud boasts, picturesque threats, high-pitched laughter, of going out to find this man but a little while before, were silent now and cold around the gills as fish.

Morgan was watching the two men at the front door while he held Peden up those few seconds. He knew there was no use in disarming Peden, to turn him loose where he could get fifty guns in the next two seconds if he wanted them. He believed, in truth, there was not much to fear from this fellow, who depended on his hired retainers to do his killing for him.

So, when Peden, watching Morgan calculatively, shifted a little to get himself out of line so he would not stand a barrier between his gun-slingers and their target and longer block the opening of operations to clear the hall of this upstart, Morgan let him go. Then, with a sudden bound, Peden leaped across into the crowd.

A moment of strained waiting, quiet as the empty night, Morgan standing out a fair target for any man who had the nerve to pull a gun. Then a stampede in more of sudden fear than caution by those lined up along the bar, and the two hired killers at the front of the house began to shoot.

Morgan pitched back on his heels as if mortally hit, staggered, thrust one foot out to stay his fall. He stood bracing himself in that manner with out-thrust foot, shooting from the hip.

Three shots he fired, the roar of his rifle loud above the lighter sound of the revolvers. With the third shot Morgan raised his gun. In the smoke that was settling to the floor the taller of the gunmen lay stretched upon his face. The other, arms rigidly at his sides, held a little way from his body, head drooping to his chest, turned dizzily two or three times, spinning swiftly in his dance of death, gave at the knees, settled down gently in a strange, huddled heap.

Dead. Both of them dead. The work of one swift moment when the blood curse fell on this new, quick-handed marshal of Ascalon.

There was a choking scream, and a woman's cry. "Look out! look out!"

Peden, on the fringe of a crowd of shrinking, great-eyed women, ghastly in the painted mockery of their fear, fired as Morgan turned. Morgan blessed the poor creature who was woman enough in her debauched heart to cry out that warning, as the breath of Peden's bullet brushed his face.

Morgan could not defend himself against this a.s.sault, for the coward stood with one shoulder still in the huddling knot of women, and fired again. Morgan dropped to the floor, p.r.o.ne on his face as the dead man behind him.

Peden came one cautious step from his shelter, leaning far over to see, a smile of triumph baring his gleaming teeth; another step, while the crowd broke the stifling quiet with shifted feet. Morgan, quick as a serpent strikes, raised to his elbow and fired.

Morgan had one clear look at Peden's face as he threw his arms high and fell. Surprise, which death, swift in its coming had not yet overtaken, bulged out of his eyes. Surprise: no other emotion expressed in that last look upon this life. And Peden lay dead upon his own floor, his hat fallen aside, his arms stretched far beyond his head, his white cuffs pulled out from his black coat sleeves, as if he appealed for the mercy that was not ever for man or woman in his own cold heart.

CHAPTER XX

UNCLEAN

Earl Gray came down the street hatless, the big news on his tongue.

Rhetta Thayer, in the door of the _Headlight_ office, where she had stood in the pain of one crucified while the shots sounded in Peden's hall, stopped him with a gasped appeal.

Dead. Peden and the gun-slingers he had brought there to kill Morgan; any number of others who had mixed in the fight; Morgan himself--all dead, the floor covered with the dead. That was the terrible word that rolled from Gray's excited tongue. And when she heard it, Rhetta put out her hands as one blind, held to the door frame a moment while the blood seemed to drain out of her heart, staring with horrified eyes into the face of the inconsequential man who had come in such avid eagerness to tell this awful tale.

People were hastening by in the direction of Peden's, scattered at first, like the beginning of a retreat, coming then by twos and threes, presently overflowing the sidewalk, running in the street. Rhetta stood staring, half insensible, on this outpouring. Riley Caldwell, the young printer, rushed past her out of the shop, his roached hair like an Algonquin's standing high above his narrow forehead, his face white as if washed by death.

Impelled by a desire that was commanding as it was terrifying, moved by a hope that was only a shred of a raveled dream, Rhetta joined the moving tide that set toward Peden's door. Dead--Morgan was dead! Because she had asked him, he had set his hand to this b.l.o.o.d.y task. She had sent him to his death in her selfish desire for security, in her shrinking cowardice, in her fear of riot and blood. And he was dead, the light was gone out of his eyes, his youth and hope were sacrificed in a cause that would bring neither glory nor grat.i.tude to illuminate his memory.

She began to run, out in the dusty street where he had marched his patrol that first night of his bringing peace to Ascalon; to run, her feet numb, her body numb, only her heart sentient, it seemed, and that yearning out to him in a great pain of pity and stifling labor of remorse. It was only a little way, but it seemed heavy and long, impeded by feet that could not keep pace with her anguish, swift-running to whisper a tender word.

The lights were bright in Peden's hall, a great crowd leaned and strained and pushed around its door. There were some who asked her kindly to go away, others who appealed earnestly against her looking into the place, as Rhetta pushed her way, panting like an exhausted swimmer, through the crowd.

Nothing would turn her; appeals were dim as cries in drowning ears.

Gaining the door, she paused a moment, hands pressed to her cheeks, hair fallen in disorder. Her eyes were big with the horror of her thoughts; she was breathless as one cast by breakers upon the sand. She looked in through the open door.

Morgan was standing like a soldier a little way inside the door, his rifle carried at port arms, denying by the very sternness of his pose the pa.s.sage of any foot across that threshold of tragedy. There was nothing in his bearing of a wounded man. Beyond him a few feet lay the bodies of the two infamous guards who had been posted at the door to take his life; along the glistening bar, near its farther end, Peden stretched with face to the floor, his appealing hands outreaching.

A gambling table had been upset, chairs strewn in disorder about the floor, when the rabble was cleared out of the place. Only Morgan remained there with the dead men, like a lone tragedian whose part was not yet done.

Rhetta looked for one terrifying moment on that scene, its tragic detail impressed on her senses as a revelation of lightning leaps out of the blackest night to be remembered for its surrounding terror. And in that moment Morgan saw her face; the horror, the revulsion, the sickness of her shocked soul. A moment, a glance, and she was gone. He was alone amidst the blood that the curse of Ascalon had led his hand to pour out in such prodigality in that profaned place.

Long after the fearful waste of battle had been cleared from Peden's floor, and the lights of that hall were put out; long after the most wakeful householder of Ascalon had sought his bed, and the last horseman had gone from its hushed streets, Morgan walked in the moonlight, keeping vigil with his soul. The curse of blood had descended upon him, and she whose name he could speak only in his heart, had come to look upon his infamy and flee from before his face.

Time had saved him for this excruciating hour; all his poor adventures, slow striving, progression upward, had been designed to culminate in the mockery of this night. Fate had shaped him to his bitter ending, drawing him on with lure as bright as sunrise. And now, as he walked slowly in the moonlight, feet enc.u.mbered by this tragedy, he felt that the essence had been wrung out of life. His golden building was come to confusion, his silver hope would ring its sweet chime in his heart no more. From that hour she would abhor him, and shrink from his polluted hand.

He resented the subtle indrawing of circ.u.mstance that had thrust him in the way of this revolting thing, that had thrust upon him this infamous office that carried with it the inexorable curse of blood. Softly, against the counsel of his own reason, he had been drawn. She who had stared in horror on the wreckage of that night had inveigled him with gentle word, with appeal of pleading eye.

This resentment was sharpened by the full understanding of his justification, both in law and in morals, for the slaying of these desperate men. Duty that none but a coward and traitor to his oath would have shunned, had impelled him to that deed. Defense of his life was a justification that none could deny him. But she had denied him that. She had fled from the lifting of his face as from a thing unspeakably unclean.

He could not chide her for it, nor arraign her with one bitter thought.

She had hoped it would be otherwise; her last word had been on her best hope for him in a place where such hope could have no fruition--that he would pa.s.s untainted by the b.l.o.o.d.y curse that fell on men in this place.

It could not be.