o voice the general belief of the crowd.
Murmurs of disapproval began to rise.

One of the leading moralists of the town, proprietor of a
knock-down-and-drag-out, was loudest in his protestations that such a
happening in the public square of Ascalon, in the broad light of day,
the assembled inhabitants looking on, would give the place a name from
which it never would recover. This fellow, a gross man of swinging
paunch, a goitre enlarging and disfiguring his naturally thick, ugly
neck, had scrambled from his bed in haste at the thrilling of the
general alarm of something unusual in the daylight annals of the town.
His bare feet were thrust into slippers, his great white shirt was
collarless, dainty narrow blue silk suspenders held up his
hogshead-measure pantaloons. The redness of unfinished sleep was in his
eyes.

"I tell you, men, this ain't a goin' to do--this ain't no town down
south where they take niggers out and burn 'em," he said. "I ain't got
no use for that gang, myself, but I've got the good of the town and my
business to consider, like all the rest of you have."

There must have been in town that day forty or more cowboys from Texas
and the Nation, as the Cherokee country south was called. These for the
greater part were still sober, not having been paid off, still on duty
caring for the horses left behind them when the cattle were loaded and
shipped, or for the herds resting and grazing close by after the long
drive. They began to gather curiously around the fat man who had the
fair repute of Ascalon so close to his heart, listening to his efforts
to set a current of resentment against the stranger stirring in the awed
crowd. They began to turn toward Morgan now, with close talk among
themselves, regarding him yet as something more than a common man, not
keen to spring into somebody else's trouble and get their fingers
scorched.

"What's he going to do with them?" one of these inquired.

"Burn 'em," the fat man replied, as readily as if he had it from
Morgan's own mouth, and as strongly denunciatory as though the disgrace
of it reached to his fair fame and good business already. "You boys
ain't goin' to stand around here and see men from your own country burnt
like niggers, are you? Well, you don't look like a bunch that'd do
it--you don't look like it to me."

"What did they do to him?" one of the cowboys asked, not greatly fired
by the fat man's sectional appeal.

Stilwell came loitering among th