em at that point, a man of their own
calling, sympathies, and traditions, with the shoulder-lurching gait of
a man who had spent most of his years in the saddle. He told them in a
few feeling, picturesque words the extent of Morgan's grievance against
the six, and left it with them to say whether he was to be interfered
with in his exaction of a just and fitting payment.

"I don't know what he's goin' to do," Stilwell said, "but if he wants to
roast 'em and eat 'em"--looking about him with stern eyes--"this is his
day."

"If he needs any help there's plenty of it here," said a cowboy from the
Nation, hooking his thumb with lazy but expressive movement under the
cartridge belt around his slim waist.

The fat publican subsided, seeing his little ripple of protest flattened
out by the spirit of fair play. He backed to the sidewalk, where he
stood in conference with Tom Conboy, and there was heard a reference to
niggers in Ireland, pronounced with wise twisting of the head.

Morgan selected, in the face of this little flurry of opposition and
defense, a box from among the odds and ends brought him by the boys, sat
on it facing his prisoners and broke bits of wood for a fire. People
began pressing a little nearer to see what was to come, but when Morgan,
with eye watchful to see even the shifting of a foot in the crowd,
reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, there was an immediate
scramble to the sidewalk. This left twenty feet of dusty white road
unoccupied, a margin on the page where this remarkable incident in
Ascalon's record of tragedies was being written.

Midway of his line of captives, six feet in front of the nearest man,
Morgan kindled a fire, adding wood as the blaze grew, apparently as
oblivious of his surroundings as if in a camp a hundred miles from a
house. When he had the fire established to his liking, he took from his
saddle an iron implement, at the sight of which a murmur and a movement
of new interest stirred the crowd.

This iron contrivance was a rod, little thicker than a man's finger,
which terminated in a flat plate wrought with some kind of open-work
device. This flat portion, which was about as broad as the span of a
man's two hands and perhaps six or eight inches long, appeared to be a
continuation of the handle, bent and hammered to form the crude pattern,
and the wonderment and speculation, contriving and guessing, all passed
out of the people when they beheld this thing. That