his
hand, in short, that would shut up the ribald pleasures of Ascalon like
a tomb. As for the ordinances of the city, which he also had obligated
himself to apply, Morgan had not found time to work down to them. There
appeared to be authority in the thick volume Judge Thayer had lent him
to last Ascalon a long time. If he should find himself running short
from that source, then the city ordinances could be drawn upon in their
time and place.

Exclusive of the mighty Peden, the other traffickers in vice were
inconsequential, mere retailers, hucksters, peddlers in their way. They
were as vicious as unquenchable fire, certainly, and numerous, but
small, and largely under the patronage of the king of the proscribed,
Peden of the hundred-foot bar.

And this Peden was a big, broad-chested, muscular man, whose neck rose
like a mortised beam out of his shoulders, straight with the back of his
head. His face was handsome in a bold, shrewd mold, but dark as if his
blood carried the taint of a baser race. He went about always dressed in
a long frock coat, with no vest to obscure the spread of his white shirt
front; low collar, with narrow black tie done in exact bow;
broad-brimmed white sombrero tilted back from his forehead, a cigar that
always seemed fresh under his great mustache.

This mustache, heavy, black, was the one sinister feature of the man's
otherwise rather open and confidence-winning face. It was a cloud that
more than half obscured the nature of the man, an ambush where his
passions and dark subterfuges lay concealed.

Peden had met the order to close his doors with smiling loftiness, easy
understanding of what he read it to mean. Astonished to find his offer
of money silently and sternly ignored, Peden had grown contemptuously
defiant. If it was a bid for him to raise the ante, Morgan was starting
off on a lame leg, he said. Ten dollars a night was as much as the
friendship of any man that ever wore the collar of the law was worth to
him. Take it or leave it, and be cursed to him, with embellishments of
profanity and debasement of language which were new and astonishing even
to Morgan's sophisticated ears. Peden turned his back to the new officer
after drenching him down with this deluge of abuse, setting his face
about the business of the night.

And there self-confident defiance, fattened a long time on the belief
that law was a thing to be sneered down, met inflexible resolution. The
substitute city mar