und--"about well, thank you, Miss Dora. I
guess my good looks are ruined, though."

Dora half closed her eyes in arch expression, pursing her lips as if she
meant to give him either a whistle or a kiss, laughed merrily, and ran
off to cut patterns in a sheet of biscuit dough. She left such a
clearness and good humor in the morning air that Morgan felt quite light
at heart as he started for a morning walk.

Morgan was still wearing the cowboy garb that he had drawn from the
bottom of his trunk among the things which he believed belonged to a
past age and closed period of his life's story. He had deliberated the
question well the night before, reaching the conclusion that, as he had
stepped out of his proper character, lapsed back, in a word, to
raw-handed dealings with the rough edges of the world, he would better
dress the part. He would be less conspicuous in that dress, and it would
be his introduction and credentials to the men of the range.

Last night's long vigil, tramping around the square in his high-heeled,
tight-fitting boots, had not hastened the cure of his bruised ankles and
sore feet. This morning he limped like a trapped wolf, as he said to
himself when he started to take a look around and see whether any of the
outlawed had made bold to open their doors.

Few people were out of bed in Ascalon at that hour, although the sun was
almost an hour high. As Morgan passed along he heard the crackling of
kindling being broken in kitchens. Here and there the eager smoke of
fresh fires rose straight toward the blue. No stores were open yet; the
doors of the saloons remained closed as the night before. Morgan paused
at the bank corner after making the round of the square.

Ahead of him the principal residence street of the town stretched, the
houses standing in exclusive withdrawal far apart on large plots of
ground, a treeless, dusty, unlovely lane. Here the summer sun raked roof
and window with its untempered fire; here the winds of winter bombarded
door and pane with shrapnel of sleet and charge of snow, whistling on
cornice and eaves, fluttering in chimney like the beat of exhausted
wings.

Morgan knew well enough how the place would appear in that bitter
season; he had lived in the lonely desolation of a village on the bald,
unsheltered plain. How did Rhetta Thayer endure the winter, he wondered,
when she could not gallop away into the friendly solitude of the clean,
unpeopled prairie? Where did she live?