shifted to points believed to be more
advantageous for seeing the coming drama; watches clicked, comments
passed on the exactness to the schedule; breaths were drawn with fresh
tingling of hope, or falling of doubt and despair.

Morgan was watching that far skyline for the first smoke, for the first
gleam of windows in the sun as the train swept round the curve heading
for a little while into the north. He noted the murmur and movement of
the watchers as it came in sight; wondered if any breast but one was
agitated by a pang of friendly concern, wondered if any hand loosed
weapon in its sheath to strike in his support if necessity should call
for such intervention. He knew that Rhetta Thayer stood in the shade of
the bank with her father and others; he was cheered by the support of
her presence to witness his triumph or fall.

Now, as the train swept into the first obscuring swale, Morgan rode
around the depot again to see that none had slipped through either in
malice or curiosity. Only the station agent was in sight, pulling a
truck with three trunks on it to the spot where he estimated the
baggage-car would stop. Morgan rode back again to take his stand at the
point where arrivals by train crossed from depot into town. His left
hand was toward the waiting crowd, kept back by his injunction fifty
yards or more from the station; his right toward the track on which the
train would come.

Conversation in the crowd fell away. Peden, garbed in his long coat, was
seen shouldering through in front of the hotel, the nearest point to the
set and waiting stage. As always, Peden wore a pistol strapped about him
on ornate belt, the holster carrying the weapon under the skirt of his
coat. His presence on the forward fringe of the crowd seemed to many as
an upraised hand to strike the waiting horseman in the back.

Morgan saw Peden when he came and took his stand there, and saw others
in his employ stationed along the front of the line. He believed they
were there to throw their weight on Craddock's beam of the balance the
moment they should see him outmastered and outweighed.

Because he mistrusted these men, because he did not know, indeed,
whether there was a man among all those who had pledged their moral
support who would lift a hand to aid him even if summoned to do so,
Morgan kept his attention divided, one eye on the signs and portents of
the crowd, one on keeping the depot platform clear.

Morgan did not know whethe