e place. He was a slender, gentle little
man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to
shoot him down that way."

"You're right; I met him," Morgan said, remembering Dell Hutton among
the wagons, his smoking gun in his hand.

"Sneaking little coward!"

"Well, he'll hardly sling his gun down on you," Morgan reflected, as if
he communed with himself, yet thinking that Hutton scarcely would be
beyond even that.

"Hardly," she replied, in abstraction. "What are you going to do with
that old brigand you've got locked in the calaboose?"

"I expect we'll turn him loose in the morning. There doesn't seem to be
anything we can hold him for, guilty as he is."

"If he'll leave, and never come back," doubtfully. "I'm glad now it
turned out the way it did, I'm so thankful you didn't have to--that you
came through _without blood on your hands_!"

"It would have been a calamity the other way," he said.

When Morgan went his way presently, leaving her in the door of the
little boxlike newspaper office, from where she gave him a parting
smile, it was with a revised opinion of the day's achievements. He felt
peculiarly exalted and satisfied. He had accomplished something, after
all.

Whatever this was, he did not confess, but he smiled, and felt renewed
with a lifting gladness, as he went on to the livery barn, his horse at
his heels.

CHAPTER XVIII

A BONDSMAN BREATHES EASIER

There was a little ripple, more of mirth than excitement or concern, in
Ascalon next morning when it became known that Seth Craddock had kicked
a hole in the burned corner of the calaboose and leaked out of it into
the night.

Let him go; it was as well that way as any, they said, since it relieved
them at once of the charge of his keep and the trouble of disposing of
him in the end. He never would come back to that town, let him ravage in
other parts of the world as he might. What the town had lost in
notoriety by his going would be offset by the manner of his degradation,
already written at length by the local correspondent of the _Kansas City
Times_ and sent on to be printed with a display heading in a prominent
position in that paper and copied by other papers all over the land.

Seth Craddock and his reign were behind the closed door of the past,
through which he was not likely to kick a hole and emerge again, after
his manner of going from the calaboose. That matter off the town's mind,
it ranged itself along