the shady side of the street to watch the present
contest between the law and those who lived beyond it.

Up to this point it appeared that the law was going to have it according
to its mandate. Peden made no attempt to open his place on the night
following Craddock's deposition, the lesser lights following his
virtuous example.

But there was in this quiescent confidence, in this lull almost
threatening, something similar to the impertinent repression of an
incorrigible child who yields to authority immediately above him,
knowing that presently it will be overruled. Something was clouding up
to break over Ascalon; the sleepiest in the town was aware of that.

How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and
explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely
tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that
Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance,
but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although
friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.

Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of
hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force,
when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite
the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was
to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.

Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours
in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the
arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and
having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the
pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls
than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line
concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the _Headlight_ during that
time.

In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of
this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and
growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged
to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle
were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks
ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a
barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its
blind-striking hand.

On the evening of this third day, be