he godless town of Ascalon.

These visitors, lately food for the mills of the place, walked about as
curiously as fowls liberated in a strange yard after long confinement in
a coop. They looked with uncomprehending eyes on the closed doors of
Peden's famous temple of excesses; they turned respectful eyes on Morgan
as he passed them in his silent, determined rounds. And presently, after
meeting the white-shirted, coatless dealers, lookout men, _macquereaux_,
they began to have a knowing look, an air of expectant hilarity. After a
little they usually mounted and rode away, laughing among themselves
like men who carried cheerful tidings to sow upon the way.

In that manner Ascalon remained closed five nights, nobody contesting
the authority of the new marshal, not a shot fired in the streets. On
the afternoon of the sixth day an unusual tide of visitors began to set
in to this railroad port of Ascalon. By sundown the hitching rack around
the square was packed with horses; Dora Conboy told Morgan she never had
waited on so many people before in her hotel experience.

At dusk Morgan brought his horse from the livery stable, mounted with
his rifle under the crook of his knee. At nine o'clock Peden threw open
his doors, the small luminaries which led a dim existence in his
effulgence following suit, all according to their preconcerted plan.

There was a shout and a break of wild laughter, a scramble for the long
bar with its five attendants working with both hands; a scrape of
fiddles and a squall of brass; a squeaking of painted and bedizened
drabs, who capered and frisked like mice after their long inactivity.
And on the inflow of custom and the uprising of jubilant mirth, Peden
turned his quick, crafty eyes as he stood at the head of the bar to
welcome back to his doors this golden stream.

Close within Peden's wide door, one on either hand, two vigilant
strangers stood, each belted with two revolvers, each keeping a hand
near his weapons. One of these was a small, thin-faced white rat of a
man; the other tall, lean, leathery; burned by sun, roughened by
weather. A shoot from the tree that produced Seth Craddock he might have
been, solemn like him, and grim.

Dell Hutton, county treasurer, cigar planted so far to one corner of his
wide thin mouth that wrinkles gathered about it like the leathery folds
of an old man's skin, came to Peden where he stood at the bar.

"All's set for him," he said, drawing his eyes small a