f sudden fear than caution by those lined up along
the bar, and the two hired killers at the front of the house began to
shoot.

Morgan pitched back on his heels as if mortally hit, staggered, thrust
one foot out to stay his fall. He stood bracing himself in that manner
with out-thrust foot, shooting from the hip.

Three shots he fired, the roar of his rifle loud above the lighter sound
of the revolvers. With the third shot Morgan raised his gun. In the
smoke that was settling to the floor the taller of the gunmen lay
stretched upon his face. The other, arms rigidly at his sides, held a
little way from his body, head drooping to his chest, turned dizzily two
or three times, spinning swiftly in his dance of death, gave at the
knees, settled down gently in a strange, huddled heap.

Dead. Both of them dead. The work of one swift moment when the blood
curse fell on this new, quick-handed marshal of Ascalon.

There was a choking scream, and a woman's cry. "Look out! look out!"

Peden, on the fringe of a crowd of shrinking, great-eyed women, ghastly
in the painted mockery of their fear, fired as Morgan turned. Morgan
blessed the poor creature who was woman enough in her debauched heart to
cry out that warning, as the breath of Peden's bullet brushed his face.
Morgan could not defend himself against this assault, for the coward
stood with one shoulder still in the huddling knot of women, and fired
again. Morgan dropped to the floor, prone on his face as the dead man
behind him.

Peden came one cautious step from his shelter, leaning far over to see,
a smile of triumph baring his gleaming teeth; another step, while the
crowd broke the stifling quiet with shifted feet. Morgan, quick as a
serpent strikes, raised to his elbow and fired.

Morgan had one clear look at Peden's face as he threw his arms high and
fell. Surprise, which death, swift in its coming had not yet overtaken,
bulged out of his eyes. Surprise: no other emotion expressed in that
last look upon this life. And Peden lay dead upon his own floor, his hat
fallen aside, his arms stretched far beyond his head, his white cuffs
pulled out from his black coat sleeves, as if he appealed for the mercy
that was not ever for man or woman in his own cold heart.

CHAPTER XX

UNCLEAN

Earl Gray came down the street hatless, the big news on his tongue.
Rhetta Thayer, in the door of the _Headlight_ office, where she had
stood in the pain of one crucified while t