not come.

CHAPTER XXII

WHINERS AT THE FUNERAL

Joe Lynch, the bone man, stopped at the well in the public square to
pour water on his wagon tires. A man was pestered clean out of his
senses by his tires coming off, his felloes shrinking up like a fried
bacon rind in that dry weather, Joe said. It beat his time, that drouth.
He had been through some hot and dry spells in the Arkansaw Valley, but
never one as dry and hot as this.

He told Morgan this as he poured water slowly on his wheels to swell the
wood and tighten the tires, there at the town well in the mid-morning of
that summer day. It was so hot already, the ceaseless day wind blowing
as if it trailed across a fire, that one felt shivers of heat go over
the skin; so hot that the heat was bitter to the taste, and shade was
only an aggravation.

This was almost a week after Morgan's forceful assertion of the law's
supremacy in Ascalon, when Peden and his assassins fell in their
insolence. It seemed that day as if Ascalon itself had fallen with
Peden, and the blood of life had drained out of its body. There was a
quietude over it that seemed the peace of death.

"I never thought, the day I hauled you into this town," said Joe, his
high rasping voice harmonizing well with his surroundings, like a
katydid on a dead limb, "you'd be the man to put the kibosh on 'em and
close 'em up like you done. I never saw the bottom drop out of no place
as quick as it's fell out of this town, and I've saw a good many go up
in my day. The last of them gamblers pulled out a couple of days ago, I
hauled his trunk over to the depot. He went a cussin', and he pulled the
hole in after him, I guess, on all the high-kickin' this town'll ever
do. Well, I ain't a carin'; I've been waitin' my time."

"You were wiser than some of them, you knew it would come," Morgan said,
glad to meet this bone-gathering philosopher in the desert he had made
of Ascalon, and stand talking with him, foot on his hub in friendly way.

"Not so much bones," said Joe reflectively, as if he had weighed the
possibilities long ago and now found them coming out according to
calculation, "as bottles. Thousands of bottles, every boy in this town's
out a pickin' up bottles for me. I reckon I'll have a couple of carloads
of nothing but bottles. Oh-h-h, they'll be _some_ bones, but the
skeleton of this town is bottles. That's why I tell 'em it never will
pick up no more. You've got to build a town on somet