shot that would remove this picturesque crusader, not believing,
any more than the rest of the world, including Ascalon itself, believed
that this state of quiescence could prevail without end.

While they waited, sending off long stories by telegraph to their
papers every night, they saw the exodus of the proscribed begin,
increase, and end. The night-flitting women went first, urged away by
the necessities of the flaccid fish which lived upon their shame. The
gamblers and gamekeepers followed close behind.

A little while the small saloon-keepers who had nosed the floor and
licked up the crumbs which fell from Peden's bar hung around, hoping
that it was a flurry that would soon subside. They had big eyes for
future prosperity, the overlord being now out of the way, and talked
excitedly among themselves, even approached Morgan through an emissary
with proposals of a handsome subsidy.

But when they saw a Kansas City gambler come and strip Peden's hall of
its long bar and furnishings, of its faro tables and doctored roulette
wheels, load them all on a car and ship them to his less notorious but
safer town, they knew it was the end. Ascalon had fallen with its most
notable man, never to rise up again.

The last of the correspondents left on the evening of the day that Judge
Thayer set the rainmaker to work. He sent the obituary of Ascalon, as he
believed, ahead of him by wire.

Not that Ascalon was as dead as it appeared on the surface, or the
gamblers would make it out to be. True, the undertaker's business had
gone, and he with it; Druggist Gray's trade in the bromides and
restoratives in demand after debauches, and repairs for bunged heads
after the nightly carousels, had fallen away to nothing; the Elkhorn
hotel and the Santa Fe cafe were feeding few, and the dealers in
vanities and fancies, punctured hosiery, lacy waists, must pack up and
follow those upon whom they had prospered.

But there was as much business as before in lumber and hardware,
implements, groceries, and supplies for the cattle ranches and the many
settlers who were arriving without solicitation or proclamation and
establishing themselves to build success upon the ruins of failure left
by those who had gone before.

It was only the absence of the wastrels and those who preyed upon them,
and the quiet of nights after raucous revelry, that made the place seem
dead. Ascalon was as much alive as any town of its kind that had no more
justificati