on for being in the beginning. It had more houses than it
could use now, since so many of its population had gone; empty stores
were numerous around the square, and more would be seen very soon. The
fair was over, the holiday crowd was gone. That was all.

Rhetta Thayer came back the same evening the last correspondent faced
away from Ascalon. Morgan saw her in the _Headlight_ office, where she
worked late that night to overtake her accumulated affairs, her pretty
head bent over a litter of proofs. Her door stood open as he passed, but
he hastened by softly, and did not return that way again.

He felt that she had gone away from Ascalon on his account, fearful that
she would meet him with blood fresh upon his hands. The attitude of
Judge Thayer was but a faint reflection of her own, he was sure. It was
best that they should not meet again, for blood had blotted out what
had seemed the beginning of a tender regard between them. That was at an
end.

During the next few days little was seen of Morgan in Ascalon. When he
was not riding on long excursions into the outlying country he could
have been found, if occasion had arisen demanding his presence on the
square, in the station agent's office at the depot. There he spent hours
hearing the little agent, whose head was as bald as a grasshopper's,
nothing but a pale fringe from ear to ear at the back of his neck,
recount the experiences that had fallen in his way during his
five-years' occupancy of that place.

This period covered the most notorious history of the town. In that
time, according to the check the agent had kept on them, no fewer than
fifty-nine men had met violent death on the street and in the caves of
vice in Ascalon. This man also noted keenly every arrival in these slack
days, duly reporting them all to Morgan, for whom he had a genuine
friendship and respect. So there was little chance of anybody slipping
in to set a new brewing of trouble over the dying embers of that
stamped-out fire.

Morgan avoided the _Headlight_ office, for there was a sensitive spot in
his heart that Rhetta's abhorrence of him hurt keenly. But more than
that he had the thought of sparing her the embarrassment of a meeting,
even of his shadow passing her door.

Twice he saw her at a distance in the street, and once she stood waiting
as if to speak to him. But the memory of her face at Peden's door that
night was with him always; he could not believe she would seek a
meeting ou