ays passed, that the rainmaker was driving
much of a hole in the hot air that pressed down upon that tortured land.
No commotion was apparent in the upper regions, no cloud lifted to cut
off for an hour the shafts of the fierce sun. Ascalon lay panting,
exhausted, dry as tow, the dust of driven herds blowing through its
bare, bleak streets.

Gradually, as dry burning day succeeded the one in all particulars like
it that had gone before, what little hope the few had in Judge Thayer's
weather doctor evaporated and passed away. Those who had scoffed at the
beginning jeered louder now, making a triumph of it. The Baptist
preacher said the evil of meddling in the works of the Almighty was
becoming apparent in the increasing severity of the hot wind. Ascalon,
for its sins past and its sacrilege of the present, was to writhe and
scorch and wither from the face of the earth.

For all this, interest in the rainmaker's efforts did not lax. People
sniffed his smoke, noting every change in its flavor, and pressed around
Judge Thayer's garden fence trying to get a look at the operations.
Judge Thayer was not a little indignant over the scoffings and
denunciations, and this impertinent curiosity to pry upon what he gave
them to understand was his own private venture.

Keep off a safe distance from this iniquitous business, he warned with
sarcasm; don't lean on the fence and risk the wrath of the Almighty.
Let the correction of Providence fall on his own shoulders, which had
been carrying the sins of Ascalon a long time; don't get so close as to
endanger their wise heads under the blow. At the same time he gave them
to understand that if any rain came of the efforts of his weather doctor
it would be his, the judge's, own private and individual rain, wrung
from denying nature by science, and that science paid for by the judge's
own money.

The scoffers laughed louder at this, the sniffers wrinkled their noses a
little more. But the Baptist preacher only shook his head, the hot wind
blowing his wide overalls against his thin legs.

Morgan stood aloof from doubters, hopers, scoffers, and all, saying no
word for or against the rainmaker. Every morning now he took a ride into
the country, to the mystification of the town, coming back before the
heat mounted to its fiercest, always on hand at night to guard against
any outbreak of violence among the visitors.

There were not a few in town who watched him away each morning in the
hope