or a parching season again. The dust lay deep under their
feet, gray on their roofs where shingles curled like autumn leaves in
the sun. The rainmaker sent up his vain, his fatuous, foolish,
infinitesimal breath of smoke. The rain went on its way.

"Aw, hell!" said Ascalon, in its derisive, impious way; "Aw, hell!"

CHAPTER XXIV

MADNESS OF THE WINDS

Ascalon's temper was not improved by the close passing of the rain,
which had refreshed but a small strip of that almost limitless land. The
sun came out as hot as before, the withering wind blew from the
southwest plaguing and distorting the fancy of men. Everybody in town
seemed sulky and surly, ready to snap at a word. The blight of
contention and strife seemed to be its heritage, the seed of violence
and destruction to be sown in the drouth-cursed soil.

The judgment of men warped in that ceaseless wind, untempered by green
of bough overhead or refreshing turf under foot. There was no justice in
their hearts, and no mercy. Morgan himself did not escape this infection
of ill humor that rose out of the hard-burned earth, streamed on the hot
wind, struck into men's brains with the rays of the penetrating sun. Not
conscious of it, certainly, any more than the rest of them in Ascalon
were aware of their red-eyed resentment of every other man's foot upon
the earth. Yet Morgan was drilled by the boring sun until his view upon
life was aslant. Resentment, a stranger to him in his normal state, grew
in him, hard as a disintegrated stone; scorn for the ingratitude of
these people for whom he had imperiled his life rose in his eyes like a
flame.

More than that, Morgan brooded a great deal on the defilement of blood
he had suffered there, and the alienation, real or fancied, that it had
brought of such friends as he valued in that town. By an avoidance now
unmistakably mutual, Morgan and Rhetta Thayer had not met since the
night of Peden's fall.

One thing only kept Morgan there in the position that had become
thankless in the eyes of those who had urged it upon him in the
beginning. That was the threatened vengeance of Peden's friends. He was
giving them time to come for their settlement; he felt that he could not
afford to be placed in the light of one who had fled before a threat.
But it seemed to him, on the evening of the second day after the rain
storm's passing, that he had waited long enough. The time had come for
him to go.

There were a few cowboys in