would return it to Judge Thayer for me. I'm not needed in Ascalon any
longer, I'm quitting the job tonight. Good-bye."

Morgan laid the badge in her hand as he spoke the last word, turned his
horse quickly, rode back upon their trail. Rhetta wheeled her horse
about, a protest on her lips, a sudden pang in her heart that clamored
to call him back. But no cry rose to summon him to her side, and Morgan,
gloomy as the night around him, went on his way.

But the lights of Ascalon were blurred as if she looked on them through
a rain-drenched pane when Rhetta faced again to go her way alone, the
marshal's badge clutched in her hand. Remorse was roiling in her breast;
the corrosive poison of regret for too much said, depressed her generous
heart.

If he had known how to accomplish what he had wrought without blood, he
had said; if he had known. Neither had she known, but she had expected
it of him, she had set him to the task with an unreasonable condition.
Blood was the price. Ascalon exacted blood, always blood.

The curse of blood, he had said, was on his soul, his voice trembling
with the deep, sad vibration that might have risen from a broken heart.
Yes, there was madness in the wind, in the warping sun, in the hard
earth that denied and mocked the dearest desires of men. It had struck
her, this madness that hollowed out the heart of a man like a worm,
leaving it an unfeeling shell.

Rhetta had time for reflection when she reached home, and deeper
reflection than had troubled the well of her remorse as she rode. For
there in the light of her room she saw the bullet-mark on the dented
badge, which never had come quite straight for all Morgan's pains to
hammer out its battle scars. A little lead from the bullet still clung
in the grooves of letters, unmistakable evidence of what had marred its
nickled front.

Conboy had regarded Morgan's warning to keep that matter under his hat,
for he had learned the value of silence at the right time in his long
experience in that town. Nobody else knew of the city marshal's close
escape the night of his great fight. The discovery now came to Rhetta
Thayer with a cold shudder, a constriction of the heart. She stared with
newly awakened eyes at the badge where it lay in her palm, her pale
cheeks cold, her lips apart, shocked by the sudden realization of his
past peril as no word could have expressed.

Hot thoughts ran in thronging turmoil through her brain, thoughts before
repres