he went to bed, harassed her sleep like
a fever, woke her at early dawn and drew her to the window, where she
leaned and listened, straining to define in the stillness the thing that
seemed to whisper a warning to her heart.

There was nothing in the face of nature to account for this; not a cloud
was on the sky. The town, too, lay still in the mists of breaking
morning, its houses dim, its ways deserted. Alarm seemed unreasonable,
but her heart quivered with it, and shrunk within her as from a chilling
wind. There was no warder at the gate of Ascalon; the sentry was gone.

Rhetta turned back to her bed, neither quieted of her indefinable
uneasiness nor inclined to resume her troubled sleep. After a little
while she rose again, and dressed. Dread attended her, dread had brooded
on her bosom while she slept uneasily, like a cat breathing its poisoned
breath into her face.

Dawn had widened when she went to the window again, the mist that clung
to the ground that morning in the unusual coolness was lifting. A
horseman rode past the corner at the bank, stopped his horse in the
middle of the street, turned in his saddle and looked around the quiet
square.

Other riders followed, slipping in like wolves from the range, seven or
eight of them, their horses jaded as if they had been long upon the
road. Cowboys in with another herd to load, she thought. And with the
thought the first horseman, who had remained this little while in the
middle of the street gazing around the town, rode up to the hitching
rack beside the bank and dismounted. Rhetta gasped, drawing back from
the window, her heart jumping in sudden alarm.

Seth Craddock!

There could be no mistaking the man, slow-moving when he dismounted,
tall and sinewy, watchful as a battered old eagle upon its crag. With
these ruffians at his back, gathered from the sweepings of no knowing
how many outlawed camps, he had come in the vengeance that had gathered
like a storm in his evil heart, to punish Ascalon and its marshal for
his downfall and disgrace.

CHAPTER XXV

A SUMMONS AT SUNRISE

Three horses were standing in Stilwell's yard, bridle reins on the
ground, as three horses had stood on the morning that Morgan first found
his tortured way to that hospitable door. In the house the Stilwell
family and Morgan were at breakfast, attended by Violet, who bore on
biscuits and ham to go with the coffee that sent its cheer out through
the open door as if to find