ack smoke that swirled like a turgid flood from burning Ascalon
across the square.

Morgan's thought was to locate the raiders' horses and cut them off, if
it should be that some of the rascals were still on foot setting fires,
as it seemed likely from the smell of kerosene, that they were. It would
increase his doubtful chances to meet as many of them on foot as
possible. This was his thought.

He made out one mounted man dimly through the blowing smoke, watching in
front of the Santa Fe cafe, but recently set on fire. This fellow
doubtless was stationed there on the watch for him, Morgan believed,
from the close attention he was giving the front door of the place, out
of which a volume of grease-tainted smoke rolled. He wondered, with a
little gleam of his saving humor, what there was in his record since
coming to Ascalon that gave them ground for the belief that it was
necessary to burn a house to bring him out of it to face a fight.

Morgan rode on a little way across the square, not twenty yards behind
this raider, the sound of his horse silenced in the roar of fire and
growing wind. The heat of the place was terrific; burning shingles
swirled on the wind, coals and burning brands fell in a rain all over
the square. At the corner of the broad street that came into the square
at Peden's hall, another raider was stationed.

The citizens who were making a weak defense were being driven back, the
sound of firing was behind the stores, and falling off as if the raiders
pressed them hard. Morgan quickly concluded that Craddock and the rest
of the outfit were over there silencing this resistance, probably in the
belief that he was concerned in it.

This seemed to be his moment for action, yet arresting any of them was
out of the question, and he did not want to be the aggressor in the
bloodshed that must finish this fiendish morning's work. Hopeless as his
situation appeared, justified as he would have been in law and reason
for opening fire without challenge, he waited the further justification
of his own conscience. They had come looking for him; let them find him
here in their midst.

Fire was rising high among the stripped timbers of Peden's hall, purging
it of its debauchery and blood. On the rising wind the flames were
licking up Gray's drug-store, the barber shop beside it, the newspaper
office, the Santa Fe cafe and the incidental small shops between them
and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little