o his face and smiled.

The little crowd broke and followed, but Morgan, oblivious to the
movement around him, stood on the sidewalk edge looking after her, his
hat in his hand.

CHAPTER V

ASCALON AWAKE

Ascalon was laid out according to the Spanish tradition for arranging
towns that dominated the builders of the West and Southwest in the days
when Santa Fe extended its trade influence over a vast territory.
Although Ascalon was only a stage station in the latter days of traffic
over the Santa Fe Trail, its builders, when it came occasion to expand,
were men who had traded in that capital of the gray desert wastes at the
trail's end, and nothing would serve them but a plaza, with the
courthouse in the middle of it, the principal business establishments
facing it the four sides around.

There were many who called it _the plaza_ still, especially visitors
from along the Rio Grande who came driving their long-horned,
lean-flanked cattle northward over the Chisholm Trail. Santa Fe, at its
worst, could not have been dustier than this town of Ascalon, and
especially the plaza, or public square, in these summer days. Galloping
horses set its dust flying in obscuring clouds; the restless wind that
blew from sunrise till sunset day in and day out from the southwest,
whipped it in sudden gusts of temper, and drove it through open doors,
spreading it like a sun-defying hoarfrost on the low roofs. All
considered, Ascalon was as dry, uncomfortable, unpromising of romance,
as any place that man ever built or nature ever harassed with wearing
wind and warping sun.

The courthouse in the middle of the public square was built of bricks,
of that porous, fiery sort which seem so peculiarly designed to the
monstrous vagaries of rural architecture. Here in Ascalon they fitted
well with the arid appearance of things, as a fiery face goes best with
white eyebrows, anywhere.

The courthouse was a two-storied structure, with the cupola as
indispensable to the old-time Kansas courthouse as a steeple to a
church. The jail was in the basement of it, thus sparing culprits a
certain punishment by concealing the building's raw, red, and crude
lines from the eye. Not that anybody in jail or out of it ever thought
of this advantage, or appreciated it, indeed, for Ascalon was proud of
the courthouse, and fired with a desire and determination to keep it
there in the plaza forever and a day.

There were precedents before them, and plen