rion flock of women who always hover after these wreckers and
wastrels, came to Ascalon by scores. It began to appear a question, in
time, of what they were to subsist upon, even though they turned to the
ravening of one another.

But the broad notoriety of Ascalon attended to this, bringing with the
outlawed and debased a fresh and eager train of victims. The sons of
families came from afar, sated with the diversions and debaucheries of
eastern cities, looking for strange thrills and adventures to heat their
surfeited blood. Unsophisticated young men came, following the lure of
romance; farm boys from the midwestern states came, with a thought of
pioneering and making a new empire of the plow, as their fathers had
smoothed the land in the states already called old.

All of these came with money in their pockets, and nearly all of them,
one day first or last, became contributors to the support of Ascalon's
prostituted population. New victims came to replace the plucked, new
crowds of cowherders rode in from the long trails to the south, relays
of them galloped night after night from the far ranches stretching along
the sandy Arkansas. There was no want of grain to sow in the gaping
furrows struck out by the hands of sin in the raw, treeless, unpainted
city of Ascalon.

And into all this fever of coming and going, this heartbreak of shame
and loss, of quickly drawn weapon, of flash, despairing cry, and
death--this sowing of recklessness and harvesting of despair--into all
this had come Calvin Morgan, a man with a clean heart, a clean purpose
in his soul.

Ascalon once had been illuminated at night about the public square by
kerosene lamps set on posts, after the manner of gas lights in a city,
but the expense of supplying glass day after day to repair the damage
done by roysterers during the night had become so heavy that the town
had abandoned lights long before Morgan's advent there. Only the posts
stood now, scarred by bullets, gnawed by horses which had stood hitched
to them forgotten by their owners who reveled their wages in Ascalon's
beguiling fires. At the time of Morgan's coming, starlight and
moonlight, and such beams as fell through the windows of houses upon the
uneven sidewalk around the square, provided all the illumination that
brightened the streets of Ascalon by night.

On the evening of his mildly adventurous first day in the town, Morgan
sat in front of the Elkhorn hotel, his chair in the gutter,