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By midnight the last cowboy had gone galloping on his long ride to carry the news of Ascalon's eclipse over the desolate gray prairie; an hour later the only sign of life in the town was the greasy light of the Santa Fé café, where a few lingering nondescripts were supping on cove oyster stew.
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.
He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back. "He's over there in the courthouse now that's his office where you see the light trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know," she declared.
It was nothing more severe than Seth's ordinary scrutiny, but it appeared to the traveler to be at once hostile and inhospitable, the look of a man who sneered out of his heart and carried a challenge in his eyes. The stranger made the mental observation that this citizen was a sour-looking customer, who apparently resented the coming of one more to the mills of Ascalon's obscene gods.
If they come over here they'll find him Cal ain't makin' no secret of where he's at. And they'll find somebody standin' back to back with him, any time they want to come." Stilwell's resentment of Ascalon's ingratitude toward his friend was plainer in his mouth than print. "They're going to burn the town to drive him out!" Rhetta said, gasping in the terror that shook her heart.
As the undertaker had said, nearly everybody in Ascalon was already collected in front and in the near vicinity of the hotel, fringing the square in gay-splotched crowds. Beneath the canopy of the Elkhorn hotel many were assembled, as many indeed, as could conveniently stand, for that bit of shade was a blessing on the sun-parched front of Ascalon's bleak street.
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.
All desire for dinner was gone out of Morgan's stomach, all thought of preparing it from the girl's mind. She stood in the door with her mother, watching the black wagon away with this latest victim to be crushed in Ascalon's infernal mill, twisting her fingers in her apron, her face as white as the flour on her mother's hands.
Drumm's body was lying on a board in the calaboose, diverted for that dark day in Ascalon's history into a morgue. The sheriff reported that the Texas cattleman had carried more than fifty thousand dollars in currency behind his saddle. That was according to the custom of the times, and usage of the range, where many a man's word was as good as his bond, but no man's check was as good as money.
With Ascalon's bright point kept well before him, he drove directly at the breast of the monster. The sword struck him under the wing; through the thick flesh it went, and nothing stopped it till it pierced the monster's heart.
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