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Everything on that side of the square was leveled but a few upstanding beams, the fire was rioting among the fallen rafters, eating up the floors that had borne the trod of so many adventurous feet. The hotel was a ruin, Gray's store only a recollection, the little shops between it and Peden's long, hollow skeleton of a barn already coals.
But when they saw a Kansas City gambler come and strip Peden's hall of its long bar and furnishings, of its faro tables and doctored roulette wheels, load them all on a car and ship them to his less notorious but safer town, they knew it was the end. Ascalon had fallen with its most notable man, never to rise up again.
Rhetta Thayer, in the door of the Headlight office, where she had stood in the pain of one crucified while the shots sounded in Peden's hall, stopped him with a gasped appeal. Dead. Peden and the gun-slingers he had brought there to kill Morgan; any number of others who had mixed in the fight; Morgan himself all dead, the floor covered with the dead.
Morgan turned from this scene in which Ascalon presented its better side, to skirmish along the street running behind Peden's establishment. It might be well, for future exigencies, to fix as much of the geography of the place in his mind as possible.
Morgan went to the hotel, where Tom Conboy was still on duty smoking his cob pipe in a chair tilted back against a post of his portico. "Well, the light's out up at Peden's," said Conboy, feeling a new and vast respect for this man who had proved his luck to the satisfaction of all beholders in Ascalon that night. "Yes," said Morgan, wearily, pausing at the door.
She had come unwillingly on her errand, disliking him as the cause of her lover's absence one of the last things a woman learns to forgive. But, as she looked on Allan Welsh, so bowed and broken, his eyes fallen in, looking wistfully out of the pain of his life, her heart went out to him, even as she thought that of a truth he was Ralph Peden's enemy.
She paused on her way, wondering, and her wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell Hutton. The other she had no need to name.
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 Fé café and the incidental small shops between them and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw.
''Tis Peden's Cleuch, he said with animation; ''tis the place where blessed Master Peden was preachin' when the bloody "Clavers" was huntin' him like a fox on the fells; ay, and would hae worrited him wi' his hounds had na the Lord sent down His mist and wrapped him awa frae the hunters.
More than that, Morgan brooded a great deal on the defilement of blood he had suffered there, and the alienation, real or fancied, that it had brought of such friends as he valued in that town. By an avoidance now unmistakably mutual, Morgan and Rhetta Thayer had not met since the night of Peden's fall.
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