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Updated: June 14, 2025
The citizenry and floating population of the town joined in the merriment, and the lowering clouds of tragedy were swept away on a gale of laughter that echoed along the jagged business front. But the girl Rhetta was not laughing. Perplexed, troubled, she laid her hand on Morgan's arm as he stood beside his horse about to mount. "What are you going to do with them now, Mr. Morgan?" she inquired.
He was silent, yet apparently agitated by a strong emotion, as a man might be who had leaped a crevasse in fleeing a pressing peril, upon which he feared to look back. She whom the man had called Rhetta picked up the young cowboy's hat and put it on his head. "Hush!" she charged, in reply to his whimpering intercession for mercy. "Mr. Morgan isn't going to let them hang you."
As he left her, Rhetta followed a few quick steps, a cry rising in her heart for him to stay a moment, to spare her one word of forgiveness out of his grim, sealed lips. But the cry faltered away to a great, stifling sob, while tears rose hot in her eyes, making him dim in her sight as he threw the rein over the horse's head, starting the animal out of its sleep with a little squatting jump.
"I feel like somebody had died, and that he they that he " "And you ought to be thankful it isn't so!" said Violet, sharply, "but I don't believe you are." "I never want to see him again, I'll always think of him standing there with that terrible gun in his hands, those dead men around him on the floor!" "You may have to go to him on your knees yet, and I hope to God you will Rhetta Thayer!"
She stood so, stretching out her hands to him, while he, unbending in his stern answer to the challenge of duty, unseeing in the hard bitterness of his heart, swung into the saddle and rode away. Rhetta groped for her saddle, blind in her tears. Morgan was hidden by the dust that hung in the quiet morning behind him as she mounted and followed.
So Morgan stood like a family horse while Rhetta pinned the ribbon to the pocket of his dingy gray woolen shirt, where it flaunted its unmistakable proclamation in a manner much more effective than any police shield or star ever devised.
Judge Thayer came on to where Morgan stood, the surrendered weapons at his feet, Rhetta beside him, pride higher than the heavens in her eyes. "I can't apologize for them, I can't even try," said the judge, with a humility in his word and manner quite new and strange, indicating the members of the fast-scattering mob.
Rhetta had time for reflection when she reached home, and deeper reflection than had troubled the well of her remorse as she rode. For there in the light of her room she saw the bullet-mark on the dented badge, which never had come quite straight for all Morgan's pains to hammer out its battle scars.
Morgan seemed to interpose in the manner of throwing out his hand, a gesture speaking of the fatuity and his unwillingness to set himself to the task. "Not just temporarily, we don't mean just temporarily, Mr. Morgan, but for good," Rhetta urged.
"Now Miss Rhetta, you'd better run along," a man urged kindly. Morgan stood beside her in the narrowing circle about the six men who had been condemned by public sentiment in less than sixty seconds and scarcely more words, the hot end of the branding iron in the dust at his feet.
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