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Updated: June 14, 2025
Rhetta was working late in the Headlight office, preparing for the weekly issue of the paper. This disquieting news had come in at her door like the wave of a flood. She had no thought of work from that moment, only to stand at the door listening for the dreaded sound of shooting from the direction of Peden's hall.
That was the terrible word that rolled from Gray's excited tongue. And when she heard it, Rhetta put out her hands as one blind, held to the door frame a moment while the blood seemed to drain out of her heart, staring with horrified eyes into the face of the inconsequential man who had come in such avid eagerness to tell this awful tale.
On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta Thayer stopped Morgan as he was passing the Headlight office at the beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some passing terror had opened their windows.
And so evening found peace in Ascalon, after all its tragedy and pain. Calvin Morgan and Rhetta Thayer stood at the bank corner at sunset, looking down the square where the great gap in its front made the scene unfamiliar.
And when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of gratitude rose out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.
We were here before Ascalon became a plague spot and a by-word in the mouths of men; we started it right, but it went wrong as soon as it was able to walk." "It seems to have wandered around quite a bit since then," Morgan said, sparing them a grin. "It's been a wayward child," Rhetta sighed. "We're ashamed of our responsibility for it now."
They were out here this spring, liked the country, saw its future with eyes that revealed like telescopes, and would have bought ten sections of land to begin with if it hadn't been for two or three killings while they were here." "It was the same way with those people from Pennsylvania," said Rhetta.
The discovery now came to Rhetta Thayer with a cold shudder, a constriction of the heart. She stared with newly awakened eyes at the badge where it lay in her palm, her pale cheeks cold, her lips apart, shocked by the sudden realization of his past peril as no word could have expressed.
The town, too, lay still in the mists of breaking morning, its houses dim, its ways deserted. Alarm seemed unreasonable, but her heart quivered with it, and shrunk within her as from a chilling wind. There was no warder at the gate of Ascalon; the sentry was gone. Rhetta turned back to her bed, neither quieted of her indefinable uneasiness nor inclined to resume her troubled sleep.
"I don't see what other motive there can be, then," she reflected, eyes bent to the ground as she walked slowly by his side. "A lady asked me to undertake it. I'm doing it for her," he replied. "She was a thoughtless, selfish person!" Rhetta said, her deep feeling stressed in the flush of her face, her accusation as vehement as if she laid charges against another.
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