CHAPTER XVI
THE MEAT HUNTER COMES
The few courageous and hopeful ones who remained loyal to Morgan were somewhat assured, the doubtful ones agitated a bit more in their indecision, when he appeared on horseback a little past the turn of day. These latter people, whose courage had leaked out overnight, now began to weigh again their business interests and personal safety in the balance of their wavering judgment.
Morgan, on horseback, looked like a lucky man; they admitted that. Much more lucky, indeed, than he had appeared that morning when he went limping around the square. It was a question whether to come over to his side again, openly and warmly, or to hold back until he proved himself to be as lucky as he looked. A man might as well nail up his door and leave town as fall under the disfavor of Seth Craddock. So, while they wavered, they were still not quite convinced.
Prominent among the business men who had revised their attitude on reform as the shadow of Seth Craddock approached Ascalon was Earl Gray, the druggist one of the notables on Dora Conboy's waiting list. Druggist Gray was a man who wore bell-bottomed trousers and a moleskin vest without a coat. His hair had a fetching crinkle to it, which he prized above all things in bottles and out, and wore long, like the man on the label.
There was so much hair about Mr. Gray, counting mustache and all, that his face and body seemed drained and attenuated by the contribution of sustenance to keep the adornment flourishing in its brown abundance. For Gray was a tall, thin, bony-kneed man, with long flat feet like wedges of cheese. His eyes were hollow and melancholy, as if he bore a sorrow; his nose was high and bony, and bleak in his sharp, thin-cheeked face.
Gray expressed himself openly to the undertaker, in whom he found a cautious, but warm supporter of his views. There would be fevers and ills with Ascalon closed up, Gray said he knew very well, just as there would be deaths and burials in the natural course of events under the same conditions. But there would be neither patches for the broken, stitches for the cut nor powders for the headaches of debauchery called for then as now; and all the burying there would be an undertaker might do under his thumb nail.
They'd go to drugging themselves with boneset tea, and mullein tea, and bitter-root powders and wahoo bark, said Gray. Likewise, they'd turn to burying one another, after the ways of pioneers, who were as resourceful in deaths and funerals as in drugs and fomentations. Pioneers, such as would be left in that country after Morgan had shut Ascalon up and driven away those who were dependent on one another for their skinning and fleecing, filching and plundering, did not lean on any man. Such as came there to plow up the prairies would be of the same stuff, rough-barked men and women who called in neither doctor to be born nor undertaker to be buried.