How much more keenly, then, was this charged atmosphere sensed and explored with the groping hand of trepidation by Rhetta Thayer, finely tuned as a virtuoso's violin. She knew something was hatching in that Satan's nest of iniquity that would result in an outbreak of defiance, but what form it would take, and when, she could not determine, although friends tried to sound for her the bottom of this pit.
Morgan knew it; all the scheme was as plain to him as the line of hitching racks around the square. They were waiting to gather force, when they meant to rise up and crush him, fling wide their doors, invite the outlawed of the world in, and proceed as in the past. All there was to be done was wait the uncovering of their hands.
Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the Headlight during that time.
In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its blind-striking hand.
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.
"He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully, facing him just inside the door.
"Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful assurance in his words. "I can assure you I was at no time in any danger."
"Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on her quick-coming breath.
"It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it—I never stepped in front of him anywhere."
"That woman in the tent—the rustler's wife—told me—she told me just a little while ago. Oh! if he—if he'd have hit you!"