He led her away from the subject of Ascalon's dangers and unrest, its sinister ferment and silent threat, but she would come back to it in a little while, and to Dell Hutton, who shot men in the back.
"He's over there in the courthouse now—that's his office where you see the light—trying to doctor up his books to hide his stealing, I know," she declared.
Morgan left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him, guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.
Rhetta Thayer, leaving the Headlight office at nine o'clock, saw two men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk of starlight and early night. 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.
When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. 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.
CHAPTER XIX
THE CURSE OF BLOOD
Sensitive as a barometer to every variation, every shading, in public sentiment and sympathy, Morgan patroled the town nightly until the streets were deserted. Night by night he felt, rather than saw, the growing insolence of the pale feeders on the profits of vice, the confidence in some approaching triumph gleaming in their furtive eyes.