Trail's End

by George W. Ogden

A little while the small saloon-keepers who had nosed the floor and licked up the crumbs which fell from Peden's bar hung around, hoping that it was a flurry that would soon subside. They had big eyes for future prosperity, the overlord being now out of the way, and talked excitedly among themselves, even approached Morgan through an emissary with proposals of a handsome subsidy.

But when they saw a Kansas City gambler come and strip Peden's hall of its long bar and furnishings, of its faro tables and doctored roulette wheels, load them all on a car and ship them to his less notorious but safer town, they knew it was the end. Ascalon had fallen with its most notable man, never to rise up again.

The last of the correspondents left on the evening of the day that Judge Thayer set the rainmaker to work. He sent the obituary of Ascalon, as he believed, ahead of him by wire.

Not that Ascalon was as dead as it appeared on the surface, or the gamblers would make it out to be. True, the undertaker's business had gone, and he with it; Druggist Gray's trade in the bromides and restoratives in demand after debauches, and repairs for bunged heads after the nightly carousels, had fallen away to nothing; the Elkhorn hotel and the Santa Fé café were feeding few, and the dealers in vanities and fancies, punctured hosiery, lacy waists, must pack up and follow those upon whom they had prospered.

But there was as much business as before in lumber and hardware, implements, groceries, and supplies for the cattle ranches and the many settlers who were arriving without solicitation or proclamation and establishing themselves to build success upon the ruins of failure left by those who had gone before.

It was only the absence of the wastrels and those who preyed upon them, and the quiet of nights after raucous revelry, that made the place seem dead. Ascalon was as much alive as any town of its kind that had no more justification for being in the beginning. It had more houses than it could use now, since so many of its population had gone; empty stores were numerous around the square, and more would be seen very soon. The fair was over, the holiday crowd was gone. That was all.

Rhetta Thayer came back the same evening the last correspondent faced away from Ascalon. Morgan saw her in the Headlight office, where she worked late that night to overtake her accumulated affairs, her pretty head bent over a litter of proofs. Her door stood open as he passed, but he hastened by softly, and did not return that way again.

He felt that she had gone away from Ascalon on his account, fearful that she would meet him with blood fresh upon his hands. The attitude of Judge Thayer was but a faint reflection of her own, he was sure. It was best that they should not meet again, for blood had blotted out what had seemed the beginning of a tender regard between them. That was at an end.

During the next few days little was seen of Morgan in Ascalon. When he was not riding on long excursions into the outlying country he could have been found, if occasion had arisen demanding his presence on the square, in the station agent's office at the depot. There he spent hours hearing the little agent, whose head was as bald as a grasshopper's, nothing but a pale fringe from ear to ear at the back of his neck, recount the experiences that had fallen in his way during his five-years' occupancy of that place.

This period covered the most notorious history of the town. In that time, according to the check the agent had kept on them, no fewer than fifty-nine men had met violent death on the street and in the caves of vice in Ascalon. This man also noted keenly every arrival in these slack days, duly reporting them all to Morgan, for whom he had a genuine friendship and respect. So there was little chance of anybody slipping in to set a new brewing of trouble over the dying embers of that stamped-out fire.