Trail's End

by George W. Ogden

Morgan saw with relief that the magazine of his rifle was full, and a shot in the barrel. He took Dora by the hand, turning away from his haste to mount as if it came to him as an after-thought to thank her for this great help.

"There's going to be a fight, Dora," he said. "You'd better get behind the bank, and keep any of the women and children there that happen along. You're a brave, good little soul, I'll never forget you for what you've done for me today. Please take care of this gun—it belongs to Uncle John."

He was up in the saddle with the last word, and gone, galloping into the pitchy black smoke that swirled like a turgid flood from burning Ascalon across the square.

Morgan's thought was to locate the raiders' horses and cut them off, if it should be that some of the rascals were still on foot setting fires, as it seemed likely from the smell of kerosene, that they were. It would increase his doubtful chances to meet as many of them on foot as possible. This was his thought.

He made out one mounted man dimly through the blowing smoke, watching in front of the Santa Fé café, but recently set on fire. This fellow doubtless was stationed there on the watch for him, Morgan believed, from the close attention he was giving the front door of the place, out of which a volume of grease-tainted smoke rolled. He wondered, with a little gleam of his saving humor, what there was in his record since coming to Ascalon that gave them ground for the belief that it was necessary to burn a house to bring him out of it to face a fight.

Morgan rode on a little way across the square, not twenty yards behind this raider, the sound of his horse silenced in the roar of fire and growing wind. The heat of the place was terrific; burning shingles swirled on the wind, coals and burning brands fell in a rain all over the square. At the corner of the broad street that came into the square at Peden's hall, another raider was stationed.

The citizens who were making a weak defense were being driven back, the sound of firing was behind the stores, and falling off as if the raiders pressed them hard. Morgan quickly concluded that Craddock and the rest of the outfit were over there silencing this resistance, probably in the belief that he was concerned in it.

This seemed to be his moment for action, yet arresting any of them was out of the question, and he did not want to be the aggressor in the bloodshed that must finish this fiendish morning's work. Hopeless as his situation appeared, justified as he would have been in law and reason for opening fire without challenge, he waited the further justification of his own conscience. They had come looking for him; let them find him here in their midst.

Fire was rising high among the stripped timbers of Peden's hall, purging it of its debauchery and blood. On the rising wind the flames were licking up Gray's drug-store, the barber shop beside it, the newspaper office, the Santa Fé café and the incidental small shops between them and Peden's like a windrow of burning straw. A little while would suffice to see their obliteration, a little longer to witness the destruction of the town if the wind should carry the coals and blazing shingles to other roofs, dry as the sered grasses of the plain.

The sound of this fire set by Seth Craddock in celebration of his return to Ascalon was in Morgan's ears like the roar of the sea; the heat of it drew the tough skin of his face as he rode fifty yards from it into the center of the square. There he stopped, his rifle across his breast, waiting for the discovery.