As the activity of the growing night increased, high-pitched voices of cowboys who called figures of the dances quavered above the confusion of sounds, a melancholy note in the long-drawn syllables that seemed a lament for the waste of youth, and a prophecy of desolation. When the music fell to momentary silence the clash of pool balls sounded, and the tramp of feet, and quavering wild feminine laughter rising sharply, trailing away to distance as if the revelers sailed by on the storm of their flaming passions, to land by and by on the shores of morning, draggled, dry-lipped, perhaps with a heartache for the far places left behind forever.
Morgan was not moved by a curiosity great enough to impel him to make the round. All this he had seen before, time over, in the frontier towns of Nebraska, with less noise and open display, certainly, for here in Ascalon viciousness had a nation-wide notoriety to maintain, and must intensify all that it touched. He was wondering how the townspeople who had honest business in life managed to sleep through that rioting, with the added chance of some fool cowboy sending a bullet through their thin walls as he galloped away to his distant camp, when Tom Conboy came through the sidewalk stream to sit beside him in a gutter chair.
The proprietor of the Elkhorn hotel appeared to be under a depression of spirits. He answered those who addressed him in short words, with manner withdrawn. Morgan noted that the diamond stud was gone out of the desert of Conboy's shirt bosom, and that he was belted with a pistol. Presently the man on Conboy's other hand, who had been trying with little result to draw him into a conversation, got up and made his way toward the bright front of the dance hall. Conboy touched Morgan's knee.
"Come into the office, kind of like it happened, a little while after me," he said, speaking in low voice behind his hand. He rose, stretching and yawning as if to give his movements a casual appearance, stood a little while on the edge of the sidewalk, went into the hotel. Morgan followed him in a few minutes, to find him apparently busy with his accounts behind the desk.
A little while the proprietor worked on his bookkeeping, Morgan lounging idly before the cigar case.
"Some fellers up the street lookin' for you," Conboy said, not turning his head.
"What fellows? What do they want?"
"That bunch of cowboys from the Chisholm Trail."
"I don't know them," said Morgan, not yet getting the drift of what Conboy evidently meant as a warning.
"They're friends of the city marshal; he belonged to the same outfit," Conboy explained, ostensibly setting down figures in his book.