Trail's End

by George W. Ogden

"You forgot about our cattle, Mother," Stilwell chided, ignoring Morgan's request. "I'm goin' to sue Sol Drumm, I'm goin' to have the papers ready to serve on him the minute he steps off of the train. If there's any way to make him pay for the damage he's done me I'm goin' to do it."

"There's more than one way," said Fred. "If the law can't——"

"Then we lose," his father finished for him, in the calm resignation of a just man.

Morgan's intention of going to Ascalon to square accounts with his persecutors as soon as he had the strength to warrant such a move was no secret in the Stilwell family. Fred had offered his services at the beginning, and the one cowboy now left out of the five but recently employed by Stilwell had laid his pistol on the table and told Morgan that he was the man who went with it, both of them at his service when the hour of reckoning should arrive. Now Stilwell himself was beginning to show the pistol itch in his palm.

Morgan was grateful for all this uprising on the part of his new friends in his behalf, to whom his suffering and the cruelty of his ordeal appealed strongly for sympathy, but he could not accept any assistance at their hands. There could be no satisfaction in justice applied by any hand but his own. If otherwise, he might as well go to the county attorney, lodge complaints, obtain warrants and send his enemies to jail.

No, it was a case for personal attention; it was a one-man job. What they were to suffer for their great wrong against him, he must inflict with his own weapon, like the savage Comanche whose camp fires were scarcely cold in that place.

So Morgan spoke again of going that night to Ascalon, only to be set upon by all of them and argued into submission. Eager as Fred was to go along and have a hand in the fray, he was against going that night. Violet came and laid her good wholesome, sympathetic hand on Morgan's arm and looked into his face with a plea in her eyes that was stronger than words. He couldn't bear his feet in the stirrups with his ankles all swollen and sore as they were, she said; wait a day or two—wait a week. What did it matter if they should leave in the meantime, and go back down the wild trail to Texas? So much the better; let them go.

Morgan smiled to hear her say it would be better if they should get away, for she was one of the forgiving of this world, in whose breast the fire of vengeance would find no fuel to nurse its hot spark and burst into raging flame. He yielded to their entreaties and reasoning, agreeing to defer his expedition against his enemies until morning, but not an hour longer.

When the others had gone to bed, Morgan went down to the river through the broad notch in the low bank where the Santa Fé Trail used to cross. This old road was brush-grown now, with only a dusty path winding along it where the cattle passed to drink. The hoof-cut soil was warm and soft to his bruised feet; the bitter scent of the willows was strong on the cooling night as he brushed among them. Out across the broad golden bars he went, seeking the shallow ripple to which the stream shrunk in the summer days between rains, sitting by it when he came to it at last, bathing his feet in the tepid water.

There he sat for the cure of the water on his bruised, fevered joints, raking the fire of his hatred together until it grew and leaped within him like a tempest. As the Indian warrior watches the night out with song of defiance and dance of death to inflame him to his grim purpose of the dawn, so this man fallen from the ways of gentleness into the abyss of savagery spurred himself to a grim and terrible frenzy by visiting his wrath in anticipation upon his enemies.