One of the leading moralists of the town, proprietor of a knock-down-and-drag-out, was loudest in his protestations that such a happening in the public square of Ascalon, in the broad light of day, the assembled inhabitants looking on, would give the place a name from which it never would recover. This fellow, a gross man of swinging paunch, a goitre enlarging and disfiguring his naturally thick, ugly neck, had scrambled from his bed in haste at the thrilling of the general alarm of something unusual in the daylight annals of the town. His bare feet were thrust into slippers, his great white shirt was collarless, dainty narrow blue silk suspenders held up his hogshead-measure pantaloons. The redness of unfinished sleep was in his eyes.
"I tell you, men, this ain't a goin' to do—this ain't no town down south where they take niggers out and burn 'em," he said. "I ain't got no use for that gang, myself, but I've got the good of the town and my business to consider, like all the rest of you have."
There must have been in town that day forty or more cowboys from Texas and the Nation, as the Cherokee country south was called. These for the greater part were still sober, not having been paid off, still on duty caring for the horses left behind them when the cattle were loaded and shipped, or for the herds resting and grazing close by after the long drive. They began to gather curiously around the fat man who had the fair repute of Ascalon so close to his heart, listening to his efforts to set a current of resentment against the stranger stirring in the awed crowd. They began to turn toward Morgan now, with close talk among themselves, regarding him yet as something more than a common man, not keen to spring into somebody else's trouble and get their fingers scorched.
"What's he going to do with them?" one of these inquired.
"Burn 'em," the fat man replied, as readily as if he had it from Morgan's own mouth, and as strongly denunciatory as though the disgrace of it reached to his fair fame and good business already. "You boys ain't goin' to stand around here and see men from your own country burnt like niggers, are you? Well, you don't look like a bunch that'd do it—you don't look like it to me."
"What did they do to him?" one of the cowboys asked, not greatly fired by the fat man's sectional appeal.
Stilwell came loitering among them at that point, a man of their own calling, sympathies, and traditions, with the shoulder-lurching gait of a man who had spent most of his years in the saddle. He told them in a few feeling, picturesque words the extent of Morgan's grievance against the six, and left it with them to say whether he was to be interfered with in his exaction of a just and fitting payment.
"I don't know what he's goin' to do," Stilwell said, "but if he wants to roast 'em and eat 'em"—looking about him with stern eyes—"this is his day."
"If he needs any help there's plenty of it here," said a cowboy from the Nation, hooking his thumb with lazy but expressive movement under the cartridge belt around his slim waist.