Trail's End

by George W. Ogden

The fat publican subsided, seeing his little ripple of protest flattened out by the spirit of fair play. He backed to the sidewalk, where he stood in conference with Tom Conboy, and there was heard a reference to niggers in Ireland, pronounced with wise twisting of the head.

Morgan selected, in the face of this little flurry of opposition and defense, a box from among the odds and ends brought him by the boys, sat on it facing his prisoners and broke bits of wood for a fire. People began pressing a little nearer to see what was to come, but when Morgan, with eye watchful to see even the shifting of a foot in the crowd, reached for his rifle and laid it across his lap, there was an immediate scramble to the sidewalk. This left twenty feet of dusty white road unoccupied, a margin on the page where this remarkable incident in Ascalon's record of tragedies was being written.

Midway of his line of captives, six feet in front of the nearest man, Morgan kindled a fire, adding wood as the blaze grew, apparently as oblivious of his surroundings as if in a camp a hundred miles from a house. When he had the fire established to his liking, he took from his saddle an iron implement, at the sight of which a murmur and a movement of new interest stirred the crowd.

This iron contrivance was a rod, little thicker than a man's finger, which terminated in a flat plate wrought with some kind of open-work device. This flat portion, which was about as broad as the span of a man's two hands and perhaps six or eight inches long, appeared to be a continuation of the handle, bent and hammered to form the crude pattern, and the wonderment and speculation, contriving and guessing, all passed out of the people when they beheld this thing. That was a cattle country; they knew it for a branding iron.

Morgan thrust the brand into the fire, piled wood around it, leaning over it a little in watchful intent. This relic of his past he also had retrieved from the bottom of his trunk along with boots and spurs, corduroys and hat, and it had been a long time, indeed, since he heated it to apply the Three Crow brand to the shoulder of a beast. That brand, his father's brand in the early days in the Sioux country where he was the pioneer cattleman, never had been heated to come in contact with such base skins as these, Morgan reflected, and it would not be so dishonored now if cattle were carrying it on any range.

When the Indians killed his father and drove off the last of the herd, the Three Crow became a discontinued brand in the Northwest. The son had kept this iron which his father had carried at his saddle horn as a souvenir of the times when life was not worth much between the Black Hills and the Platte. The brand was not recorded anywhere today; the brand books of the cattle-growers' associations did not contain it. But it was his mark; he intended to set it on these cattle, disfiguration of face for disfiguration, and turn them loose to return smelling of the hot iron among their kind.

Sodden with the dregs of last night's carousel, slow-headed, surly as the Texans were when Morgan encountered them, they were all alert and fully cognizant of their peril now. No rough jest passed from mouth to mouth; there was no sneer, no laugh of bravado, no defiance. Some of them had curses left in them as they sweated in the fear of Morgan's silent preparations and lunged on their ropes in the hope of breaking loose. All but the Dutchman appealed to the crowd to interfere, promising rewards, making pledges in the name of their absent patron, Seth Craddock, the dreaded slayer of men.

Now and again one of them shouted a name, generally Peden's name, or the name of some dealer or bouncer in his hall. Nobody answered, nobody raised hand or voice to interfere or protest. During their short reign of pillage and debauchery under the protection of the city marshal, the members of the gang had not made a friend who cared to risk his skin to save theirs.

To add to their disgrace and humiliation, their big pistols hung in the holsters on their thighs. People, especially the men of the range, remarked this full armament, marveling how the stranger had taken six men of such desperate notoriety all strapped with their guns, but they understood at once his purpose in allowing the weapons to hang under their impotent hands. It was a mockery of their bravado, a belittlement of their bluff and swagger in the brief day of their oppression.

Morgan withdrew the brand from the fire, knocking the clinging bits of wood from it against the ground.