"Nearly everybody you talk to say they'd rather have Ascalon a whistling station on the railroad, where you could go to sleep in peace and get up feeling safe, than the awful place it is now," Rhetta said. She removed her sombrero as she spoke, and dropped it on the floor at her feet, as though weary of the turmoil that vexed her days.
Morgan noted for the first time that she was not dressed for the saddle today as on the occasion of their first meeting, but garbed in becoming simplicity in serge skirt and brown linen waist, a little golden bar with garnets at her throat. Her redundant dark hair, soft in its dusky shade as summer shadows in a deep wood, was coiled in a twisted heap to fit the crown of her mannish sombrero. It came down lightly over the tips of her ears in pretty disorder, due to the excitement of the morning, and she was fair as a camelia blossom and fresh as an evening primrose of her native prairie land.
"I wouldn't like to be the man that killed Ascalon, after all its highly painted past," Morgan said, trying to turn it off lightly. "It might be better for all the respectable people to go away and leave it wholly wicked, according to its fame."
"That might work to the satisfaction of all concerned, Mr. Morgan, if we had wagons and tents, and nothing more," said the judge. "We could very well pick up and pull out in that case. But a lot of us have staked all we own on the future of this town and the country around it. We were here before Ascalon became a plague spot and a by-word in the mouths of men; we started it right, but it went wrong as soon as it was able to walk."
"It seems to have wandered around quite a bit since then," Morgan said, sparing them a grin.
"It's been a wayward child," Rhetta sighed. "We're ashamed of our responsibility for it now."
"It would mean ruination to most of us to pull out and leave it to these wolves," said the judge. "We couldn't think of that."
"Of course not, I was only making a poor joke when I talked of a retreat," Morgan said. "Things will begin to die down here in a year or two—I've seen towns like this before, they always calm down and take up business seriously in time, or blow away and vanish completely. That's what happens to most of them if they're let go their course—change and shift, range breaking up into farms, cowboys going on, take care of that."
"I don't think Ascalon will go out that way—not if we can keep the county seat," Judge Thayer said. "If you were to step into the breach while that killer's away and rub even one little white spot in the town——"