o--not tonight!" Violet protested, hurrying forward as if she
would stay him by force.

"You wait till morning, son," Stilwell counseled calmly, so calmly,
indeed, that his wife turned to him sharply. "Maybe I'll go with you in
the morning."

"You've got no business there--let them kill each other off if they want
to, but you keep out of it!" said his wife.

"If you'll let me have a horse--" Morgan began again, with the
insistence of a man unmoved.

"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 could