n'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 Fe 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.

Unworthy as they were, obscure and trivial; riotous, ignorant, bestial
in their lives, he would lower himself to their level for one blood-red
hour to carry to them a punishment more terrible than the noose. As from
the dead he would rise up to strike them with terror. In the morning,
when the sun was striking long shadows of shrub and bunched bluestem
over the prairie levels; in the morning, when the wind was as weak as a
young fawn.

CHAPTER X

THE HOUR OF VENGEANCE

The proscribed of the earth were sleeping late in Ascalon that morning,
as they slept late every morning, bright or cloudy, head-heavy with the
late watch and debaucheries of the night. Few were on the street in
pursuit of the small amount of legitimate business