is, how many people here want it done?"

"The respectable majority, I can assure you on that."

"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