ner much more effective than any
police shield or star ever devised. Rhetta pressed it down hard with the
palm of her hand to make the stiff ribbon assume a graceful hang, so
hard that she must have felt the kick of the new officer's heart just
under it. And she looked up into his eyes with a glad, confident smile.

"I feel safe _now_," she said, sighing as one who puts down a wearing
burden at the end of a toilsome journey.

CHAPTER XIII

THE HAND OF THE LAW

The stars came out over a strange, silent, astonished, confounded,
stupefied Ascalon that night. The wolf-howling of its revelry was
stilled, the clamor of its obscene diversions was hushed. It was as if
the sparkling tent of the heavens were a great bowl turned over the
place, hushing its stridulous merriment, stifling its wild laughter and
dry-throated feminine screams.

The windows of Peden's hall were dark, the black covers were drawn over
the gambling tables, the great bar stood in the gloom without one priest
of alcohol to administer the hilarious rites across its glistening altar
boards.

As usual, even more than usual, the streets around the public square
were lively with people, coming and passing through the beams of light
from windows, smoking and talking and idling in groups, but there was no
movement of festivity abroad in the night, no yelping of departing
rangers. It was as if the town had died suddenly, so suddenly that all
within it were struck dumb by the event.

For the new city marshal, the interloper as many held him to be, the
tall, solemn, long-stepping stranger who carried a rifle always ready
like a man looking for a coyote, had put the lock of his prohibition on
everything within the town. Everything that counted, that is, in the
valuation of the proscribed, and the victims who came like ephemera on
the night wind to scorch and shrivel and be drained in their bright,
illusive fires. The law long flouted, made a joke of, despised, had come
to Ascalon and laid hold of its alluring institutions with stern and
paralyzing might.

Early in the first hours of his authority the new city marshal, or
deputy marshal, to be exact, had received from unimpeachable source, no
less than a thick volume of the statutes, that the laws of the state of
Kansas, which he had sworn to enforce, prohibited the sale of
intoxicating liquors; prohibited gambling and games of chance;
interdicted the operation of immoral resorts--put a lock and key in