216
XIX The Curse of Blood 223
XX Unclean 234
XXI As One That Is Dead 241
XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245
XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259
XXIV Madness of the Winds 277
XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290
XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299
XXVII Absolution 315
XXVIII Sunset 325

TRAIL'S END

CHAPTER I

THE UNCONQUERED LAND

Bones.

Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The
tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a
sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its
treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile
wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in
the dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.

A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as he
followed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable West
once was borne. Although that highway had belonged to another
generation, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on its
creeping journey toward distant Santa Fe, the ruts of old wheels were
deep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamed
like scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broad
highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new
ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.

Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; it
wound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairie
grass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler who
bent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot on
a road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, was
a man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took the
road in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains had
traveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leather
bag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository,
upon which the dust of the road lay spread.

Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparently
fresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him since
morning, not a li