is
gift. They wished him well of it, with all their hearts.

Meantime Seth Craddock, with the blood of eight men on his hands, was
making more noise in the coffin box than a sack of cats. It was a most
undignified way for a man of his sanguinary reputation to accept this
humiliation at the hands of a public that he had outraged. A mule in a
box stall could not have made a greater clatter with heels against
planks than the fallen city marshal of Ascalon drummed up with his on
the stout end of the coffin box. He cursed as he kicked, and called in
muffled voice on the friends of his brief day of power to come and set
him free.

But the sycophants who had hung to his heels like hand-fed dogs when
power glorified him like a glistening garment and exalted him high above
other men, turned out as all time-servers and cowardly courtiers always
finish when the object of their transitory adulation falls with his
belly in the dust. They sneered, they jeered, they turned white-shirted
coatless backs upon his box with derisive, despising laughter on their
night-pale faces. Seth Craddock was a mighty man as long as he had a
license to walk about and slay, but fastened up in a box like a corpse
for shipment at the rate of the dead, he was only a hull and an empty
husk of a man.

They said he was a coward; they had known it all along. It called for a
coward to shoot men down like rabbits. That was not the way of a brave
and worthy man. This great moral conclusion they reached readily enough,
Seth Craddock securely caged before them. If Morgan's rope had missed
its mark, if a snarl had shortened it a foot; if Craddock had been a
second sooner in starting to draw his gun, this wave of moral exaltation
would not have descended upon Ascalon that day.

There was some concern over the holding quality of the box. People
feared Craddock might burst out of it before going far, and return
against them for the reckoning so volubly threatened. The undertaker
quieted these fears by tapping the box around with his hammer, pointing
out its reenforced strength with melancholy pride. A ghost might get out
of it if some other undertaker put the lid on, he said, but even that
thin and vaporous thing would have to call for help if _he_ screwed him
shut in that most competent container of the mortal remains of man.

Thus assured, the citizens carried the box in festive spirit, with more
charity and kindness toward old Seth than he deserved, and stood i