s an institution apart from the county jail. Due to
some past rivalry between the county and city officials, the palatial jail
was closed to offenders against the lowly and despised-by-the-sheriff
town ordinances. So, out of its need, the city had built this little
house with bars across the one small window, and a barred door formed of
wagon tires to close outside the one of wood.

No great amount of business ever had been done in this calaboose, for
minor infractions of the law were not troubled with in that town. If
there ever was anybody left over from a shooting he usually went along
about his business or his pleasure until the coroner's jury assembled
and let him off. The last man confined in the calaboose had stolen a
bottle of whisky, a grave and reprehensible offense which set all the
town talking and speculating on the proper punishment. This poor bug had
made a fire of his hay bedding in the night, and perished as miserably
as everybody said he deserved. The charred boards in one corner still
attested to his well-merited end.

Morgan was not at all confident of the retaining powers of the
calaboose, neither was he greatly concerned. He believed that if
Craddock could break out he would make a streak away from Ascalon,
hooked up at high speed, never to return. It was not in the nature of a
man humbled from a high place, mocked by the lowly, derided by those
whom he had oppressed, contemned by the false friends he had favored, to
come back on an errand of revenge. The job was too general in a case
like Craddock's. He would have to exterminate most of the town.

They left him in the calaboose with whatever reflections were his. The
window was too high in the wall for anybody on the outside to see in, or
for Craddock, tall as he was, to see anything out of it but the sky.
Public interest had fallen away since he was neither to be shipped out
nor hanged, only locked up like a whisky thief. Only a few boys hung
around the calaboose, which stood apart in the center of at least half
an acre of ground, as if ashamed of its office in a community that used
it so seldom when it was needed so often.

Morgan returned to the square for his horse, rather dissatisfied now
with the day's developments. It was going to be troublesome to have this
fellow on his hands. Judge Thayer should not have interfered with the
last decree of public justice. It would have been over with by now.

Rhetta Thayer was in the door of the newsp