n left her, his rifle in his hand, to go on his patrol of the town
according to his nightly program. As he tramped around the square, he
watched the light in the courthouse window, thinking of the account on
his own books against the old-faced young man who labored there alone to
hide his peculations for a little while longer. And so, watching and
considering, thinking and devising, the night came down over him,
guardian of the peace of Ascalon, where there was no peace.

Rhetta Thayer, leaving the _Headlight_ office at nine o'clock, saw two
men come down the courthouse steps, shadowy and indistinct in the dusk
of starlight and early night. She paused on her way, wondering, and her
wonder and mystification grew when she saw them cut across the square in
the direction of Peden's dark and silent hall. One of them was Dell
Hutton. The other she had no need to name.

When Dell Hutton, county treasurer, deposited three thousand dollars of
the county's funds in the bank next morning, a certain man who stood
surety on his bond wiped the sweat of vast relief from his forehead. And
when Rhetta heard of it, she smiled, and the incense of gratitude rose
out of her heart for the strong-handed man who had stopped this leak in
the slender finances of the county, a thing which he believed he was
holding secret in the simplicity of his honest soul.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CURSE OF BLOOD

Sensitive as a barometer to every variation, every shading, in public
sentiment and sympathy, Morgan patroled the town nightly until the
streets were deserted. Night by night he felt, rather than saw, the
growing insolence of the pale feeders on the profits of vice, the
confidence in some approaching triumph gleaming in their furtive eyes.

None of the principals, few of the attendant vultures, had left Ascalon.
The sheriff had returned from his excursion after cattle thieves, and,
contrary to the expectation of anybody, had brought one lean and hungry,
hound-faced man with him and locked him up in jail.

But the sheriff was taking no part in the new city marshal's campaign in
the town, certainly not to help him. If he worked against him in the way
his fat, big-jowled face proclaimed that it was his habit to work, no
evidence of it was in his manner when he met Morgan. He was a friendly,
puffy-handed man, loud in his hail and farewell to the riders who came
in from the far-off cow camps to see for themselves this wide-heralded
reformation of t