d ground.

There they rolled, clawing, striking, grappling at each other's
throats. As if surf made sport of them on the shelving sands they
rolled, one upper-most now, the other then. And they fought and rolled
until Morgan felt something hard under his oppressed back, and groped
for it in the star-shot agony of sinewy fingers choking out his life.
His empty gun. It seemed that he grasped it in delirium, and struck with
it in the blindness of hovering death.

When Morgan staggered to his feet there was blood in his mouth; the
sound of the fiery turmoil around him was hushed in the roar of blood in
his ears. He stood weakly a moment, looking at the pistol in his hand.
The blow he had laid along Craddock's head had broken the cylinder pin.
Meditatively Morgan looked at it again, then threw it down as an
abandoned and useless thing. It fell close by where Craddock lay, blood
running from a wound on his temple.

CHAPTER XXVII

ABSOLUTION

Morgan stood looking down on the man whom he had overcome in the climax
of that desperate hour, wondering if he were dead. He did not stoop to
investigate; from where he stood no sign of life disturbed Craddock's
limp body. Morgan was thinking now that they would say of him in Ascalon
that luck had been with him to the last.

Not prowess, at any rate; he did not claim to that. Perhaps luck was as
good a name as any for it, but it was something that upheld his hand and
stimulated his wit in crises such as he had passed in Ascalon that
eventful fortnight.

A band of men came around the corner past Peden's hall, now only a
vanishing skeleton of beams, bringing with them the two raiders who had
attempted to escape by that avenue to the open prairie. The two were
still mounted, the crowd that surrounded them was silent and ominous.
Morgan waited until they came up, when, with a sign toward Craddock,
which relinquished all interest in and responsibility for him to the
posse comitatus, he turned away to hasten to Fred Stilwell's side.

Tom Conboy had reached the fallen youth--he was little more than a
boy--and was kneeling beside him, lifting his head.

"God! they killed a woman over there--and a man!" Conboy said.

"Is he dead?" Morgan inquired, his voice hoarse and strange.

"He's shot through the lung, he's breathin' through his back," Conboy
replied, shaking his head sadly. "But I've seen men live shot up worse
than Fred is," he added. "It takes a big lot of lead to kill