ty of them in that part of
the country, where county seats had been changed, courthouses of red
bricks and gray stones put on skids and moved away, leaving desolation
that neither maledictions could assuage nor oratory could repair. For
prosperity went with the courthouse in those days, and dignity, and
consequence among the peoples of the earth.

Hitching racks, like crude apparatus for athletic exercises, were built
around the courthouse, with good driving distance between them and the
plank sidewalks. Here the riders from distant ranges tied their jaded
mounts, here such as made use of wagons in that land of horseback-going
men hitched their teams when they drove in for supplies.

There was not a shrub in the courthouse square, not the dead and
stricken trunk of a tree standing monument of any attempt to mitigate
the curse of sun. There was not a blade of grass, not a struggling,
wind-blown flower. Only here and there chickweed grew, spreading its
green tracery over the white soil in such sequestered spots as the hoofs
of beast and the feet of men did not stamp and chafe and wear; and in
the angles of the courthouse walls, the Russian thistle, barbed with its
thousand thorns. Men did not consider beauty in Ascalon, this Tophet at
trail's end, save it might be the beauty of human flesh, and then it
must be rouged and powdered, and enforced with every cosmetic mixture to
win attention in an atmosphere where life was lived in a ferment of ugly
strife.

There was in Ascalon in those bloody days a standing coroner's jury, of
which Tom Conboy was the foreman, composed of certain gamblers and town
politicians whose interests were with the vicious element. To these men
the wide notoriety of the town was capital. Therefore, it was seldom,
indeed, that anybody was slain in Ascalon without justification,
according to the findings of this coroner's jury. In this way the
gamblers and divekeepers, and such respectable citizens as chose to
exercise their hands in this exhilarating pastime, were regularly
absolved.

The result of this amicable agreement between the county officials and
the people of the town was that Ascalon became, more than ever, a refuge
for the outlawed and proscribed of other communities. Every train
brought them, and dumped them down on the station platform to find their
way like wolves to their kind into the activities of the town.

Gamblers and gun-slingers, tricksters and sharpers, attended by the
car