"No," she denied him, putting down her qualm, clutching the heavy belt firmly. "It is a notable trophy, a great distinction you're giving me, Mr. Morgan. I'm afraid you'll think I'm a coward," smiling wanly as she lifted her face. "You're not afraid to edit the paper. That seems to me the most dangerous job in town." "Most dangerous job in town!" she reproved him, giving him to understand very plainly that she could name one attended by greater perils. "They've only killed _one_ editor, so far." "Can you shoot?" he asked, as seriously concerned as if the fate of editors in Ascalon darkened over her already. "Everybody in this town can shoot," she sighed. "It's every boy's ambition to own and carry a pistol, and most of them do." "I hope you'll never have to defend the independence of the press with arms," he said, making a small pleasantry of it. "More than likely they're gentlemen enough to let you say whatever you want to, and make no kick." "The _Headlight_ is going to be an awful joke with Riley Caldwell and me getting it out. But I'm not going to try to please anybody. That way I may please them all." "It sounds like the sensible way. Have you edited before?" "I used to help Mr. Smith, the editor they killed. That was in the summer vacation, just. I taught school the rest of the time." "You must have been the busiest person in town," he said, with pride in her activities as if they had touched his own life long ago. "I'm a poor stick of an editor, I'm afraid, though--I seem to be all mussed up with legal notices and this sudden flood of news. And I can't set type worth a cent!" "Just let the news go," he suggested, not without concern for the part he might bear in her chronicle of late events in Ascalon. "Let the news go!" She censured him with her softly chiding eyes. "I wish I could write like Mr. Smith--I'd wake this town up! Poor man, his coat is hanging in the office by the desk, so suggestive of him it makes me cry. I haven't had the heart to take it away--it would seem like expelling his spirit from the place. He was a slender, gentle little man, more like a minister than an editor. It took an awful coward to shoot him down that way." "You're right; I met him," Morgan said, remembering Dell Hutton among the wagons, his smoking gun in his hand. "Sneaking little coward!" "Well, he'll hardly sling his gun down on you," Morgan reflected, as if he communed with himself, yet thinking that Hutton scarcely would be beyond even that. "Hardly," she replied, in abstraction. "What are you going to do with that old brigand you've got locked in the calaboose?" "I expect we'll turn him loose in the morning. There doesn't seem to be anything we can hold him for, guilty as he is." "If he'll leave, and never come back," doubtfully. "I'm glad now it turned out the way it did, I'm so thankful you didn't have to--that you came through _without blood on your hands_!" "It would have been a calamity the other way," he said.