Meantime, there was a breathing spell between, a spell of pleasant hours in the little newspaper office, reading the exchanges, helping on the arrangement of such news as the town and country about it yielded, and having many a good laugh over their bungling of the job, himself and the pretty, brown-eyed editor, that was better for their bodies and souls than all the physic on Druggist Gray's shelves. And not one line concerning Morgan's adventures appeared in the _Headlight_ during that time. In this manner, Ascalon enjoyed as it might three days of peace out of this summer solstice. The drouth was aggravating in its duration and growing hardships. Many families in town were without water, and obliged to carry it from the deep well in the public square. Numberless cattle were being driven to the loading pens for shipment to market, weeks ahead of their day of doom, unfattened, unfit. The range was becoming a barren; disaster threatened over that land with a torch in its blind-striking hand. On the evening of this third day, between sunset and twilight, Rhetta Thayer stopped Morgan as he was passing the _Headlight_ office at the beginning of his nightly patrol. She was disturbed by an agitation that she could not conceal; her eyes stood wide as if some passing terror had opened their windows. "He shot at you, and you didn't tell me!" she said, reproachfully, facing him just inside the door. "Well, he isn't much of a shot," Morgan told her, cheerful assurance in his words. "I can assure you I was at no time in any danger." "Oh! you didn't tell me!" she said, her voice little above a whisper on her quick-coming breath. "It didn't amount to anything," Morgan discounted, wondering how she had heard of it. "All that puzzled me was why the little rat did it--I never stepped in front of him anywhere." "That woman in the tent--the rustler's wife--told me--she told me just a little while ago. Oh! if he--if he'd have hit you!" "The kids all came running out of the tent--I thought he'd hit one of them," Morgan said, humorously, thinking only to calm her great agitation and quiet her friendly--if there could be no dearer interest--concern. "It was Peden got him to do it," she declared. "Peden? Why should Hutton go out to do that fellow's gunning?" "Dell Hutton's gambling the county's money, he killed Mr. Smith because he charged him with it! Pa knows it, pa's on his bond, and if he keeps on losing the county funds there on Peden's game we'll have to make it good. It will take everything we've got--if he keeps on." "That's bad, that's mighty bad," Morgan said, deeply concerned, curiously awakened to the inner workings of things in Ascalon. "Still, I don't see what connection I have in it, why he'd want to take a shot at me on the quiet that way."