Now, at night, she was calmer, the haunting terror of the scene which rose up before her eyes was drawing off, like some frightful thing that had stood a menace to her life. But she felt that it never would dim entirely from her recollection, that it must endure, a hideous picture, to sadden her days until the end. The two girls had gone to the river, where the moonlight softened the desert-like scene of barren bars, and twinkled in the ripples of shallow water which still ran over against the farther shore. They were sitting near the spot where Morgan had laved his bruised feet in the river not many nights past. A whippoorwill was calling in the tangle of cottonwoods and grapevines that grew cool and dark on a little island below them, its plaint as sad as the mourner's own stricken heart. "I begged him to give up the office and let things go," said Rhetta, pleading to mitigate her own blame, against whom no blame was laid. "You'd have despised him for it if he had," said Violet. "But he wouldn't do it, and now this has happened, and he's a man-killer like the rest of them. Oh it's terrible to think about!" "Not like the rest of them," Violet corrected, in her firm, gentle way. "He had to stand up like a man for what he was sworn to do, or run like a dog. Mr. Morgan wouldn't run. Right or wrong, he wouldn't run from any man!" "No," said Rhetta, sadly, "he wouldn't run." "You talk like you wanted him to!" "I don't think I would," said Rhetta. "Then what _do_ you expect of a man?" impatiently. "If he stands up and fights he's either got to kill or be killed." "Don't--don't, Violet! It seems like killing is all I hear--the sound of those guns--I hear them all the time, I can't get them out of my ears!" "Suppose," said Violet, looking off across the runlet sparkling, gurgling like an infant across the bar, "it was him you saw when you looked in there, instead of the others. You'd have been satisfied then, I suppose?" "Violet! how can you say such awful things!" "Well, somebody had to be killed. Do you suppose Mr. Morgan killed them just for fun?" "They say, they were talking all over town that night--last night--and saying the same thing this morning, that he didn't give them a show, that he just turned his rifle on them and killed them before he knew whether they were going to shoot or not!" "Well, they lie," said Violet, with the calmness of conviction. "I suppose he had a right to do what he did, but he doesn't seem like the same man to me now. I feel like I'd lost something--some friendship that I valued, I mean, Violet--you know what I mean." "I know as well as anything," said Violet, smiling to herself, head turned away, the moonlight on her good, kind face. "I feel like somebody had died, and that he--they--that he----" "And you ought to be thankful it isn't so!" said Violet, sharply, "but I don't believe you are."