"I never want to see him again, I'll always think of him standing there with that terrible gun in his hands, those dead men around him on the floor!" "You may have to go to him on your knees yet, and I hope to God you will Rhetta Thayer!" Violet said. "If you'd seen somebody--somebody that you--that was--if you'd seen him like I saw him, you wouldn't blame me so," Rhetta defended, beginning again to cry, and bend her head upon her hands and moan like a mother who had lost a child. Violet was moved out of her harshness at once. She put her arm around the weeping girl, whose sorrow was too genuine to admit a doubt of its great depth, and consoled her with soft words. "And he looked so big to me, and he was so _clean_, before that," Rhetta wailed. "He's bigger than ever, he's as blameless as a lamb," said Violet. "After a little while you'll see it different, he'll be the same to you." "I couldn't touch his hand!" said Rhetta, shuddering at the thought. "Never mind," said Violet, soothingly; "never mind." Violet said no more, but took Rhetta by the hand, and it was wet with tears from her streaming cheeks. There was peace in the night around them, for all the turmoil there might be in human hearts, for night had eased the throbbing, drouth-cursed earth of its burning, and called the trumpeters of the greenery out along the riverside. "I'm afraid he'll come," said Rhetta by and by. "Why should he come?" asked Violet, stroking back the other's hair. "He's got one of your horses--I'm afraid he'll come to bring it home." "You only hope he will," said Violet, in her assured, calm way. "Violet!" But there was not so much chiding in the word as a cry of pain, a confession of despair. He would not come; and she knew he would not come. CHAPTER XXII WHINERS AT THE FUNERAL Joe Lynch, the bone man, stopped at the well in the public square to pour water on his wagon tires. A man was pestered clean out of his senses by his tires coming off, his felloes shrinking up like a fried bacon rind in that dry weather, Joe said. It beat his time, that drouth. He had been through some hot and dry spells in the Arkansaw Valley, but never one as dry and hot as this. He told Morgan this as he poured water slowly on his wheels to swell the wood and tighten the tires, there at the town well in the mid-morning of that summer day. It was so hot already, the ceaseless day wind blowing as if it trailed across a fire, that one felt shivers of heat go over the skin; so hot that the heat was bitter to the taste, and shade was only an aggravation. This was almost a week after Morgan's forceful assertion of the law's supremacy in Ascalon, when Peden and his assassins fell in their insolence. It seemed that day as if Ascalon itself had fallen with Peden, and the blood of life had drained out of its body. There was a quietude over it that seemed the peace of death.