Morgan looked up again quickly from his speculative study of the boards in Judge Thayer's floor, to meet the elder man's shrewd eyes with a look of complete understanding. So they sat a moment, each reading the other as easily as one counts pebbles at the bottom of a clear spring. "I don't believe I'm the man you're looking for," Morgan said. "You're the only man that can do it, Morgan. It looks to me like you're appointed by Providence to step in here and save this town from this reign of murder." "Oh!" said Morgan, impatiently, discounting the judge's fervid words. "You can supplant him, you can strip him of his badge of office when he steps from the train, and you're the one man that _can_ do it!" Morgan shook his head, whether in denial of his attributed valor and prowess, or in declination to assume the proffered honor, Judge Thayer could not tell. "I believe you'd do it without ever throwing a gun down on him," Judge Thayer declared. "I know he could!" said a clear, hearty, confident voice from the door. "Come in and help me convince him, Rhetta," Judge Thayer said, his gray-flecked beard twinkling with the pleasure that beamed from his eyes. "Mr. Morgan, my daughter. You have met before." Morgan rose in considerable confusion, feeling more like an abashed and clumsy cowboy than he ever had felt before in his life. He stood with his battered hat held flat against his body at his belt, turning the old thing foolishly like a wheel, so unexpectedly confronted by this girl again, before whom he desired to appear as a man, and the best that was in the best man that he could ever be. And she stood smiling before him, mischief and mastery in her laughing eyes, confident as one who had subjugated him already, playing a tune on him, surely--a tune that came like a little voice out of his heart. "I didn't know, I didn't suspect," he said. "Of course not. She isn't anything like me." Judge Thayer laughed over it, mightily pleased by this evidence of confusion in a man who could heat his branding iron to set his mark on half a dozen desperadoes, yet turned to dough before the eyes of a simple maid. "No more than a bird is like a bear," said Morgan, thinking aloud, racing mentally the next moment to snatch back his words and shape them in more conventional phrase. But too late; their joint laughter drowned his attempt to set it right, and the world lost a compliment that might have graced a courtier's tongue, perhaps. But, not likely. Morgan proffered the chair he had occupied, but Rhetta knew of one in reserve behind the display of wheat and oats in sheaf on the table. This she brought, seating herself near the door, making a triangle from which Morgan had no escape save through the roof. Judge Thayer resumed the discussion of the most vital matter in Ascalon that hour, pressing Morgan to take the oath of office then and there.