"When I get good and ready," said Dora, serenely. "You wouldn't care if we got shot to pieces every night as long as we could get up in the morning and make biscuits!" "Yes, and some of you'd be rootin' around somebody else's kitchen for biscuits to fill your craws if this town laid dead a little while longer," Conboy fired back, his true feeling in the matter revealed. "I can get a job of biscuit shooter any day," Dora told him, untroubled by the outlook of disaster that attended upon peace and quiet. "I'd rather not have no guests than drunks that come in stagger blind and shoot the plaster off of the wall. It ain't so funny to wake up with your ears full of lime! Ma's sick of it, and I'm sick of it, and it'd be a blessin' if Mr. Morgan would keep the joints all shut till the drunks in this town dried up like dead snakes!" "You, and your ma!" Conboy grumbled, bearing on an old grievance, an old theme of servitude and discontent. Morgan recalled the gaunt anxiety of Mrs. Conboy's eyes, hollow of every emotion, as they seemed, but unrest and straining fear. Dora had gone unmarked yet by the cursed fires of Ascalon; only her tongue discovered that the poison of their fumes had reached her heart. "I'd like to put strickenine in some of their biscuits!" Dora declared, with passionate vehemence. "Tut-tut! no niggers----" "How's your face, Mr. Morgan?" Dora inquired, out of one mood into another so quickly the transition was bewildering. "Face?" said Morgan, embarrassed for want of her meaning. "Oh," putting his hand to the forgotten wound--"about well, thank you, Miss Dora. I guess my good looks are ruined, though." Dora half closed her eyes in arch expression, pursing her lips as if she meant to give him either a whistle or a kiss, laughed merrily, and ran off to cut patterns in a sheet of biscuit dough. She left such a clearness and good humor in the morning air that Morgan felt quite light at heart as he started for a morning walk. Morgan was still wearing the cowboy garb that he had drawn from the bottom of his trunk among the things which he believed belonged to a past age and closed period of his life's story. He had deliberated the question well the night before, reaching the conclusion that, as he had stepped out of his proper character, lapsed back, in a word, to raw-handed dealings with the rough edges of the world, he would better dress the part. He would be less conspicuous in that dress, and it would be his introduction and credentials to the men of the range. Last night's long vigil, tramping around the square in his high-heeled, tight-fitting boots, had not hastened the cure of his bruised ankles and sore feet. This morning he limped like a trapped wolf, as he said to himself when he started to take a look around and see whether any of the outlawed had made bold to open their doors.