Trails End

Trail's End, by George W. Ogden, Illustrated

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Title: Trail's End
Author: George W. Ogden

Release Date: February 28, 2007 [eBook #20712]
Language: English
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TRAIL'S END
by
G. W. OGDEN
Author of The Duke of Chimney Butte, The Flockmaster of Poison Creek, The Land of Last Chance, Etc.
Frontispiece by P. V. E. Ivory

[Illustration: Morgan, grim as judgment, stood among the crowd of wastrels and women of poisoned lips (Page 229)]
Grosset & Dunlap Publishers New York Made in the United States of America
Copyright A. C. McClurg & Co. 1921 Published September, 1921 Copyrighted in Great Britain

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I The Unconquered Land 1 II The Meat Hunter 11 III First Blood 23 IV The Optimist Explains 36 V Ascalon Awake 54 VI Riders of the Chisholm Trail 65 VII A Gentle Cowboy Joke 77 VIII The Atavism of a Man 87 IX News from Ascalon 101 X The Hour of Vengeance 111 XI The Penalty 124 XII In Place of a Regiment 141 XIII The Hand of the Law 157 XIV Some Fool With a Gun 165 XV Will His Luck Hold? 176 XVI The Meat Hunter Comes 187 XVII With Clean Hands 199 XVIII A Bondsman Breathes Easier 216 XIX The Curse of Blood 223 XX Unclean 234 XXI As One That Is Dead 241 XXII Whiners at the Funeral 245 XXIII Ascalon Curls Its Lip 259 XXIV Madness of the Winds 277 XXV A Summons at Sunrise 290 XXVI In the Square at Ascalon 299 XXVII Absolution 315 XXVIII Sunset 325

TRAIL'S END
CHAPTER I
THE UNCONQUERED LAND
Bones.
Bones of dead buffalo, bones of dead horses, bones of dead men. The tribute exacted by the Kansas prairie: bones. A waste of bones, a sepulcher that did not hide its bones, but spread them, exulting in its treasures, to bleach and crumble under the stern sun upon its sterile wastes. Bones of deserted houses, skeletons of men's hopes sketched in the dimming furrows which the grasses were reclaiming for their own.
A land of desolation and defeat it seemed to the traveler, indeed, as he followed the old trail along which the commerce of the illimitable West once was borne. Although that highway had belonged to another generation, and years had passed since an ox train toiled over it on its creeping journey toward distant Santa F��, the ruts of old wheels were deep in the soil, healed over by the sod again, it is true, but seamed like scars on a veteran's cheek. One could not go astray on that broad highway, for the eye could follow the many parallel trails, where new ones had been broken when the old ones wore deep and rutted.
Present-day traffic had broken a new trail between the old ones; it wound a dusty gray line through the early summer green of the prairie grass, endless, it seemed, to the eyes of the leg-weary traveler who bent his footsteps along it that sunny morning. This passenger, afoot on a road where it was almost an offense to travel by such lowly means, was a man of thirty or thereabout, tall and rather angular, who took the road in long strides much faster than the freighters' trains had traveled it in the days of his father. He carried a black, dingy leather bag swinging from his long arm, a very lean and unpromising repository, upon which the dust of the road lay spread.
Despite the numerous wheel tracks in the road, all of them apparently fresh, there was little traffic abroad. Not a wagon had passed him since morning, not a lift had been given him for a single mile. Now, mounting a ridge toward which he had been pressing forward the past hour, which had appeared a hill of consequence in the distance, but now flattened out to nothing more than a small local divide, he put down his bag, flung his dusty black hat beside it, and stood wiping his face with a large turkey-red handkerchief which he unknotted from about his neck.
His face was of that rugged type common among the pioneers of the West, lean and harsh-featured, yet nobly austere, the guarantee of a soul above corruption and small trickery, of a nature that endures patiently, of an anger slow to move. There were bright