Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  Again he paused, and again McQuown did not speak.

  “That’s all I’ve got to say, McQuown,” Blaisedell said. “Except that you and your people are welcome here so long as you can keep them in order.”

  “Hear, hear!” someone yelled from the doorway. It was the only utterance. McQuown suddenly started forward. He came at a slow, steady walk along the bar. As he passed Friendly and Calhoun he nodded to them; they fell in behind him. Blaisedell half turned to watch, and Gannon could see the line of his face, calm and sure; and proud.

  “Blaisedell!” Billy yelled. His voice broke. “Go for your iron, Blaisedell!” He leaned forward in a crouch, his hands hovering at his waist.

  Billy, Gannon whispered, not even aloud; he tried to shake his head. He saw Morgan raise the shotgun.

  Blaisedell didn’t move. “Go along, son,” he said gently.

  Billy stood there with his upper lip working over his teeth; he twisted away as Wash put out a hand toward him. Then McQuown said, over his shoulder, “Let’s go, Billy,” and Billy let his hands fall to his sides.

  The men who had crowded back in through the batwing doors now squeezed apart to let McQuown through, and Friendly, Calhoun, and Pony Benner behind him. Wash and Billy came down past Gannon, and Curley stooped to retrieve his gun, holstering it with a flourish. Billy stared at Blaisedell as he passed, and Wash, walking heavy-footed behind him, rolled his eyes exaggeratedly at Gannon. Curley came last, and made a little saluting gesture to Blaisedell. He looked pale, but unconcerned now.

  Then Blaisedell turned squarely to face him, John Gannon. The lookout gazed down at him still from the stand, and Morgan watched him from the doorway at the end of the bar. Everyone was looking at him; he felt it like a blow in the stomach, and slowly he too started out after the rest. Behind him there was the sudden whispering of the Glass Slipper coming back to life.

  They stood on the boardwalk in the near-darkness. As he came outside, slipping his still-bleeding hand into his pocket, he saw Curley standing close to Abe. He heard Curley laugh nervously. “Whooooo-eee, Abe! Fast, I mean!”

  Gannon let the batwing doors swing closed behind him. They struck against his back on their outswing, without force. Jack Cade was sitting on the rail, his head in his round-crowned hat bent down. He rose and came forward, his face featureless in the darkness.

  “You God damned yellow-livered son of a bitch!” Cade whispered. “By God, I will cut your damned throw-down interfering hand right—”

  Gannon backed up a step. Billy sprang forward toward Cade. “Shut your face!” he cried, almost hysterically. “You was supposed to hold on that lookout! I saw you making for Blaisedell, you backshooting son—”

  “Here!” Curley said, and Wash stepped between Cade and Billy. “Abe’s going, boys,” Curley said. “Let’s go along now, and not stand around squawling at each other.” He started after McQuown, his sombrero swinging across his back from the cord around his neck. Abe was already a half-block away, heading toward the Acme Corral.

  The group before Gannon dissolved as Billy and Wash moved aside. Gannon stared into Jack Cade’s face—without judgment, for he had known what Cade was for a long time; and now he knew, too, that McQuown had put Cade to the backshooting which had just failed. With a slow, upward movement of his hand, Cade hooked his thumb behind his front teeth and snapped it out viciously.

  “I’ll shoot that thumb off, one day, Jack,” Billy said, in a quieter voice. “Come on, Bud,” he said to Gannon.

  Gannon stepped past Cade, and ducked under the tie rail to join the others in the street. Billy laid an arm over his shoulders; it felt like wire rope.

  “Back to old San Pablo with our tails between our legs,” Wash said.

  “Did you see that damned Morgan?” Luke Friendly said, in an aggrieved voice. “Brought that God damned short-barreled out of somewhere and had it on us before you could say spit.”

  Cade caught up and fell into step with Benner. “Who is going to get hisself posted first?” he said, and there were curses.

  “He had it his way this time!” Pony said shrilly. “But there’ll be another time!”

  “We should’ve known better than to make a play in that damned place,” Friendly said. “Too bad odds.”

  Gannon trudged through the dust between his brother and Wash Haggin, Billy’s arm heavy on his shoulders. He had never felt so tired, and his dread of Cade was lost in his revulsion against them all. Ahead, alone, Abe McQuown disappeared in the shadows on the corner before Goodpasture’s store. He heard muffled laughter behind them, and Billy cursed under his breath. Someone called, “Say, did you see those gold-handles good enough, Curley Burne?”

  “Ah, sons of bitches!” Calhoun muttered. Curley, strolling ahead of the rest, began to hum a mournful tune on his mouth organ. Gannon remembered that mouth organ, and Curley playing it on quiet evenings in the bunkhouse—that had been one of the pleasant things. There had not been many.

  And suddenly he knew he was not going with them back to San Pablo. He slowed his steps; he felt the strain of stubbornness in him that was as strong as the same strain in Billy, tighten and halt him like a snubbed rope caught around his waist. Billy’s arm slipped off his shoulders.

  Gannon turned to face his brother. “I guess I will be staying in town, Billy,” he said.

  6. THE DOCTOR AND MISS JESSIE

  DOCTOR WAGNER, bag in hand, watched the riders appear against the whitish dust of the street and the night sky. They turned west toward the rim, one of them riding well ahead, the others bunched behind. The suspirant music of Curley Burne’s mouth organ was mingled with the confused pad of hoofs as they disappeared into the darkness.

  Clearly they were leaving town. There had been no shooting, no need for his bag of medicines and his small skill. He heard a man near him sigh with relief.

  He turned and pushed his way through the crowd of men along the boardwalk. “Doc,” one said, in greeting. Others took it up: “Doc!” “Evening, Doc.” Behind him the piano in the Glass Slipper began tinkling brightly. A man caught his arm. “What happened, Doc?” Buck Slavin cried excitedly.

  “The marshal got the drop on Curley Burne in the Glass Slipper. The cowboys have all gone out of town.”

  Slavin let out an amazed and pleased ejaculation. The doctor disengaged his arm and hurried on, for he must go and tell Jessie, who would be waiting.

  He crossed Broadway. Several men were standing on the veranda of the Western Star Hotel, outlined against the yellow windows there.

  “What happened, Wagner?” MacDonald called, in his harsh voice.

  A burst of whooping from the men back in the central block gave the doctor an excuse not to hear the superintendent of the Medusa mine. He hurried away across Main Street. There was no reason not to be civil, he thought, and he was irritated with himself. When the miners came to him with their complaints and wrongs, he could patiently explain that MacDonald’s ways were only company policy, common practice—yet it was hypocrisy, for he shared their hatred of MacDonald.

  He turned down Grant Street toward the high, narrow bulk of the General Peach. A lamp was burning in the window of Jessie’s room, on the ground floor to the right of the doorway. All the other windows were dark, the boarders in town to watch trouble, to see one of the gun fights that were at the same time Warlock’s chief source of entertainment and Warlock’s curse. They had been disappointed this time, he thought.

  Panting a little, he mounted the plank steps to the porch, opened the door, and set his bag down inside the dense block of darkness of the entryway.

  “Jessie!” he called, but before her name was spoken the darkness paled and she was standing in the doorway of her room.

  “I haven’t heard anything,” she said quietly.

  “There was no shooting.”

  She smiled a flickering, tentative smile. He followed her into her room and sat down in the red plush chair just inside the door. Jessie stood facing him, slight and straight in her be
st black dress with its lace collar and cuffs. Her hands were clasped at her waist. Her hair, parted neatly in the middle, fell almost to her shoulders in cylindrical brown ringlets that slid forward along her cheeks when she inclined her head toward him. Her triangular face was strained with anxiety. It was a face that some thought plain; they did not see the light behind it.

  “Tell me,” she said pleadingly.

  “I didn’t see it, Jessie. I had gone to get my bag. But from what I heard, the marshal got the drop on Curley Burne, and took the occasion to announce to McQuown his intentions here. There was no trouble, and McQuown and his people have gone.”

  The tip of her tongue appeared, to touch her upper lip. When she smiled, tiny muscles pulled at the corners of her mouth. “Oh, that’s good,” she said, in a curiously flat voice. She turned half away from him, and laid a hand on the edge of the table. “Was he—” She paused, and then she said, “Did he look very fine, David?”

  “I’m sure he did,” he said. “Although I didn’t see him, as I have said.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said again.

  He glanced away from her, at the bookcase with the set of Scott gleaming with gold titling; at the lithographs and mezzotints upon the walls—Bonnie Prince Charlie in heroic pose, Cuchulain battling the waves, The Grave at St. Helena; at the curved-fronted bureau next to the bed, on top of which were two daguerreotypes, one of Jessie as a girl, with the same ringleted hair and her eyes cast demurely down at a little book held lovingly in her hands. The other was of her father, sad-faced with his neat triangle of mustache and beard, seated against a manufactured backdrop that spread away behind him to dreamy distance.

  “Are you angry, David?” Jessie asked.

  “Why would I be angry?”

  She sat down on the black horsehair sofa, her hands still clasped at her lap. He was, he thought, only angry that she should have seen so easily that he was jealous. “Don’t be angry with me, David,” she said, and he was moved despite himself, by the girlishness that was her manner whenever she was alone with him; by her sympathy and her sweet guilelessness that were her stock in trade, and, at the same time, her armor against rough men. She smiled at him, with the incisive understanding that always surprised him. Then her eyes wandered from his face, and, though she smiled still, he knew that she was thinking about Clay Blaisedell, who had come riding to her one day out of the half-calf and gilt-titled set of Waverley Novels.

  She cocked her head a little, to something he could not hear. “Cassady is coughing again,” she said.

  “There is nothing more I can do for him, Jessie. There never was anything. I don’t know how he is still alive.”

  Her face saddened. He knew that sympathy was as real as anything about her, and the tears when Cassady died would be real, and yet he wondered if any of it really touched her. He had always the feeling that death could not touch her, as rough men could not. He himself had always hated disease and death, and all the other outrages of nature upon man. But he himself became always less removed; hating them, he had, slowly, come intensely to hate Warlock, where death was so commonplace as to be a sort of rude joke, and especially to hate the mines that were the real destroyers of men. Most of all he hated the Medusa, the worst destroyer; and so he had come to hate its superintendent, MacDonald.

  Yet Jessie, too, had seen much of death. She had spent her girlhood nursing her father to his slow demise, and now she had nursed more dying men in Warlock than he could count any more, holding their hands as they departed quietly and bravely—as they usually did if she was with them, for they knew it was what she wanted, though others wept, or fought and cursed death, as though they could drive death off or shout it down. And now in the last week or so he had come to see that she was in love with Clay Blaisedell, had fallen in love with him immediately, was in love as obviously and unaffectedly as she was Angel of Warlock. He wondered if that could touch her, either.

  Maybe it depended upon Clay Blaisedell, he thought, and felt a stricture knot his throat.

  She was listening again. This time he heard it too, the heavy, helpless, muffled coughing. Footsteps came hurrying down the hall, and Jessie lifted the brass lamp from the bright-colored yarn lamp mat on the table.

  “Miss Jessie!” Ben Tittle cried, from the doorway. “He has gone and started it again!”

  “Yes, I’m coming, Ben. And Doctor Wagner’s here now.” She hurried out with the lamp, and he retrieved his bag and followed her down the hall, reluctantly; Cassady only made him feel his helplessness the more. Shadows swung and tilted in the hallway as Jessie hurried along it with the lamp, toward the room at the back that she had converted into a hospital. Tittle hobbled after her on the crippled, twisted foot. They had not taken him back on at the Medusa because of that foot, and now he worked for Jessie as an errand boy and orderly.

  When he entered the hospital, Jessie was already bending over Cassady’s cot. Tittle was holding the lamp for her. Rows of cots extended into the shadows, and men were sitting up watching as Jessie poured water from an olla into a glass, and tipped the glass to Cassady’s lips. The coughing continued, fleshy-sounding and murderous in the man’s crushed chest.

  “He sounds like a goner, Doc,” Buell said softly from his cot nearest the door. “We sure thought he was going about three times to night, and a blessed relief it would be, God help me for saying it.”

  The doctor nodded, watching Jessie lay her hand on Cassady’s chest; he had never known another woman who would have done that, except a hardened professional nurse. “Drink it!” Jessie said. “Drink it, please, Tom. Drink as much as you can!” She spoke urgently, she sounded almost angry; and Cassady drank, and choked. Beneath a fringe of curly beard his face was drawn tight over the bone, and freckles stood out on the clean, gray flesh like bee stings on an apple. Water streamed down his beard.

  “You can stop, Tom,” Jessie said. “Try now. David!” she called, as Cassady began to gasp, horribly. The water might choke and kill him as easily as the coughing fit, the doctor thought, but he did not move. Cassady would not die simply because Jessie commanded him not to.

  The gasping ceased, and the coughing. Jessie straightened. “There, Tom!” she said, as though she had merely talked a child out of a willful pet. “Now, that’s better, isn’t it?”

  The doctor picked up Cassady’s limp wrist. The pulse was almost imperceptible. Cassady was staring up at Jessie with worship in his eyes. The man could not possibly live for more than a day or two, and, heaven knew, there would be another along soon to need his cot. The cots were always needed, for the men were continually being broken and crushed in rock falls, in the collapse of a stope or the failure of a lift, or were poisoned at the stamp mill, or knife-slashed or shot, or got broken jaws or heads in saloon fights.

  It would be merciful to let Cassady die, but Jessie adhered to a sterner philosophy than his. It was not that she considered death a sin, as he had once; she considered it a failure, and could not believe that there were wills less strong than her own. He knew her persuasion to duty, too, and he wondered if she did not also refuse to let Cassady die because her duty as the Miners’ Angel, the Angel of Warlock, was to be just that, to the limit of her powers, and of her will. Perhaps, he thought, almost guiltily, in this singlemindedness she was incapable of any interest in Cassady, or any other, as a person at all, but saw them only as objects for her ministrations and as proofs of her office.

  He shook his head at her, as Cassady tried to speak.

  “Hush now, Tom,” Jessie whispered, smiling down at the dying man. “You mustn’t try to talk, the doctor says. It is time you tried to sleep.”

  Cassady’s pale tongue appeared, to swipe at pale, dry lips. He closed his eyes. In the lamplight spilled water shone like jewels in his beard.

  Jessie handed the olla to Ben Tittle and took back the lamp. She raised it so that its light spread farther, and smiled around the hospital room at the others. “Now you boys try to be quiet, won’t you? We must le
t Tom get some sleep.”

  “Surely, Miss Jessie,” young Fitzsimmons said, cradling his thickly bandaged hands to his chest. “Yes, Miss Jessie,” the others said, in hushed voices. “We sure will, Miss Jessie.”

  “Good night, Miss Jessie. Doc.”

  “Good night, boys.” She started toward the door. Her skirts rustled as she walked. They all stared after her.

  “Doc,” MacGinty whispered, as Jessie went out. MacGinty’s thin, pocked face was raised to him; it did not look so feverish tonight, and he pressed the back of his hand to the dry forehead and nodded with satisfaction.

  MacGinty said, “I guess you heard how Frank tried to get a contrib from MacDonald for—” He rolled his eyes toward Cassady. “But MacDonald said how if he gave anything we’d think the Medusa owed us something when we hurt ourself.”

  “Frank was stupid to ask.”

  “Lumber’s too high to run in enough laggings,” Dill said. “But it don’t cost them nothing when we get busted up.”

  The doctor only nodded, curtly. It was difficult to meet their eyes. Sometimes that was even harder than trying to excuse MacDonald and the mine owners. “I’ll come in in the morning,” he said. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Doc.”

  He took up his bag, went out, and closed the door behind him. Halfway along the hall, Jessie was standing in conversation with Frank Brunk, a miner whom MacDonald had fired a month ago.

  “He won’t last long,” Brunk was saying, in his heavy voice. “Not busted up the way he is. He can’t.”

  “He can if he will,” Jessie said. She raised the lamp, and Brunk drew back a little, as though to avoid the light. He was a huge, almost square man, with a square, red, clean-shaven face. He wore a bowie knife slung from his broad belt.

  “Hello, Doc,” he said. “Well, I went to MacDonald and I asked him straight out to—”

  “You knew there was no use asking.”

  “Maybe I did,” Brunk said. “Maybe I just wanted it clear what a son— Pardon me, Miss Jessie.”