by Oakley Hall
“Asked him what, Frank?” Jessie said.
“Well, told him. How the Medusa ought to pay part of Tom Cassady’s keep.”
“Tom doesn’t have to worry about his keep, Frank.”
Brunk nodded a little; his eyes were pits of shadow. “No, I guess it won’t run to much, either,” he said. “But I worry about it, Miss Jessie. And it was the Medusa smashed him.”
“You are beginning to talk like Lathrop,” Jessie said.
“And maybe MacDonald will put Jack Cade to run me out of town, too?” Brunk said. “Well, I am just saying there is going to be trouble when Tom dies, is all.”
The doctor said, “Do you need him to die? So you can have your trouble?”
Brunk looked at him reproachfully. “That kind of hurts, Doc.” He leaned against the wall. “Do you think I want that? I only know what all of us want, and that’s help.”
“I have tried to talk to Charlie MacDonald about the laggings,” Jessie said. She put a hand on Brunk’s arm. “But he is no easier for me to talk to. He—”
“I think maybe he is, if you’ll pardon me, Miss Jessie,” Brunk said. “Doc, it is a fact. I am a miserable no-account miner. We all are. We are dirty, ignorant bullprod drillers and muckers, as everybody knows. No one will listen when the animals try to talk. We will have to have a union.”
“Have it, then,” the doctor said, with an irritation he did not understand. “If you break your heads fighting for a union or in the stope it is the same broken head.”
“It is not the same,” Brunk said.
Jessie said in her quiet voice, “Frank, my father used to say that men could do anything they wanted if they wanted it enough. Just to look at history to see what they have done, because they wanted it with all their hearts. He was going to write a book about it and he had collected pieces for the book—the impossible things that men have accomplished because it is in them to do anything if—”
“It’s not so,” Brunk broke in, roughly.
The doctor saw Jessie’s eyes widen. “You can be civil, Brunk,” he said.
Brunk rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Sorry. But it is not so, Miss Jessie. We can’t have a union because we are not strong enough to make it and never will be, and what we want’s nothing to do with it. That’s all,” he said bitterly. “Jim Lathrop was a good man and he did his best, and all he got was run out by a hired hardcase for his pains. Wanted enough!” he said, with scorn.
“Jim Lathrop did not have courage enough,” Jessie said.
“Jesus Christ!” Brunk cried. “I will not hear that from anybody, Miss Jessie!”
Jessie’s face was stiff as she gazed back at Brunk, the lamp steady in her hand, her breast rising and falling, and all the power of her will in her eyes.
And Brunk sighed and said in a humble voice, “I am sorry, Miss Jessie. I guess I have got the nerves tonight.”
“All right, Frank,” Jessie said. “I know Tom Cassady is your friend. And I know Jim Lathrop was.” Footsteps sounded in the entryway, and she excused herself and hurried away down the hall, carrying the light with her.
The doctor said to Brunk, “Don’t you know how to be civil? Don’t you ever consider what she has done for you?”
“Christ knows she helps us enough,” Brunk said, in his heavy, tired voice. “And Christ knows you do, Doc. But—” Brunk stopped.
“But what?” He put his bag down and stepped closer to the miner. He could not see Brunk’s features now in the darkness.
“But Christ knows we shouldn’t ought to be dirty charity cases,” Brunk groaned. “We are people like anybody else. When we are charity cases it just makes it worse what everybody thinks of us. We—”
“Just a moment,” the doctor said. “Let me tell you something. Who will you blame for the fact that you are charity cases? Jessie? Is it MacDonald’s fault that Cassady has saved no money and must become a charity case? You make more money by far than any other laboring men in Warlock. Have any of you ever thought of saving any of it? I will grant you that the saloons, gambling halls, and the Row are snares constructed to relieve you of your earnings. But must all of you fall into those snares payday after payday? Saving is good for the moral fiber—a quality extremely rare among you. Saving your pay might also keep you from becoming charity cases, since you resent that status so much.”
Brunk said, “If we had a union we could—”
“There is not moral fiber enough among you to make a union.”
Brunk was silent for a time. Then he said, “Doc, I’m not saying what you just said isn’t so. But it isn’t all there is to it. We have got to have help to have a union, Doc. And the help we have to have is from respectable people. Like you.”
He had told Brunk many times he would not engage himself in trying to form a miners’ union; he had told himself, as many times, that there was no reason why he should. He said with finality, “I am a doctor, Frank. That’s all I am.”
“That’s a funny way to be. For I am a miner, but I am a man too.”
He didn’t answer; he picked up his bag.
Brunk said bitterly, “Well, don’t worry—they won’t fight when a man dies, not having any of that moral fiber you said. But maybe they will try to cut wages one of these days. I have never seen a man yet that wouldn’t fight for money.”
Brunk moved away from him, down toward the hospital room. Carrying his bag, the doctor walked rapidly to the entryway, and the stairs that led to the rooms on the second story of the General Peach. Outside the open front door a group of boarders on the porch were talking together in the darkness.
As he started up the stairs he could see through Jessie’s door, which she always left open, when she had company, for the sake of propriety. She was sitting stiffly on the horsehair sofa, with her hands clasped in her lap and her face alight. Just past the edge of the door a black strip of Blaisedell’s coat sleeve was visible, on the arm of the red plush chair.
“They were reasonable enough,” Blaisedell was saying. “Most men are, when you can talk to them straight. I don’t know as McQuown is one I’d trust far, but then I don’t know him.”
Blaisedell’s voice ceased for a moment, and Jessie glanced toward the door. The doctor went on up the stairs. Below him they began talking again, but now he couldn’t hear the words. In his room, as he poured a glass of water, and, into the water, the carefully measured drops of laudanum, he could not hear them at all.
7. CURLEY BURNE PLAYS HIS MOUTH ORGAN
IN THE night Curley let Spot pick his own way, only pushing on him when he began to fritter. By day it was a six-hour ride from Warlock to San Pablo, but by night it was slow. The stars were out and a burnt quarter-moon hung in the west, but the darkness was thick, and shapes came suddenly out of it to make his heart start and pound. From time to time he brought out the mouth organ that hung on a cord inside his shirt, and blew a tune through it.
He had dropped the others behind, but Abe had dropped him, too. Still, it was pleasant riding alone in the night, hearing now the wind whispering through trees he couldn’t even see. He reined up a moment to locate himself by the sound; he must be on the slope where, below, the river made a bend around a thick stand of cottonwoods. He turned downhill toward the river, Spot picking his way along with care. He heard the river itself and immediately, as he always did when he first heard it, he reined up again and dismounted to make water.
He rode on alongside the river, with its trembling rapid sheen under the moon and the trees soaring against the black sky, light-streaked where the wind turned the leaves. He listened for the thick rush of the rapids, and saw before him the outline of a horseman. He raised his mouth organ and blew into it, tunelessly. Spot scrambled down a rocky ledge, striking hoof-sparks.
“Curley?” Abe said.
“Ho,” he replied, and Spot whinnied at Abe’s black. They were on the northwest corner of the spread now, and Abe always stopped and watered here.
“Pretty night for a ride,” Curley said
, dismounting and giving Spot a slap on the flank. “But I sure don’t own night eyes like you do. It is lucky Spot knows the route.”
“Where’s the others?” Abe asked.
“Back somewhere, bickering and whickering.”
Abe said nothing, and Curley waited to see if he would start off or wait. If he started off he would let him go in alone. But Abe waited until he remounted, and together they rode on down along the river beneath the cottonwoods.
After a time Curley said, “Quite a one, the marshal!”
“Yes,” Abe said. “He is quite a one.” Abe didn’t pick it up any more than that, nor, although his voice had seemed short, quite cut him off either.
Curley was silent for a time, thinking that it was still all right between the two of them, but thinking painfully now, too, that if he, Curley Burne, left San Pablo and moved west, or north, or down to Sonora somewhere, the way he had been considering lately, Abe would turn into pure son of a bitch. Like Jack Cade, only a bigger one; and that would be too bad. Abe had been knocking at it close for a good while now—he knew well enough that Abe had put Jack there to backshoot Blaisedell if it came to it—and it seemed to him more and more that but for him, and some kind of decency Abe owed him, Abe would go all the way over.
And the old man, he thought, shaking his head. The old man was a trial and a terror, and born unholy mean.
“Let’s go on along the river instead of cutting in,” Abe said.
“Sounds nice tonight, don’t it?” He reined right as Abe cut back down under the deep shadow of the cottonwoods. He spat, scraped his hand over his face, and braced himself to try again. Once he and Abe had been able to talk things out.
“Well,” he said loudly. “Looks like I am some beholden to him. He could’ve burned me down there as well as not.”
“No,” Abe said.
“Surely,” he insisted. “I was looking right down it, six feet long and six deep. And lonely!”
“No,” Abe said again. “It looks better for him like this.”
He grimaced to think of having to try to figure everything that way. “Well, he is greased lightning, sure enough,” he went on. “I never saw a man get unhooked that fast and have himself in hand enough so he didn’t have the trigger on the pull. I am some pleased to be with us here, tonight.”
Abe didn’t turn, didn’t speak.
“Well, it was coming anyhow,” Curley said. “Warlock was about due to get fed up with folks. There’s been things done that would make me mad, I know. Pony, now; Pony is an aggravating kind of man. Sometimes I think he don’t have good sense. Looks like Warlock was due for somebody like this Blaisedell.”
“I was here before he was,” Abe said, in a stifled voice. “But now he is set up to say who comes and goes in Warlock.”
“Aw, Abe,” he said. He didn’t know how to go on, but he was filled with it now and he had to try to say it out. “What’s got into you, Abe?” he asked.
“Meaning what?” Abe said.
He couldn’t bring himself to reproach Abe for setting Jack Cade to backshoot Blaisedell. He said, “Well, it used to be you’d come out and shoot tomato cans off fence posts with the rest of us. And mostly you’d win, but sometimes you’d lose out—that will happen to any man. And Indian wrestle and hand wrestle with us when we got to fooling, and that the same. But you have stopped it.”
The black cantered ahead, but when Curley caught up again he kept at it.
“Like you had got to be too big a man to lose any more.” His voice felt thick in his throat. “Like if you lost even one time at anything now you lost face, or some damned foolish thing. Like—” He cleared his throat. “Like I kind of think you couldn’t stand to lose tonight.”
This time Abe glanced back at him, and Curley turned in his spurs in order to draw up even.
“Abe,” he said. “Anything where you stand to win, you have got to be able to stand to lose, too. For that’s the way things go. Abe,” he said. “Maybe I know how you feel some. But say you kept on being the biggest man in the San Pablo valley and Warlock too. You still wouldn’t be the biggest man in the territory by a damn sight. And say you called out old Peach and the cavalry, and massacreed them and took Peach’s scalp—where’d you go then? What’d you have to be the biggest of then?”
It sounded as though Abe laughed, and his spirits rose.
“Why, Curley,” Abe said. “The last time I saw that scalp of Peach’s there wasn’t a hell of a lot of hair to take. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Espirato took his Paches out of here—when he saw old Time had beat him to Peach’s hair.”
He laughed too. It sounded like the old Abe.
“Bud Gannon coming along with the others?” Abe asked.
“He stayed in town.”
“He did?” Abe said. When he spoke again his voice had turned somber. “I know there is some that’s turned against me.”
“That’s not so, Abe!” he protested.
“It’s so. Like Bud. And Chet—you see how he has been staying clear. And I felt it hard in Warlock tonight. But you can’t back off.”
“Nothing ever stopped me from it.” Curley tried to say it lightly. “I surely backed tonight, and glad to.”
“I couldn’t have done that,” Abe said. “I guess you know that’s why I let you take it.”
He nodded sickly. He thought again of Cade, and he thought of how it had been worked when they had run Canning; he had tried to shut that from his mind, but it had been as clear as this tonight. He felt sick for Abe. “Surely I knew it,” he said. “But what the hell? Abe—I am damned if I think poor of myself for backing off tonight. Or why you—”
“There gets a time when it don’t matter what you think of yourself,” Abe broke in. “That’s it, you see. Maybe it is what everybody else thinks instead.” The black cantered on ahead again. “Let’s get on in,” Abe called back to him.
Curley spurred Spot to a half-trot, but he stayed behind Abe all the way.
As they walked up from the horse corral, the dogs barked and jumped around their legs. Curley sighed as he looked up at the squat ranch house, where a little light showed in a window. Behind it soared the monolith of the chimney of the old house, which had burned down. The lonely chimney seemed incredibly high and narrow against the night sky, pointing its stone and crumbling mortar height at the stars. He wondered if that chimney would not fall some day, despite the poles that propped it up, and mash them all to smithereens.
He said to Abe, “Well, I’ll be going over to the bunkhouse.”
“Come inside and take a glass of whisky,” Abe said. His voice was bleak. One of the dogs sprawled away in front of him, yelping. They mounted the slanting steps to the porch, and Abe jerked on the latch-string and shouldered the door open. “What the hell are you doing out here, Daddy?” he said.
Following him in, Curley saw the old man on his pallet on the floor. He was raised on one elbow, his skinny neck corded with strain. There was a Winchester across his legs, a jug and lamp on the floor beside him. His beard was thick, pure-white wool in the lamplight, and his mouth was round and pink as a kitten’s button.
“Didn’t stay long, did you?” Dad McQuown said. “Think I’m going to stay in that bedroom and burn?”
“Burn?” Abe said. He picked up the lamp and set it atop the potbelly stove. With the lamplight on it the stovepipe looked red. “You’re not dead yet. Burn?”
“Burn is what I said,” the old man said. “Don Ignacio is going to hear some time you have left me all alone. You think he won’t send some of his dirty, murdering greasers up here to burn me in my bed?”
It was strange, Curley thought, that those Mexicans, killed six months ago in Rattlesnake Canyon, had turned almost every man of them into a greaser-hater—afterward. It was a strange thing.
“There’s three men out in the bunkhouse,” Abe said. He picked up the jug, hooked it to his mouth, and took a long draught. He handed it to Curley and went to sit on the old buggy-seat so
fa against the wall.
“Burn them too,” the old man said. “Sneakier than Paches. Those sons of bitches out in the bunkhouse’d sleep through a stampede coming over them anyhow.” His eyes glittered at Curley. “What happened up there?”
From the buggy seat Curley heard a clack and metallic singing. He turned to see Abe bend to pull his bowie knife loose, where it was stuck in the floor. Abe spun it down again, the blade shining fiery in the light.
“Let me tell you,” Curley said to the old man. “Bold as brass I went in there against him. In the Glass Slipper, that was packed with guns to back the bastard up. ‘Let’s see the color of your belly, Marshal!’ I said to him.”
The old man said, “Son, how come you let Curley—”
“Hush now, Dad McQuown. I am telling this. How come he let me? Why, he knows I am the coolest head in San Pablo, and that saloon stacked hard against us.” Feeling a fool, he bent his knees into a crouch and heard Abe spin the knife into the floor again. The old man stared as Curley jerked out his Colt and took a bead on the potbelly stove. “I don’t mind saying that was the fastest draw human eye ever did see,” he said. “Fast, and—” He stopped, straightened, sighed, and holstered his Colt.
“Kill him clean off?” the old man demanded.
“He was way ahead of me,” he said, and glanced toward the buggy seat. He had hoped for a laugh from Abe, to clear things a little; he knew what Abe was going to have to take from the old man. But Abe only flung the knife down again. This time the point didn’t stick and it clattered across the floor and rang against a leg of the stove. Abe made no move to retrieve it.
“Run you out of town,” the old man breathed.
“He surely did.”
The old man lay back on his pallet, and sucked noisily at his teeth. “Son of mine running,” he said.
“Yep,” Abe said, tightly.
“That all you can say?” the old man yelled.
“Yep,” Abe said.
“Go in myself,” the old man said. “See anybody run me out.”
“Walk in,” Abe said.
“I will drag in, by God!” Dad McQuown said, straining his head up again. “See anybody run me out. I have been through Warlock when it wasn’t but a place in the road where me and Blaikie and old man Gannon used to meet and go into Bright’s together. Went together because of Paches in the Bucksaws, thick as fleas. Many’s the time we fought them off, too, before Peach was ever heard of. Took my son with me sometimes that I thought was going to amount to something, and not get run out of—”