Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  He was nearly done when he began to smell the damp, sweet smell of cornbread, and cooking meat. She called to him that it was time to wash up, and he finished quickly. The oilcloth table was set with dented metal plates and thick white mugs. Kate Dollar had put out a crockery bowl of water and a cake of Pears soap for him, and he washed his hands carefully and wiped them dry on his trouser legs. He could see Kate Dollar in the little kitchen, before a charcoal fire set into a brick counter; her face was pink and prettily beaded with perspiration.

  “You can sit down, Deputy,” she called. He did so, and continued to watch her working. She seemed very slim, and it occurred to him that she must not be wearing certain of her usual undergarments. She brought in a dish of cornbread, with a cloth over it, and he rose hurriedly, and seated himself again when she had returned to the kitchen—to rise again when she brought in the meat and greens. Finally she sat down opposite him.

  “We’ll have to eat the cornbread dry,” she said. “I haven’t got anything to put on it.”

  “Everything certainly smells fine,” he said. He watched her hands to see how she would use her knife and fork, and followed her example. He remembered that his mother had switched her fork to her right hand after she had cut her meat, and he was glad to see that Kate did it that way. In the lamplight he watched the dark down on her bare arms. Her knife scraped painfully on the metal plate.

  “Eat your greens, Deputy.”

  He grinned and said, “I remember my mother saying that.”

  “It is a thing women say.” She had taken off her head scarf and her hair gleamed blue-black. Her teeth were very straight and white, and there was a fine down also on her upper lip. “Where is she?” she asked.

  “Well, she’s dead, Miss Dollar.”

  “Kate,” she said. “Just Kate.”

  “Kate,” he said. “Well, she died, I don’t know—twelve years ago. That was back in Nebraska. She and the baby died of the influenza.”

  “And your father?”

  “Apaches shot him. That was in the early days here.”

  “And Blaisedell killed your brother,” Kate said.

  He looked down at his plate. Kate didn’t speak again, and the silence was heavy. He finished his meat and greens and took a piece of corn-bread from under the cloth. It was warm still, but it was dry in his mouth. He knew he was not being very good company. With an effort he laughed and said, “Well, there’s not many men in Warlock tonight, I guess, eating home-cooked food. And good, too. I mean with white women,” he added, thinking of the miners’ Mexican women.

  “I’m not all white,” Kate said. “I’m a quarter Cherokee.”

  “That’s good blood to have.”

  “Why, I’ve thought so,” she said. “My grandmother was Cherokee. She was the finest woman I ever knew.” She looked at him intently, and then she said, “When my father was killed in the war she was going to go after the Yankee that did it, except she didn’t have any way of knowing what Yankee. I was five or six then and the first thing I remember was Grandma getting ready to go with her scalping knife. The only thing that held her back was not knowing how to find out who the Yankee was. Then when I was ten she just died. It always made me think the Yankee’d died too, and she knew it some way, and had gone off to get him where she knew she could find him.”

  She smiled a little, but the way she had told it made him uncomfortable. It seemed to him they had talked only of death since they had sat down. He said, “I guess I would have known you for part Cherokee. With those black eyes.”

  “My nose. I think I might’ve given up a little Cherokee blood for a decent-sized nose.”

  He protested, and put his hand to his own nose, laughing; it was the first time he had ever been pleased with it.

  “How did you break it?” Kate asked.

  “Fight,” he said. “Well, Billy did it,” he said reluctantly. “We got in a fight and he hit me with a piece of kindling. He had a temper.”

  Silently she rose and went into the kitchen. She brought back the coffee pot and poured steaming coffee into the two cups. When she had seated herself again, she said, “The first time you talked to me you knew he was going to kill your brother. Didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did.”

  When she seemed to change the subject he was grateful: “Where were you from before Nebraska?”

  “From Pennsylvania to begin with. I don’t remember it much.”

  “Yankee,” she said.

  “I guess I am. Where are you from, Kate?”

  “Texas.” She sat very stiffly, not looking at him now but attentive, as though she were listening to something within herself. She said, “I don’t know about Yankees. In Texas if a man killed your brother you went after him.”

  He picked up his cup. The coffee burned his tongue but he drank it anyway, and when he put the cup down he spilled coffee in a thin brown stain on the oilcloth.

  “But you’re not going after Blaisedell,” Kate said, in a flat voice.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Afraid of him?”

  “I have got no reason to be afraid of him.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. All at once she seemed very cold, and bored.

  “Men brace people they are afraid of,” he said. “That’s nothing to do with it. I just don’t expect I have to set out to kill a man because some people think I ought to.”

  “Who?” Kate said.

  “Some people here. But I am not going to go against Blaisedell just because I don’t want people to think I am yellow. I don’t care that much what they think of me.” He felt himself flushing, as though he had been caught in a brag. Kate was looking at the star on his shirt, her mouth tucked in at the corners.

  “Meaning what I think?” she said.

  “Why, no. Anyhow all that is nothing to do with it. It’s that I don’t see how any blame is due Blaisedell. Or not—not much.”

  “You have called him not guilty before the jury in Bright’s City got around to it, have you?”

  “Well, it was self-defense clear enough, when you come down to it. They’d come in to kill him. Billy told me that.”

  Kate drank her coffee. Her eyelashes made delicate shadows upon her white cheeks. He finished his own coffee, disappointed and ill at ease in this silence. Finally he said, “Well, I had better be going now, Miss Dollar.”

  “Kate,” she said. “No, don’t go yet. There might be somebody coming by and I think I had better have a man here.”

  “Who?”

  “The jack I rented this house from. I thought he might be planning on paying a call.”

  He nodded, and he felt better. She poured another cup of coffee, and he said, “You said you knew Blaisedell in Fort James?”

  “I knew Tom Morgan. If you knew him you knew Blaisedell.”

  “What did they think of Blaisedell in Fort James, Kate?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and he saw the tightening in her face. She said, “About the same as they do here. The way they feel about a badman anywhere. Some like him because they think if they show they like him he’ll like them. Others don’t like him and stay out of his way. People are the same most places.”

  Her black eyes met his expressionlessly as she went on. “He dealt faro for Morgan and people knew he was a gunman from the start. Though nobody knew anything about him. Then one day a man named Ben Nicholson came in. A real bad rattlesnake of a man. He was shooting things up. Drunk and cursing everybody and trying to get a fight. He was trying to get the marshal to fight. So Blaisedell went to the marshal and said he’d brace Nicholson, and the mayor heard him and fired the marshal and made Blaisedell marshal. So Blaisedell went out in the street and told Nicholson to get out of town. Nicholson drew on him so Blaisedell killed him.”

  She stopped, but it didn’t sound as though she was finished, and he waited for her to go on.

  “So he was marshal but he still worked for Morgan,” she said. “Morgan had given him a quarter inter
est in the place he had there.”

  “A lot of marshals do that.”

  “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bust in.”

  “That’s all I was going to say. He killed four or five others—bad-men mostly. That writer came and gave him those gold-handled guns. I guess you’ve seen them. I was gone by then. I left pretty soon after he killed—Nicholson. Fort James was dying off by then and everybody was beginning to move on.”

  “What did you mean,” he said slowly, “that the four or five others was badmen mostly?”

  She said, in a voice so thick he could hardly understand her, “I am sick and tired of talking about Clay Blaisedell and who he killed.”

  “I’m sorry. I guess it’s not a thing women are interested in much.” He tried desperately to think of something to say that would interest her, but it seemed to him that he didn’t know anything that would interest anybody. He wondered why she had gotten so angry.

  “I’ve heard people saying you’d come out here to start up a dance hall,” he said, tentatively. “Seems like it would be a good tiling.”

  She shrugged. Then she sighed and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I am waiting to see if this town is dying off too.” Something in the way she said it made him think it was a kind of apology for her anger, and after that it was almost all right again. They discussed the rumors that wages were going to be dropped at the mines, and she told him of the strike she had seen at Silver Mountain. She regarded him brightly now when he spoke, and so he found himself not so tongue-tied, although he marveled at how much more she knew, and had seen, than he. It was almost like talking to a man, and almost he could forget he was having supper with Kate Dollar in her house and alone, and that they were man and woman. But he would be brought back to it sharply from time to time, by something she said, or by some movement, and it was a very intense thing to him, except that it always made him begin to wonder again what had brought her to Warlock, who she was and what she was; but now he did not want to know. And he marveled too at how fine-looking she was in the lamplight, and at how soft her sharp black eyes could be sometimes, and the crooked way her mouth twisted when she smiled the smile he liked. He could not keep his eyes from the soft shadows her lashes made upon her cheeks.

  Then she asked about McQuown. “What sort is he? I’ve heard a lot about him since I’ve been here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in town.”

  “He and Curley are in tonight. I guess on their way up to Bright’s for the trial.” He paused, to see if she was really interested; she was watching him intently. “Well, he is a rustler, mostly,” he went on. “I know him pretty well. He took Billy and me on to work for him after our father died—the Apaches’d run off all our stock.”

  “How bad is he?”

  He laughed shakily and said, “Why, Kate, I guess I don’t like to talk about him sort of the way you don’t about Blaisedell.”

  She touched a finger to the corner of her mouth. She looked wary, suddenly. “I see,” she said. “You are against McQuown. So you are for Blaisedell.”

  “No, that’s not so. Not like Carl is; not—” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “Maybe I am in a way,” he said. “For Abe is bad. Worse than he ought to be, and worse all the time, it seems like. I used to think pretty high of him.”

  “But you left,” she said. “You left and your brother stayed on there.”

  He stared down at his hands. He was going to tell her; it surprised him that he was. It seemed to him that Kate was gathering information not because she was interested in him, but for some purpose of her own that he had no way of deciphering. Yet, he thought, he would tell her, and only waited to get it calm and in proportion in his mind, so that he could tell it correctly.

  “It was eight or ten months ago,” he said. “Maybe you’ve heard about it. Some Mexicans that was supposed to have been shot by Apaches in Rattlesnake Canyon. Peach came down with the cavalry. I guess everybody thought it was Apaches.”

  “I’ve heard about it. Somebody said it was McQuown’s men dressed like Apaches.”

  He nodded, and wet his lips. “We’d rustled more than a thousand head down at Hacienda Puerto,” he said. “But Abe wasn’t along. Abe always ran things like that pretty well, but he wasn’t along that time. He was sick, I guess it was, and Curley and Dad McQuown was running it, but there was nobody so clever as Abe. Anyway, they just about caught us, and Hank Miller was shot dead, and Dad McQuown shot and crippled. We lost all the stock, and they trailed us pretty close all the way.

  “We got across the border all right, but then we found out they were coming right on after us. Abe was there by then, for Curley had rode the old man back to San Pablo. So a bunch of us stripped down and smeared ourselves with mud and boxed those Mexicans of Don Ignacio’s in Rattlesnake Canyon. We killed them all. I guess maybe one or two got away down the south end, but all the others. Seventeen of them.”

  He picked up his coffee cup; his hand was steady. The coffee was cold, and he set the cup down again.

  “That’s when you left?” Kate said; she didn’t sound shocked.

  “I had some money and I went up to Rincon and paid a telegrapher to apprentice me. I thought it would be a good trade. But he died and I got laid off. So I came back here.”

  It struck him that he had been able to tell her all there was to know about him in a few minutes. He shifted his position in his chair and his scabbarded Colt thumped noisily against the wood. He went on. “I can’t say I didn’t know what Abe aimed to do there in Rattlesnake Canyon. I knew, and I was against it, but everybody else was for it and I was afraid to go against them. I guess because I was afraid they’d think I was yellow. Curley wouldn’t go, though; he wouldn’t do it. There was some others that didn’t like it. I know Chet Haggin didn’t. And Billy was sick—to his stomach, afterwards. But he stuck down there. I guess he figured it out some way inside himself so it was all right, afterwards. But I couldn’t.”

  “If you don’t like to see men shot down you are in the wrong business, Deputy,” Kate said.

  “No, I’m in the right business. I was wrong when I went up to Rincon—that was just running away. There is only one way to stop men from killing each other like that.”

  He looked up to see her black eyes glittering at him. She smiled and it was the smile he did not like. She started to speak, but then she stopped, and her eyes turned toward the door. He heard quiet footsteps on the porch.

  He rose as a key rattled in the lock and the door swung inward. A short, fat, clean-shaven miner stood in the doorway, in clean blue shirt and trousers. His hair gleamed with grease.

  “Oh, hello, Mr. Benson,” Kate said. “Meet Mr. Gannon, the deputy. Did you want something, Mr. Benson?”

  The miner shuffled his feet. He backed up a step, out of the light. “I just come by, miss.”

  “I guess you came by to give me the other key,” Kate said. “Just give it to Johnny, will you? He’s been asking for it, but I’d thought there was only one.”

  “That’s it,” the miner said. “Remembered I had this other key here and I thought I’d just better bring it by before I went and forgot, the way a man does.”

  Gannon stepped toward him, and the miner dropped the heavy key into his hand. The miner watched it all the way as Gannon put it in his pocket.

  Kate laughed as he fled, and Gannon closed the door again. He couldn’t look at Kate as he returned to the table.

  “He’s sorry he rented it so cheap,” Kate said.

  “I guess I’d better talk to him tomorrow.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  He stood leaning on the back of his chair. “Anytime anybody fusses you, Kate. I mean, there’s some wild ones here and not much on manners. You could let me know.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said. She got to her feet. “Are you going now?” she said. Dismissing him, he thought; she had just asked him for supper because of the miner.

/>   “Why, yes, I guess I had better go. It was certainly an enjoyable supper. I surely thank you.”

  “I surely thank you,” she said, as though she were mocking him.

  He started to put the key down on the table.

  “Keep it,” she said, and his hand pulled it back, quickly. It was clear enough, he thought. He tried to grin, but he felt a disappointment that worked deeper and deeper until it was a kind of pain.

  He started around the table toward her. But something in her stiff face halted him, a kind of shame that touched the shame he felt and yet was a different thing. And there was something cruel, too, in her face, that repelled him. Uncertainly he turned away.

  “Well, good night, Miss Dollar,” he said thickly.

  “Good night, Deputy.”

  “Good night,” he said again, and took his hat from the hook and opened the door. The blue-black sky was full of stars. There was a wind that seemed cold after the warmth inside.

  “Good night,” Kate said again, and he tipped his hat, without looking back, and closed the door behind him.

  Walking back toward Main Street he could feel the weight of the key in his pocket. He wondered what she had meant by it, and thought he had been right about it at first. He wondered what had happened inside her that had showed so in her face at the end; he wondered what she was and what she wanted until his mind ached with it.

  26. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE

  March 2, 1881

  JED ROLFE in on the stage this afternoon, and everyone gathered around him to hear about the first day of the trial. Evidently the delay came about because at the last moment General Peach decided he would hear the case himself, as Military Governor, from which illegal and senile idiocy he was finally dissuaded. General Peach, however, did sit in at the trial and interrupted frequently to the harassment of everyone and the baffled rage of Judge Alcock. Peach is evidently inimical to Blaisedell, for what reason I cannot imagine. My God, surely Blaisedell cannot be found guilty of anything! Yet I must remind myself that anything is possible in the Bright’s City court.