by Oakley Hall
“Why, it seems like they get a new set of laws up there every time a man comes in. Now you can’t even talk any more. And scratchy! Well, I was there by Sam Brown’s billiard place, minding my own business and talking to some boys, and Carl comes butting in and didn’t like what I was saying. We cussed back and forth some, and—”
“God damn you!” Abe whispered.
Curley stiffened, his hands clenching on the rail on either side of him as he stared back at Abe.
“You did it now,” Abe said. He didn’t sound angry any more, only washed-up and bitter.
“What’s the matter, Abe?”
Abe shrugged and scratched at his leg in the dirty longjohns. “Where you going?” he asked.
“I guess up toward Welltown, and then—quién sabe?”
“In a hurry?”
“I don’t expect they got a posse off till sun-up. But it’s not something I better count on. Why’d you get so mad, Abe?”
“People liked Carl,” Abe said. He hit his fist, without force, down on the porch rail, and shook his head as though there were nothing that was any use. “They’ll hang this on me too,” he went on. “That I put you to killing Carl. But you’ll be gone. It’s nothing to you.”
“Ah, for Christ’s sake, Abe!”
“They have got me again,” Abe said.
“Sonny, you shut that crazy talk!” the old man shrilled. “Now, you bring me out there with you boys. Abe!”
“I’ll get him,” Curley said. He went inside to where the old man lay, on his pallet on the floor by the stove, and picked him up pallet and all. The old man clung to his neck, breathing hard. He didn’t weigh over a hundred pounds any more, and the smell of him was the hardest part of carrying him.
“Got the deputy, did you, Curley?” the old man said, blinking and scowling in the sun as Curley put the pallet down on the porch. “Well, now; I always thought high of you, Curley Burne!” His mouth was red and wet through his white beard. “Well now,” he went on, glancing sideways at Abe. “That’s all there is to it. Man’s pushing on you, all you do is ride in there—”
“By God, you talk,” Abe said, in a strained voice. “Daddy, I’ve told you I don’t mind dying, if that’s what you want of me. I just mind dying a damned fool!”
“Abe,” Curley said. “I guess I had better be moving.”
Abe didn’t even hear him. “I mind dying a damned fool, and I mind dying one for every man to spit on,” he went on. He began to laugh, shrilly. “Pile everything on me! By God, they will have a torchlight parade and fireworks when I am dead! They will carry him around Warlock on their shoulders and make speeches and set off giant powder, for him; that never did a sin in his life. And tramp me in the dust for the dogs to chew on—that never did anything else but!”
The old man gazed at his son in horror, at Curley in shame. There was an iron clamor from Cookie’s triangle, and the dogs began to bark out by the cook shack.
“Well, there is breakfast now,” the old man said in a soothing voice. “You boys’ll feel better after some chuck.”
“Blaisedell don’t stand so high now, Abe,” Curley said. “I heard a thing or two about Blaisedell, and saw a pack of miners tramp over him too.” He told about the miners storming over Blaisedell to try to lynch Morgan. Abe looked barely interested.
“And maybe things’re getting stacked against him some, for a change,” Curley went on. “There is plenty talk it was Morgan stopped that stage, and maybe Blaisedell with him.”
“That’s stupid,” Abe said, but he stood a little straighter.
“And that those boys was killed in the Acme Corral to cover it over.”
“That’s a stupid lie,” Abe said. He grinned a little.
“No, there is something there. Pony and Cal stopped that stage, surely. But you remember Cal and Pony being kind of suspicious back and forth about who it was shot that passenger, and then they finally decided it must’ve been Hutchinson trying to sneak a shot at Cal and the passenger jumped out and got hit instead. But maybe it wasn’t Hutchinson, either.”
Abe was nervously running his fingers through his beard.
“There is something there,” Curley said again. “Taliaferro had some news might interest you, and it is spreading around Warlock pretty good, I hear. There is some whore named Violet at the French Palace that was in Fort James when Morgan and Blaisedell was. And this Kate Dollar woman that Bud Gannon is chasing after now. Lew says this Violet says the Dollar woman was Morgan’s sweetie in Fort James, and she took up with another fellow and Morgan paid Blaisedell money to burn him dead. How a lot of people knew about it in Fort James— Wait a minute, now!” he said, as Abe started to interrupt. “And then this Dollar woman was married to the passenger that got shot on that stage. Now if Pony or Cal didn’t shoot him, who did? Lew likes it it was Morgan—he is down on Morgan something fierce—but there is talk that if Blaisedell hired out to Morgan for that kind of job once, why not twice? There is all kind of things being said around Warlock, Abe.”
“Boys, what is this hen-scratch low gossip you are talking here?” the old man said indignantly.
“Shut up,” Abe said, but he began to grin again.
He had better go, Curley thought. There was more than he had told Abe, but he did not like to hear himself saying all this. Lew Taliaferro was a man he could stand only if the wind was right; and what Taliaferro had told him, part of which he had just repeated to Abe, had made as poor hearing as telling, medicine though it was to Abe.
“So I expect you will be going into Warlock one of these days yourself,” he said, and tried to grin back at Abe’s grin. “There is a time coming. I wish I could go in with you when you go, but you won’t need me, Abe.”
“By God!” the old man whispered.
“I’d sure like to stay to see it,” Curley went on. “But it has come time for me to make tracks. Like you said, people liked old Carl.” He took a deep breath. “I’m telling you things are running the other way, Abe. You have done right, staying down here till they started changing. And it was the smartest thing you ever did, too, telling MacDonald you wouldn’t have nothing to do with his Regulators. Just wait it out. It won’t be long. Abe, Blaisedell is starting to come down like a pile of bricks.”
He felt exhausted watching the life and sharpness coming back into Abe’s face. He had given Abe what he had to give, and he would do it again, but he had lied when he had said he wished he could see the end. He could stomach no more of it.
“Thanks, Curley,” Abe said, softly. “You’ve been a friend.” With a lithe swing of his body he turned to gaze off at the mountains. His face, in profile, looked younger. He said, “Well, you will hear one way or other when the time comes.”
“I’ll drink a bottle of whisky to you, Abe.”
“Do that for me. One way or the other.”
“One way,” Curley said, grinning falsely.
“You have sure bucked him like a dose of kerosene,” the old man said, in a breathless voice. The clanging of the iron triangle sounded again.
“Better eat before you go,” Abe said.
“I’ll grab something and say so long to the boys.”
“What do you want to move on for, Curley?” the old man complained. “How’ll we make out? Have to break in a new hand on that mouth organ of yours.”
“You’ll never get one as good as me.”
“Wait a minute till I get my pants on,” Abe said, and disappeared inside.
Curley took the mouth organ out of his shirt and began to play the old man a tune. “Curley,” Dad McQuown said, scrounging up on one elbow. “Tell me how it was you popped that deputy before you go. Ran him the road-agent spin, did you?”
It was sour music he was making. He wiped the spit from the mouth organ, and put it down on the rail beside him. “No, it wasn’t that,” he said.
“You said—”
“It wasn’t so,” he said. “The whole thing was poor all around. He had the drop on me and I went t
o give him my Colt’s like a good boy. But he grabbed hold of the barrel—” He stopped, for Abe was standing in the doorway with his hands frozen where he’d been buckling his shell belt on. Abe’s eyes were blazing.
“You always was a God-damned liar, Curley Burne,” the old man said disgustedly, and lay back again.
“You didn’t mean to do it?” Abe whispered, and his face was crafty and cruel as Curley had not seen it since Abe had heard the Hacienda Puerto vaqueros were coming after them through Rattlesnake Canyon.
He shook his head.
“Carl went and did it himself? Pulling on the barrel with your finger on the trigger. Like that?”
“That was it.” The expression on Abe’s face frightened him a little, but then it was gone and Abe bent to attend to buckling his belt on. “It was poor,” Curley said. “It don’t set so good either, but it is done. I kind of thought I’d better not stick around and try and explain it to folks, what with five or six of them getting ready to pop away at me. Well, I guess I’ll go get some breakfast.”
Abe nodded. “I’ll go down and saddle up for you,” he said, in a strange voice. “You send the breed around and I’ll put him on that you rode out here on, and send him on down Rattlesnake Canyon in case they have got somebody following sign. You head for Welltown and I’ll get a herd run over your track.” Abe nodded again, to himself.
“Well, that’s fine of you, Abe.”
“So long, Curley,” the old man said. “You take care of yourself, hear?”
Curley hurried down the steps. “So long, Dad McQuown!” he called back over his shoulder. At the cook shack he shook hands around with the boys who hadn’t gone with MacDonald, and told them to say so long for him to the rest when they got back from Warlock. He sent the breed to Abe, and got some bread and bacon and a canteen of water from Cookie. Hurrying, he went on out to the horse corral, where Abe had saddled a long-legged, big-barreled, steady-standing gray he had not seen before. “He’ll take you in a hurry,” Abe said, and slapped the gray on the shoulder. Curley swung into the saddle, and Abe reached up to wring his hand.
“Curley,” he said.
“So long, boy, Suerte.”
“Suerte,” Abe said, grinning, but not quite meeting his eyes. Something had gone wrong again, but now Curley was only in a hurry to get out. He swung the big gray out of the corral on the hard-packed red earth. He could see the dust the breed was making, heading south. The big gray moved powerfully; he drew up as Abe yelled something after him, and cupped a hand to his ear.
“I say!” Abe yelled. “They catch you all you do is see you get to Bright’s City for trial all in one piece. No worry then!”
Curley waved and spurred on again. When he had crossed the river that was the border of the ranch, he had never felt so free. He reached for his mouth organ. But he had left it on the porch rail.
His mood was not affected; he began to sing to himself. The gray loped steadily along. The land stretched board-flat away to Welltown, the gray-brown desert marbled with brush. The sun burned higher in the sky. He glanced back from time to time—at first he thought it was only a dust-devil.
Then he whistled. “We had better stop loafing, boy,” he said. “Look at them come!” But he was not worried, for the big gray was strong and fresh, and the posse must have been riding hard from Warlock. The gray broke into a long, swinging stride that ate up the ground, and he laughed to see the dust cloud fading behind him.
Then the gray grunted and went lame.
He dismounted to examine the hoof; carefully he looked over the leg for something wrong, but he could see nothing. The gray stood with the lame leg held off the ground, looking at him with unconcerned brown eyes. “Boy, why would you do such a thing?” he complained, and remounted and dug his spurs in. The gray limped along, grunting, more and more slowly; he bucked half-heartedly at the spurs.
Curley looked back at the oncoming dust. It was a big posse. The gray stopped and would go no more, and he sighed and dismounted, shot the horse through the head, and sat down on the slack, warm haunch to wait in the sun. “Boy,” he said again, “why would you do such a thing?” His hand fumbled once more after his mouth organ which he had left behind him.
36. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE
April 10, 1881
IT IS impossible to watch these things happening and feel nothing. Each of us is involved to some degree, inwardly or outwardly. Nerves are scraped raw by courses of events, passions are aroused and rearoused in partisanships that, even in myself, transcend rationality.
It must be a wracking experience to stand before a mob as Schroeder and Gannon did last night; to do it not once, but twice, and to be trampled at the last by men no more than crazed beasts. I write this trying to understand Carl Schroeder, as well as in memoriam to him. I see now that his office had served to ennoble him, as it had done with Canning before him. We gave him not enough credit while he lived, and I think we did not because he was too much one of us. God bless his soul; he deserves some small and humble bit of heaven, which is all he would have asked for himself.
He was an equable and friendly man. Perhaps he was inadequate to his position here. Yet who would have been wholly adequate except, perhaps, Blaisedell himself? I think a part of Schroeder’s increasing strength (has it not been a part of all our increasing strength?) was Blaisedell’s presence and example here. I think he must have been badly shaken by Blaisedell’s decline from Grace. As he drew his strength from Blaisedell, so must he have been all too rawly aware of the cruel vicissitudes of error, or rumored error, or of mere foul lies, to which such dispensers of rough-and-ready law as Blaisedell, and himself, were prey.
Poor Schroeder, to die not only in an undignified street scrape, but in one of the multitudinous arguments over Blaisedell and McQuown. Buck Slavin heard the quarrel, and saw it at the end; he says it seems to him that Carl was as much at fault in it as Curley Burne. He says there was a deeper grudge there than the mere quarrel, but I think of my own feelings of that time last night, and know it would have taken little to rouse me to a deadly rage.
Buck was present at the General Peach almost until Schroeder’s death, and says that Schroeder chided himself bitterly for being tricked with what is called the “road agent’s spin.” This is a device whereby the pistol is proffered butt foremost, and then spun rapidly upon the trigger finger and discharged when the muzzle is level. It is a foul trick. Curley Burne has had more friends in this town by far than any other creature of McQuown’s. He has only sworn enemies now.
Gannon did not accompany the posse that went out after Burne, perhaps, as Buck suggests, because Curley has been an especial friend of his, or perhaps, as the doctor says, because Carl expressed a wish that Gannon remain with him in his final hour. The miners set fire to the Glass Slipper shortly after Schroeder’s death and Gannon has been much occupied in putting out the fire. The feeling is that he was too much occupied with it, and that his proper business lay with the posse. It is to be hoped that his office will be as ennobling to Gannon as it has been to his last two predecessors.
I think that Carl Schroeder would have been pleased to know that his death has taken men’s minds away from Blaisedell’s failure before the jail, and concentrated hate upon one man. I fervently hope that the posse will catch Curley Burne and hang him to the nearest tree.
I burn the midnight oil, I bleed myself upon this page in inky blots and scratchings. How can I know men’s hearts without knowing my own? I peel back the layers one by one, like an onion, and find only more layers, smaller and meaner each than the last. What dissemblers we are, how we seek to conceal from our innermost beings our motives, to call the meanest of them virtue, to label that which in another we can plainly see as devilish, in ourselves angelic, what in another is greed, in ourselves righteousness, etc. Observe. The Glass Slipper is burned, gutted to char and stink, and the pharmacy beside it saved by a miracle. The fire was set by the miners; they have got back at Morgan. They are devils, I
say, to so endanger a town as tinder-dry as this. But is that it? No, they have endangered my property. I will forgive being shamed, discountenanced, and insulted; threaten my property and I will never forgive. Take everything from me but my money. With money I can buy back what I need, the rest is worthless.
Poor devils, I suppose they had to destroy something. Men rise to the heights of courage and ingenuity when they avenge their slights or frustrations. It has always been so. It is comforting to some to see men work together with a good will against catastrophe. Humanity at its best, they say. Yet against, as I have written. When will humanity work with all its strength, its courage and ingenuity, and all its heart, for?
Morgan is burnt out. Will he rebuild, or accept this as earnest of the widespread sentiment against him here and depart our valley of Concord and Happiness? And in that case what of Blaisedell, who has been banking faro for him? Will he go too, or will he undertake the position of Marshal here again? I am sure the Citizens’ Committee intends to ask, or beg, him to reassume his office, next time it meets.
Blaisedell and Morgan: it is said that Blaisedell did not shoot his assailants before the jail because he would not kill for the sake of Morgan, who had wrongfully murdered Brunk (if not a number of others!). Yet Blaisedell’s prestige would have been even more grievously damaged had Morgan actually been taken out and hanged, and so I see Miss Jessie’s part in this. Blaisedell is obviously very much her concern, and, with the friendship of Blaisedell and Morgan an established fact, did she not realize that Morgan had to be saved at all costs, distasteful as the object of her salvage must have been to her?
There has been some talk to the effect that Blaisedell began his career as a gunman in a position similar to that of the now-departed Murch, as pistolero-in-chief for Morgan’s gambling hall in Fort James, and that he killed at Morgan’s behest various and sundry whom Morgan found bothersome in his affairs of the heart, as well as in his business. Morgan once saved Blaisedell’s life, it is further said, so Blaisedell is sworn to protect Morgan forever and serve whatever purpose Morgan assigns him. Morgan becomes possessed of horns, trident, a spiky tail, and Blaisedell’s soul locked up in a pillbox.