Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  Morgan is replacing McQuown as general scapegoat and what might be called whipping-devil. McQuown has remained in San Pablo and out of our ken for so long that he is becoming only a name, like Espirato, and someone readier to hand is needed. So are the witches burned, like coal, to warm us.

  April 11, 1881

  The posse has returned with Curley Burne, and Deputy Gannon has shown his true colors.

  Burne has gone free on Gannon’s oath that Schroeder’s death-bed words were that his shooting was accidental, caused by his pulling on the barrel of Burne’s six-shooter and thus forcing Burne’s finger against the trigger. Judge Holloway, whatever his feelings in the matter, could not under these circumstances remand Burne to Bright’s City for proper trial; there would be no point in it with Gannon prepared to swear such a thing. Joe Kennon, who was at the hearing, says he thought Pike Skinner would shoot Gannon then and there, and called him a liar to his face.

  It is fortunate for Gannon that this town has had a bellyful of lynch gangs lately, or he and Burne would hang together tonight. Oh, damnable! Gannon must have been eager indeed to please McQuown, for in all probability Burne would have been discharged by the Bright’s City court, as is their pleasure. Certainly Gannon is in danger here now, and, if he is here to serve McQuown in any way he can, has destroyed any further usefulness he might have had to the San Pabloite by this infuriating, and, it would seem, foolish, action. It is presumed that he will sneak out of town at the first opportunity, and that will be the last Warlock will see of him. Good riddance!

  The posse was evidently divided to begin with as to whether they should capture Curley Burne at all, a number of them feeling he should be shot down on sight. His horse had gone lame, however, and, lucidly for him, he offered no resistance. Opportunities were evidently made for him to try to escape, so ley fuga could be practiced, but Burne craftily did not attempt to take advantage of them. No doubt he was already counting on Gannon’s aid.

  It must have taken a strange, perverted sort of courage for Gannon to stand up with such a brazen lie before so partisan a group as there was at Burne’s hearing. Evidently he tried to claim that Miss Jessie had also heard Schroeder’s last words. Several men promptly ran to ask her if this was so, but she only increased Gannon’s shame by replying, in her gentle way, that she had been unable to hear what Schroeder was saying at the end, since his voice had become inaudible to her. Buck says now that he knew all the time that Gannon was trying to play both ends, and was just biding his time to pull one coup for McQuown such as this. I must say I cannot myself view Gannon as a villain, but only as a contemptible fool.

  Burne has promptly and sensibly made himself scarce. Some say he has joined the Regulators, who are encamped at the Medusa mine. If Blaisedell will resume his duties as Marshall here, and this town has its say, Curley Burne will become his most urgent project.

  Toward this end the Citizens’ Committee is meeting tomorrow morning, at the bank.

  April 12, 1881

  Blaisedell has resumed his position, and Curley Burne has been posted from Warlock. I have never felt the temper of this place in such a unanimously cruel mood. It is fervently hoped that Curley Burne, wherever he is, will take the posting process as what we have never before considered it to be—a summons, instead of a dismissal.

  April 13, 1881

  Word seems to have come, I’m sure I don’t know how—perhaps it is some kind of emanation in the air—that Burne will come in. It seems to me that at one moment there was not a man in Warlock who believed he could be fool enough to come, and at the next it was somehow fixed and certain that he would. He is expected at sun-up tomorrow, but I still cannot believe that he will come.

  April 14, 1881

  I saw it, not an hour ago, and I will put down exactly what I saw. I will then have this record so that, in time to come, if what others perceived is changed by their passions or the years, I may look back at this and remind myself.

  Before sun-up I was on the roof of my store, sitting behind the parapet. Others came up a ladder placed against the Southend Street wall, made apologetic gestures to me for invading my premises, and squatted silently near me in the first gray light. There were men to be seen in the street, too, occupying doorways and windows, and a number of them established within the burnt-out shell of the Glass Slipper. From time to time whispering could be heard, and there were frequent coughs and a continual rustle of movement, as in a theater when the curtain is about to rise.

  Some of our eyes were trained east, for the sun, or for Blaisedell, who would presumably appear from the direction of the General Peach; some west, as the proper direction for Curley Burne’s entry upon the stage.

  There came the rhythmic creaking of wheels; it was the wagons taking the miners out to the Thetis, the Pig’s Eye, and the farther mines, ten or twelve of them, with the miners seated in them knee to knee. Their bearded faces glanced from side to side as the wagons passed down Main Street, with, from time to time, a hand raised in greeting to a fellow, but none of the cheerful, disgruntled, or profane calling back and forth we are so used to hearing of a work-day morning. The water wagon, driven by Peter Bacon, crossed Main Street on its morning journey to the river. It was seen that the harness of the mules glittered, and all eyes turned to see the sun.

  It climbed visibly over the Bucksaws, a huge sun, not that which Bonaparte saw through the mists of Austerlitz, but the sun of Warlock. I felt its warmth half gratefully, half reluctantly. There was an increasing stirring and rustling in the street. I saw Tom Morgan come out of the hotel, and, cigar between his teeth, seat himself upon the veranda. He leaned back in his rocking chair and stretched, for all the world as though it were a bore but he would make the best of what poor entertainment Warlock had to offer. I saw Buck Slavin with Taliaferro in the upstairs window of the Lucky Dollar, Will Hart in the doorway of the gunshop, Gannon leaning in the doorway of the jail, a part of the shadow there, appearing as tiredly and patiently permanent as though he had spent the night in that position, in that place.

  “Blaisedell.” Someone said it quite loudly, or else many whispered it in chorus. Blaisedell debouched from Grant Street into Main. He waited there a moment, almost uncertainly, with his shadow lying long and narrow before him. He wore black broadcloth with white linen, a string tie; beneath his open coat the broad buckle of his belt was visible, his weapons were not. With almost a twinge of fear I watched him start forward. He carried his arms most casually at his sides, walked slowly but with long, steady strides. Dust plumed about his feet and whitened his boots and his trouser bottoms. Morgan nodded to him as he passed, but I saw no answering nod.

  “He’ll just have a little walk and then we’ll go home,” someone near me whispered.

  Blaisedell crossed the intersection of Broadway, and from all around I heard a concerted sigh of relief. Perhaps I sighed myself, with the surety that Curley Burne was not going to appear after all. Hate can burn itself out in the first light of day as readily as love can. I could see Blaisedell’s face now very clearly, his broad mouth framed in the curve of his mustache, one of his eyebrows cocked up almost humorously, as though he, too, felt he would only have a little walk and then go home.

  The sun had separated itself from the peaks of the Bucksaws by now; it glinted brilliantly upon the brass kick-plate on the hotel door. I saw Morgan, slouched in his rocking chair, raise his hand to take the cheroot from his mouth, then hold cigar and hand arrested. He leaned forward intently, and I heard a swift intake of breath from all around me, and knew that Curley Burne had appeared. I was reluctant to turn and see that this was so.

  He was a hundred yards or so down Main Street. I saw Gannon, without changing his position, turn with that same slow reluctance I had felt in myself, to watch him. I found in myself, too, a grudging admiration for Burne, that he managed even now to accomplish that saunter of his we in Warlock knew so well. His shoulders were thrown back at a jaunty angle, his sombrero hung, familiarly, down his back, his
flannel shirt was unbuttoned halfway to his cartridge belt as though in contempt of the morning chill, his striped pants were thrust into his boot tops. He looked very much a Cowboy. He was grinning, but even from where I was I could see his struggle to maintain that grin; it was exhausting to see it. I had to remind myself that he had murdered Carl Schroeder by a filthy trick, that he was a rustler, road agent, henchman of McQuown’s. “Dirty son of a b----!” growled one of my companions, and summed up what I had to feel, then, for Curley Burne.

  He and Blaisedell were not a block apart when there was another gasp around me, as Burne broke stride. He halted, and cried out, “I have got as much right to walk this street as you, Blaisedell!” I felt ashamed for him, and, all at once, pity. Blaisedell did not stop. I saw Burne raise a hand to his shirt and wrench it open further, so that his chest and belly were exposed.

  “What color?” he cried out. “What color is it?” He glanced up and around at us, the watchers, with quick, proud movements of his head. The skull-like grin never left his face. Then he started forward toward Blaisedell again. He sauntered no longer, and his hand was poised above the butt of his six-shooter. My eyes were held in awful fascination to that hand, knowing that Blaisedell would give him first draw.

  It flashed down, incredibly swift; his six-shooter spat flame and smoke and my ears were shocked by the blast despite my anticipation of it—three shots in such rapid succession they were almost one report, and Burne and his weapon were obscured in smoke. Blaisedell’s own hand seemed very slow, in its turn. He fired only once.

  Burne was flung back into the dust and did not move again. He had a depthless look as he lay there, as though he were now only a facsimile of himself laid like a painted cloth upon the uneven surface of the street. Blood stained his bare chest, his right arm was flung out, his smoking Colt still in his hand.

  Blaisedell turned away, and as he retraced his steps I watched that marble face for—what? Some sign, I do not even know what. I saw his cheek twitch convulsively, I noticed that he had to thrust twice for his holster before he was able to reseat his Colt there. I could not see whether it was gold-handled or not.

  The doctor appeared in the street, to walk through the dust to where Burne lay, carrying his black bag. A short, stocky, bowed figure in his black suit, he looked sad and weary. Gannon did not move from his position in the jail doorway. His eyes, from where I watched, looked like burnt holes in his head. Other men were coming out along the far boardwalk, and there was no longer silence.

  “Center-shotted the b—— as neat as you please,” a man near me said, as he got to his feet and spat tobacco juice over the parapet.

  “Give him three shots,” said another. “Couldn’t give a man any more than that. I call that fair.”

  “Give him all the time in the world,” agreed a third.

  But I could feel in their voices what I myself felt, and feel more strongly now. For all that Blaisedell had given Burne three shots, for all he had given him all the time in the world, we knew we had not witnessed a gunfight but an execution. I leaned upon the parapet and looked down upon the men who had surrounded the mortal remains of Curley Burne, and I saw, when one of them moved aside, a little patch of bloody flesh. I thought of that gesture he had made, opening his shirt and confronting us with the color of his belly; showing us, more than Blaisedell.

  It had been an execution, and at our order. Perhaps we had changed our mind at the last moment, but there was no reprieve, no way, before the end, to turn our thumbs up instead of down, and save the gladiator. And I think we felt cheated. There should have been some catharsis, for Carl Schroeder had been avenged, and an evil man had received his just deserts. There was no catharsis, there was only revulsion and each man afraid, suddenly, to look into the face of the one next to him. And there was the realization that Curley Burne had not been an evil man, the remembrance that we had once, all of us, liked and enjoyed him to some degree; and there was the cancerous suspicion spreading among us that Gannon might not, after all, have been lying.

  I feel drained by an over-violent purge to my emotions, that has taken from me part of my manhood, or my humanity. I feel scraped raw in some inner and most precious part. The earth is an ugly place, senseless, brutal, cruel, and ruthlessly bent only upon the destruction of men’s souls. The God of the Old Testament rules a world not worth His trouble, and He is more violent, more jealous, more terrible with the years. We are only those poor, bare, forked animals Lear saw upon his dismal heath, in pursuit of death, pursued by death.

  I am ashamed not only of this execution I myself have in part ordered, but of being a man. I think the climax to my shame for all of us came when Blaisedell was walking back up the street, dragging his arrow-thin, arrow-long shadow behind him, and Morgan came down from the veranda of the Western Star to put a hand on his shoulder, no doubt to congratulate his friend. At that moment I heard someone near me on my rooftop whisper—I did not see who, but if I believed in devils I would have been sure it was the voice of one come to yet more hideously corrupt our souls than we have ourselves corrupted them this day—whisper, “There is the dirty dog he ought to kill.”

  37. GANNON ANSWERS A QUESTION

  “COME IN, Deputy,” Kate said. She was tall in her white shirt with a velvet band around the collar, and her thickly pleated black skirt. Her hair hung loose around her head, softening the angular lines of her face. She looked neither pleased nor displeased to see him. “Haven’t left town yet?” she said.

  “No,” he said, and sat down at the table, as she indicated he was to do. The oilcloth was cool and cleanly greasy to his touch. He felt something in him relax suddenly, here, for the first time since the posse had returned with Curley. He had become used to men falling silent as he passed them, and whispering behind his back, but now all his strength and will were spent staying out of quarrels, or worse. They no longer whispered behind his back.

  “Well, they haven’t got a lynch party after you yet,” Kate said.

  He tried to smile. “I’m not so worried about lynch parties as I am a shooting scrape.”

  Kate seated herself opposite him, and, regarding him steadily, said, “What did you expect when you swore him out of it?”

  “What I said was so.” His voice took on an edge he had not meant to have, here.

  “Was it?” Kate said. The corners of her mouth pulled in deeply; with contempt, he thought. “Not because he was a friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  “That doesn’t signify? No, I thought what you swore was probably so, Deputy. The rest of this town hates you because they think you lied, but I don’t think much better of you because I know you didn’t. Because you would have sworn it the other way just as well if it had been the other way, friend or not—just what is true out of your cold head. But nothing out of hate or love or anything.”

  He said roughly, “I don’t have any friends.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. Nor anything.” She put out her hand and laid it cool against his for a moment, and then withdrew it. “Why, it’s warm!” she said.

  Even here, he thought, and he felt as though he had gone blind. He had tried to tell himself it did not matter what everyone thought of him; but it mattered, and he did not know how much longer he could stand under it.

  But Kate continued, mercilessly. “You had a brother. Didn’t you love your brother?”

  “I knew what he was.”

  “God!” Kate said. “Isn’t there anything—haven’t there been any people you loved? That you’d do things for because you loved them even if you saw in your cold head it was wrong, or bad?” Her chair scraped back as she rose suddenly; she stood staring down at him with her hands held spread-fingered to her breast. “What do you see here?” she said hoarsely. “Just a bitch, and you know all I want is Blaisedell dead and that’s wrong? Well, it may be wrong, but it comes out of here!”

  “Stop it, Kate!”

  “I want to know what you see! Have you got eyes to see jus
t exactly what is there and no more—no blur or warmth in them ever? Then what do you come here for?”

  He couldn’t answer, for he did not know. Today, he thought, he had only wanted a respite. He shook his head mutely.

  “Just to talk?” Kate said, more quietly. “To unload a little. And you have picked me to unload on?”

  He nodded again, for maybe that was it.

  “You need me?” she said, as though it were a condition she insisted upon.

  “Yes; I guess.”

  “Holy Mary!” Kate said. “There is something to shake the world—that you need anything but your cast-iron conscience.” She sat down again, and he heard the drowsy buzzing of flies against her window, and found himself listening for the distant crack of Eladio’s maul in the carpintería. He could not hear it from here.

  “Are you afraid of Blaisedell now?” Kate said.

  He shook his head.

  “Every other man here is. Or ought to be.”

  “No, Kate.”

  “Don’t you know why he went back to marshaling and posted Burne out of town?”

  “He didn’t post him, Kate. The Citizens’ Committee did.”

  “Wait!” she said. “Deputy, there are some people who might kill a man because they hated him. And there are some that might because they thought it was right; cold, like you. And then there is Blaisedell. Do you know why he killed Burne?”

  “Because the Cit—”

  “He killed him because his reputation was slipping. Do you know why he took the job as marshal again?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Because he knew the Citizens’ Committee would tell him to post Burne out of town. Because he knew that was what everybody wanted, and so he could be the Great Man again. It is like a gambler starting to double his bets because he is losing. Recouping like that. Not hating Curley Burne, or not even thinking of the right or wrong of it. Just his reputation to keep. And where is your brassbound conscience now, when Schroeder told you Burne hadn’t done it on purpose?”