Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  “I thank you,” he said, to Blaisedell’s back, and walked on. He looked neither right nor left now but kept his eyes fixed on the black and white sign over the jail doorway. Kate’s face appeared there briefly. He had made his turn through Warlock, as was his right, as was his duty; but his knees felt weak and the sign over the jail seemed very distant. He could feel the blood dripping from his fingers, and his wrist brushed the butt of his Colt as his arm swung.

  “Hallelujah!” Pike Skinner whispered, as he came to the corner. He did not reply, and crossed Southend Street, feeling the stares of the men—not vigilantes—who were stationed there. Again he saw Kate appear in the jail doorway, but when he approached she disappeared back inside, and, when he entered, she stood with her back to him.

  The judge sat hunch-shouldered at the table, his crutch leaning beside him, his bottle and hard-hat before him, his hands clasped between them. Buck’s face was framed in the bars.

  “Got you in the hand, did he?” Buck said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “I just broke it open again.”

  The judge didn’t speak as he moved in past the table. He heard Kate gasp. “Your belt!” she cried. He reached back to feel a long gap in the leather and some cartridge loops gone. He sat down abruptly in the chair beside the cell door.

  Kate stood facing him. He saw her stocking as she pulled up her skirt. She tore at the hem of her petticoat and then stooped to bite on the hem and pull loose a long strip. She took his hand and roughly bound the strip of smooth, soft cloth around it, and tore it again and tied the ends.

  Then she stepped back away from him. “Well, now you are a killer,” she said, with her lips flattened whitely over her teeth.

  “Who was it, Johnny?” Buck said.

  “Wash.”

  “What’re they going to do now?”

  “I expect they’ll go out.”

  “He’s got a brother, hasn’t he?” Kate said. The judge was regarding the whisky bottle, his face a mottled, grayish red, his hands still clasped before him.

  Buck cleared his throat and said, “Well, you have made some friends this day, Gannon.”

  “Friends!” Kate cried. “You mean men to think he is a wonder because he killed a man? Friends!” she said hoarsely. “A friend is someone who will say he did right and what he had to do, and hold to it. They will stew on this until they have figured he murdered this one like he murdered McQuown. I have seen it done too many times. Friends! They will—”

  “Now, Kate,” Buck said.

  “I didn’t murder Abe McQuown, Kate.”

  “What difference does that make?” she cried at him. “Friends! A friend lasts like snow on a hot griddle and enemies like—”

  “You are bitter for a young woman, miss,” the judge said.

  Gannon hung his head suddenly, and bent down still farther. He felt faint and his stomach kept rising and swelling against his laboring heart, and he could taste bile in his throat. In his mind’s eye he saw not Wash Haggin’s wooden face, but the frantic dark face of the Mexican sweeping up the bank toward him still. “Bitter?” he heard Kate say, above the humming in his ears. “Why, yes, I am bitter! Because men have found some way to crucify every decent man, starting with Our Lord. No, it is not even bitter—it is just common sense. They will admire him for a wonder because he killed a man they wouldn’t’ve had the guts to go against. But they will hate him for it, because of that. So they will say he murdered him like he murdered McQuown. Or they will say it was nothing, with Blaisedell there to back him, and those others. They will say it for they are men. Don’t you know they will, Judge?”

  “You are bitter,” the judge said, in the same dull voice. “And scared for him too. But I know men better than you, I think, Miss Dollar. They are not so bad as that.”

  “Show me one that isn’t! Show me one. But don’t show them. Or they will kill him for it!”

  “There are men that love their fellow men and suffer for their suffering,” the judge said. “But you wouldn’t see them for hatefulness, it looks like, miss.”

  Gannon raised his head to look at Kate’s face, which was turned toward the judge—and it was hard and hateful, as he had said.

  “I would show you Blaisedell for one,” the judge said.

  “Blaisedell,” Kate whispered. “No, not Blaisedell!”

  “Blaisedell. Hard as I have judged him, he is a good man. That knew better than you, miss, what had to be done just now. That let Johnny take his play and glory just now, for he needed them, with McQuown took from him. He is a good man. And I will show you Pike Skinner that thought Johnny threw this town down with Curley Burne, but backed him now all the same. And the rest of them out there. Good men, Miss Dollar! The milk of kindness is thick in them, and thicker all the time!”

  “Thick as blood!”

  “Thicker than blood. And will win in the end, miss—for all your sneering at a man that says it to you. So this old world remakes itself time and time again, each time in labor and in pain and the best men crucified for it. People like you will not see it, being bitter; as I have been myself, and so I know. So they can say a town like this one has its man for breakfast every morning—” He slammed his hand down on the table top, his voice rose. “But not killed to eat for breakfast any more! Not burnt on crosses to the glory of God any more! Not butchered up—”

  The judge stopped and swung around in his chair as footsteps sounded outside. Gannon rose as Chet Haggin came into the doorway. Chet wore no shell belt, and there was a smear of blood on the breast of his blue shirt. He stood in the doorway staring at Gannon with burnt, dark eyes in his carefully composed face.

  “I’m sorry, Chet,” Gannon said.

  Chet nodded curtly. He glanced from Gannon to Kate, to Buck, to the judge, and then his burnt eyes returned. “I never thought you come back and shot Abe,” he said, in a harsh, flat voice. “I have known you some, Bud. So I know just now you killed Wash because there wasn’t anything else you could do, the way it was put. I come up here to tell you I knew that.”

  Chet made as though to hook his thumbs in his belt, and grimaced and looked down. “Thought I’d better not start up here heeled,” he said, in an apologetic tone. “Things are scratchy out.”

  The judge sat motionless with his chin on his hands. Kate stood tall and straight with her hands clasped before her and her eyes cast down.

  Chet said, “Bud, we thought pretty low of you when Billy got killed. And said low things. Now I guess I know how you felt, for when you press to kill a man and he kills you to keep you from it, who is to blame? Anyway, I guess I know how you wouldn’t go against Blaisedell, and scared nothing to do with it.” His eyes filled suddenly. “For I won’t brace you, Bud. And I’m not scared of you!”

  “I know you’re not, Chet.”

  “They will say it. Be damned to them. I won’t come against you, Bud. But they will try to kill you, Bud. Jack— They won’t rest till they do it now. I won’t go against you, but I can’t go against what’s my own kin and kind! I can’t go against my own and side with Blaisedell like you have done. I can’t!” he cried, and then he stumbled back outside and was gone.

  “Always said he was the white one,” Buck commented, and the judge gave him a disgusted look.

  Gannon stood staring at the dusty sunlight streaming in the door. Presently he heard the creaking of the wagon wheels. He moved slowly past Kate to stand in the doorway. The team and wagon were coming down Main Street toward him, and the riders following in the dust it raised. Pike Skinner, who was still standing before Goodpasture’s store, waved to him to get back inside.

  “Going out?” the judge asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “You had better get out of that door, Johnny!” Buck said.

  But he didn’t move, watching them come down Main Street, Joe Lacey and the breed Marko on the seat of the wagon, and the serape shading the old man in the bed behind them. The horsemen fanned out to fill the street. He watched for Jack
Cade.

  Cade had dropped a little behind the others. He rode with his shoulders hunched. His round-crowned hat was white with dust, his leather vest hung open; his purple and black striped pants were stuffed into his high boots. A fringed rifle scabbard hung slanting forward along his bay’s neck. He reined the bay toward the boardwalk, and behind him on the corner Gannon saw Pike Skinner lower his hand to his Colt.

  The wagon rolled past him, the men on the seat staring steadily ahead. The old man’s eyes gazed at him over the side of the wagon, white-rimmed, sightless-looking, and insane. The riders had drawn their neckerchiefs up over their faces, and it was difficult to tell one from the other. They turned their faces toward him, like cavalrymen passing in review, but Jack Cade was riding toward him.

  “I’ll kill you, Bud!” Cade said in a voice that was almost a whisper and yet enormously loud in the silence. Then he nodded, and set his spurs, and the bay trotted swiftly on to catch up with the others.

  They rode on down the street behind the wagon, fading shapes in the powdery drifting dust, their passage almost soundless except for the occasional eccentric creak of the dry wheel. When they had almost gained the rim, he saw one of the horses rear and a shot rang out; and at once all the horses began to rear in a confused and antic mass, and all the riders fired into the air and yipped and whooped in thin and meaningless defiance.

  There was a flat loud whack above his head and the sign swung suddenly. The shooting and whooping ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and, as though team, wagon, and horsemen had fallen through a trapdoor, they disappeared over the rim on the road back to San Pablo.

  He looked up at the bullet hole in the lower corner of the new, still swinging sign, and went back inside.

  “Was that Cade?” Kate whispered.

  He nodded and heard her sigh, and she raised a fist and, like a tired child, rubbed at her eyes. There was a new and closer whooping in the street, and suddenly Kate moved to lean on the table and stare down at the judge.

  “Everything is fine now, isn’t it?” she said. “Nothing to worry about now, is there? Oh, the good ones always win out in the end and it is all right if they get crucified for it, because—”

  “Now, Kate,” Buck said. “I don’t know why you’re taking on so. It’s all over now, and he’ll have a lot to back him from now on.”

  “But who is to stand in front of him?” she said, just as Pike Skinner ran in.

  Pike leaped on Gannon, laughing and yelling and hugging him; then the others came until the jail was filled with them, all of them talking at once and coming up to slap his shoulder or shake his good hand, to examine and exclaim over the bullet scar on his belt, and ask what Chet had had to say. He didn’t see Kate leave, he was just aware suddenly that she was gone, and the judge gone. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and was passing it around, and others were singing, “Good-by! Good-by! Good-by, Regulators, Good-by! . . .”

  He thanked Pike, and thanked the others one by one as they came up to him. “Surely, Horse, surely,” Peter Bacon said. “It was a pleasure to see you and worth more than just standing there holding my boots down with a Winchester for ballast.” The whisky bottle was forced upon him time and again. Someone had let Buck out of the cell. He thought, with a sinking twisting at his heart, that there had not been such jollity and merriment as this in Warlock for a long time now.

  He heard someone ask where Blaisedell was and French replied that he had not come up with them. He had wanted to thank Blaisedell.

  He flinched as someone slapped him on the shoulder, and in the process brushed against his hand. Hap Peters stuck a finger through the hole in his shell belt. “Drink!” Mosbie was shouting, waving the bottle at him. “Drink to the rootingest-tootingest-shootingest-beatingest deputy this side of Timbuctoo!”

  Mosbie forced the bottle on him, but he gagged on the sour whisky. Suddenly he could not stand it any more, and he made his way outside, and almost ran along the boardwalk to his room in Birch’s roominghouse.

  49. GANNON WALKS ON THE RIGHT

  GANNON was alone in the jail when Blaisedell appeared in the doorway, blotting out the late sun for a moment. “Evening, Deputy,” he said.

  “Marshal,” he said, rising. He had had little occasion to speak to Blaisedell this last week. He had thanked him for his help, and Blaisedell had made acknowledgment in that uncommunicative and not quite arrogant way he had. Since then he had seen the Marshal only at a distance, usually under the arcade before the Billiard Parlor; and one night in the Lucky Dollar when there had been a quarrel between two of the Medusa strikers, which Blaisedell had already settled when he arrived.

  “Mind if I sit?” Blaisedell asked.

  Gannon indicated the chair beside the cell door, and pivoted his own around to face it. Blaisedell seated himself, tipped the chair back against the wall, and grasped one of the bars of the cell door to balance himself. “Quiet lately,” he said.

  “Been some rustling. Blaikie’s lost a few head.”

  “I meant in town.”

  “Oh; yes.”

  Blaisedell frowned and said, “I wanted to ask you about Haggin’s brother.”

  “Chet? Well, he came in that day to say he didn’t hold it against—anyone,” Gannon said, and wondered if that was what Blaisedell had meant.

  “But Cade means to take it on himself?”

  “He said so.” Gannon licked his lips.

  “A mean-looking one,” Blaisedell said, and Gannon felt the full force of his blue eyes. “Backshooter,” Blaisedell went on. “Worried about him?”

  “I guess you can’t worry about every man that’s down on you.”

  “Some can.” Blaisedell’s lips bent into a stiff, almost shy grin. “Maybe you are just not the worrying kind.”

  “Why, I can worry with the best of them, Marshal.” He forced a laugh, and Blaisedell chuckled too. It occurred to him all at once that Blaisedell was trying to make contact with him in some way, and immediately what he had hoped was going to be an easy conversation for him grew taut with strain.

  “Go home and puke afterwards?” Blaisedell asked. He did not ask it humorously; it was a question of consequence.

  “Not till night.”

  Blaisedell nodded as though satisfied. “About Cade,” he said. “If he has taken it on against you I guess the Citizens’ Committee would want to post him. If—” He stopped as Gannon shook his head.

  “I guess not, Marshal,” he said.

  “No?” Blaisedell said, and now his voice had an edge to it. “Standing on your own feet now, is it?”

  “It is not that so much,” he said with difficulty, looking down at his bandaged hand. “It is posting I am starting to balk at. It seemed it worked for a while and it was all we had here. But something happened—I don’t know what happened. I guess I don’t know how to say this very well, Marshal.”

  “Just say it,” Blaisedell said.

  He felt the strain again, and he grimaced down at his hand. “I don’t say it is the killing that’s so bad in itself,” he went on. “I mean, when people wear guns like they do, they are going to use them. But it is that after some point the killing makes people turn against what was supposed to be done for them in the first place. It is hard, and it is unfair, but it is so. I guess I mean you, Marshal. You have stood for law and order here, so if they turn against you, they—”

  “I know all that,” Blaisedell said. It seemed a rebuke, and it angered Gannon that this thought, so hard to put into words, should be brushed aside. He glanced up to see a bitterness in Blaisedell’s face that shocked him; but instantly it was gone, so that he could not be sure he had really seen it.

  “Go on, Deputy,” Blaisedell said easily. “I guess there is more.”

  “It would be a poor thing if this town was to turn against you,” he said. “Because Warlock is a safer place since you came here. And there is more to it than that, for people have got some starch into them to stand up to things. Like Carl. Why, like the othe
r day! There was others than you that let me make that play, and come out of it. But those others wouldn’t have been standing by if you hadn’t done what you’ve done in this town.

  “But there is that point, Marshal,” he went on. He managed to meet the impassive blue stare. “It is like a kid with a big brother to run the bad kids off him. Some time the big brother is going to have to let the kid fight for himself. I mean even if he gets whipped—”

  “That is you you are talking about,” Blaisedell broke in.

  “No, it is the deputy here. Which only happens to be me.”

  “Do you think you are ready to take it on, Deputy?”

  He almost groaned, for it was the question. He shook his head tiredly and said, “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think you are ready yet,” Blaisedell said. “But then I didn’t think you were before the Regulators came in, either.”

  He saw Blaisedell smile a little, and he supposed it had been a compliment. “I think I will stay on awhile,” Blaisedell said. “It is not time yet.” He said it with a certain inflection and Gannon thought he might be talking of himself now.

  He remembered Blaisedell’s telling the judge that he would know when it was time to go, but now he wondered what time Blaisedell had meant, Warlock’s or his own. “Surely,” he said quickly. “I don’t think it is time yet, either. But I have got to be ready sometime. I couldn’t ever have been ready at all if you hadn’t been here.”