Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  At the same time he had never felt so excited, nor so pleased with himself. His tongue pried and poked after the tooth he had lost the other night, to Clay, and it seemed to him now that he had played out his life like a kind of bad tooth, merely filling a hole in the jawbone of mankind, to leave, when he had passed on by, a momentary tender spot that not even a blind tongue would remember. But not now; they would remember him.

  And now he thought he must have seen the way some time ago. He had told Clay that since he was leaving he might as well be posted out. It was only a step farther, ace over king. He knew what it would do to Clay, clearly he saw that; and yet he knew that it was right, and had to be, for Clay Blaisedell. It would wipe out General Peach, it would do more than that. For after it they could not touch Clay. After it they could make him neither more nor less. Clay would have come the route, and they would have to let him be, for there was no more. And they would remember Tom Morgan.

  He felt an urge to crow, like a cock.

  But he whispered, “Yes, me too, you poor damned lost son of a bitch!” He glanced to the left where he could see the roof of Miss Jessie Marlow’s boardinghouse, where Clay was, and wondered what he was doing now, thinking now, feeling now. He clasped the shotgun that leaned between his legs and banged the butt gently against the planks. “Clay, I am sorry,” he whispered. “But it is the only thing.” He counted a few more regrets: that he would not be able to beat Peach’s head off with his own leather-bound quirt; Taliaferro. He laughed at himself as he realized that there was another regret, too. He wished that someone might know why he was doing this. He wished that Kate, at least, might know. But there was no way, and he supposed that it was fair enough.

  He squinted up at the descending sun. Not so fast there! he thought. A miner walked along the far side of the street, and Morgan made a show of scowling and tipping the shotgun forward. Godbold came out of the hotel and down the steps past him, and walked quickly across Broadway.

  He watched, in the late afternoon, the slant of sun under the arcades, the bright, shiny brown of a horse’s haunch, the colors of the dresses of two whores looking in the window of Goodpasture’s store. Sam Brown had not got his sign back up yet, and the yellow rectangle was fading in the sun. The wind blew up a whirl of dust, which traveled a way and died, and sent a dry weed rolling and rustling along the edge of the boardwalk. The light changed as the sun slid down the western slope of the sky, and the shadow line advanced across the dusty street. Now, where the sun struck, it made darker stronger colors that seemed tinged with red. It was getting late, and it was coming time.

  He banged the shotgun butt down again and rose. Dawson leaned in the doorway with a rifle under his arm, and looked as though he were putting a lot into wishing he were someplace else. He went inside past Dawson, and propped the shotgun against the counter. The Medusa people were all in the dining room. Newman sat gazing out the window. Willingham was playing a game of solitaire, his black hard-hat seated squarely on top of his head, a hand pulling at his fringe of red beard. MacDonald, seated across from him, was morosely watching the cards.

  “The muckers will be in from the other mines pretty quick now,” Morgan called into the dining room. “There will be hell busting the door down then.”

  MacDonald grimaced, and shifted his black-slinged arm around in front of his body. Willingham turned the cards and said, “Mr. Morgan, you enjoy alarming us.” He took a gold watch from his vest pocket and consulted it. “I suppose we can’t count on that old idiot getting back here tonight, can we?”

  “He’s forgotten us,” MacDonald said, in a hollow voice. Newman, his shoulders hunched, had turned to watch them. Three foremen sat at another table at the far end of the room. None of them looked as though they had anything to be pleased about.

  Willingham said, “I told him I would ruin him. I will feel quite put out if he ruins himself by blundering down into Mexico.”

  “What you big mining men need is a more reliable army. Chasing off after Apaches!”

  “I don’t believe there are any Apaches,” MacDonald said. “Mr. Willingham, I think we ought to get that coach around and—”

  “I will not be driven out of here!” Willingham said. He looked down at his cards again. “Well, Mr. Morgan? I thought our bargain was that you were to maintain the battlements. That is out in front, not here.”

  “Things are slow out there. I can’t pick a fight with anybody.”

  “Good God!” MacDonald said. “We don’t want any fights!”

  “I thought I was to pick fights and shoot holes in jacks. Run some of them out of town.”

  “Good God!”

  “Mr. Morgan, kindly remove your dubious frontier humor and yourself. Your post is on the veranda.”

  “I’m going upstairs and change my shirt, and then remove myself for a walk around town.”

  “Mr. Morgan—”

  “I always take a walk around sundown,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the Medusa mine.” He went on upstairs to his room.

  There he stripped off his coat, harness, and shirt, and washed himself in the basin. He sat down on the edge of his bed to check the action of his Banker’s Special. A thin edge of the sun came in through the window, throwing a watery red light over the bed. There was a beat like that of great slow wings in his head, and he sat with the revolver in his hand staring at the blank wall opposite him for a long time before he rose and put on a new linen shirt. He found that his fingers were shaking as he tried to insert his gold cuff links into the cuffs. “I’ll be damned!” he whispered. “Why, Rattlesnake!” He stood before the distorted mirror in his shirt sleeves, regarding his pale face with the slash of black mustache across it. He brushed his hair until it shone silver. He rubbed his hands hard together, stretching and clenching his fingers until they felt limber, and then he poured a little whisky into a glass, raised it, said, “How,” bowed to the setting sun, and drank.

  Leaving his coat off, he set the Banker’s Special inside the buckle of his belt and swaggered back downstairs. Gough stared at him round-eyed. In the dining room a young miner in clean blue pants and shirt, and with disfigured, scarred hands which he held awkwardly before him, was talking to Willingham, while MacDonald stood glaring at him with his face mottled red and white.

  “What goes against what’s bred into you?” said Willingham, who was still playing solitaire.

  “Stope-burning,” the boy said.

  “Oh, it’s stope-burning, is it?” Willingham said caustically.

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. “There’s most of them feel that way about it now. They figure when Peach gets back he will load us up and ship us out like he was set to do in the first place, so might as well get shipped for goats as sheep. There is some that get satisfaction from a good fire, and knowing how it’ll burn a couple-three years. It just goes against what’s bred in, with me. And some others.”

  “Oh, you are talking for some others, are you?”

  “I might be,” the boy said.

  “Blackguarding young—” MacDonald cried, but he stopped as Willingham waved a hand at him.

  “How many do you speak for, my boy?”

  Leaning in the doorway, Morgan watched Willingham, who had not looked up at the boy yet. Willingham ran out of plays, and picked up the cards and shuffled them.

  The boy rubbed his scarred hands together. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Willingham. I guess that would depend. They’d just about all like to go back to work, sure enough. But you know how people get—they don’t much like feeling they’ve got backed down to nothing. That’s how come they’ve stayed out so long. Mr. MacDonald here wouldn’t give an inch.”

  “Hush, Charlie,” Willingham said, as MacDonald started to speak. The boy glanced around at Morgan. He had the shadowy beginnings of a beard, and he looked like a card sharp posing as a country bumpkin.

  “Not an inch, eh?” Willingham said, shaking his head.

  “I guess they wouldn’t ever go back to work fo
r Mr. MacDonald. If you’ll pardon me for being frank, Mr. Mac.”

  “Mr. Willingham!” MacDonald cried, in a strangled voice. Willingham only pushed a hand at him, then began to turn the cards once more. He did not look up even now.

  “How many do you speak for?” he said again.

  “I guess the more I got from you, the more I could speak for.”

  “I see,” Willingham said. “Well, sit down, my boy.” The young miner sat down warily, in MacDonald’s chair, and Willingham went on. “Let’s see if reasonable men cannot work this out amicably. I will warn you in advance that I do not intend to give much more than an inch, but I have always desired to be fair. Sometimes subordinates become over-eager—I recognize that much.”

  It looked, Morgan thought, as though it would be a good game, with MacDonald first into the pot. He would have liked to stay to watch it, but the sun was going down. He said loudly, “I guess I had better get moving if I expect to run Blaisedell out of town tonight.”

  The young miner’s head swung toward him. MacDonald’s mouth gaped open. Willingham rose out of his chair. “Great God!” one of the foremen said.

  “I’ll be back to collect that thousand dollars pretty quick,” Morgan said, and grinned around the room and seated the Banker’s Special more firmly in his belt.

  “Mr. Morgan!” Willingham cried, but Morgan went on out, past the wide-eyed clerk. Dawson, at the front door, stared at him; as he passed he jerked Dawson’s Colt from its scabbard.

  Dawson said, “Whuh—”

  “Keep out of the street, Fatty,” he said. “There’s going to be lead flying.” He thrust the other’s Colt inside his belt, and went down the steps and started west along the boardwalk.

  The sun had swelled and deepened in color. It hung like a red balloon over the sharp-pointed peaks that would soon impale it. It was a sun the equal of which you saw nowhere else, he thought; bigger and brighter than anywhere else, bigger and brighter today. He took his last cigar from his shirt pocket and bit down on it.

  He crossed through the dust of Broadway and mounted the boardwalk in the next block. He passed the shell of the Glass Slipper. Men stared at his waist, and he turned his head from side to side to gaze back into their faces. Not one would meet his eyes. Once a cowboy chewing on a cud of tobacco looked back at him for a moment, but he slowed his steps and the cowboy turned quickly aside. No one spoke in his wake. Faces peered out at him over the batwing doors of the Lucky Dollar; six or eight horses were tied to the rail there. He heard whispering behind him now, and he saw Goodpasture watching him from his store window. He glanced up toward the French Palace and tipped his hat in salute. Hearing a movement behind him he turned and grinned to see three cowboys hurriedly getting their horses out of the street.

  He went on, under the new sign with the one bullet hole through it, and turned into the jail. Gannon glanced up at him from behind the table, and he brought out Dawson’s Colt and leveled it. “Hands up,” he said.

  Stiff-faced, Gannon rose slowly; his hands continued to rise, shoulder high. “What—” he said, and stopped.

  Morgan stepped forward and drew Gannon’s Colt and jammed it inside his belt. He motioned Gannon toward the open cell door. Gannon didn’t move and he thumbed the hammer back. “Get in there!”

  “What the hell do you think you are doing?” Gannon said hoarsely.

  “Get in there!” He jammed the muzzle into Gannon’s belly and Gannon backed into the cell. He slammed the door and locked it, and tossed the key ring toward the back of the jail. He sneered in at Gannon through the bars. “I promised Kate you wouldn’t get hurt,” he said, and added, “If this comes wrong you had better tell her if I couldn’t do it Pat Cletus couldn’t’ve either.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Pistol-whip the spots off this town.” With Dawson’s Colt in his right hand and Gannon’s in his left, he stepped outside.

  “Morgan!” Gannon called after him. But he raised his hand and drowned his name in a gunblast; the new sign swung wildly, perforated again.

  Now the fuse was lit; he vaulted the tie rail, and his boots sank into the soft dust of the street. The sun sat on the peaks, blood-red, like the yolk of a bad egg. He shivered a little in the wind as he turned his back on the sun. He laughed to see the men scampering along the boardwalks as he swaggered out into the street. He had seen towns shot up before. The best he had ever seen at it was Ben Nicholson, but he could beat that. He spat out his cigar, raised Dawson’s Colt, and pulled the trigger again. With the blast rocking in his ears he began to howl like a coyote, an Apache, and a rebel all rolled into one.

  “Yah-hoo!” he yelled. “I am the worst man in the West! I am the Black Rattlesnake of Warlock! My mother was a timber wolf and my daddy a mountain lion, and I strangled them both the day I was born!

  “Yah-hoo!” he yelled. “I will kill anything that moves, so sit still or die, you sons of bitches; or if you move, crawl! I can spit a man through at fifty yards! I have got lightning in both hands, I comb my hair with wildcats and brush my teeth with barbed wire!” He put a bullet through Taliaferro’s sign. A man dived inside the pharmacy, and he fired behind him; a puff of dust rose from the adobe.

  “Who wants to die?” he shouted, walking slowly forward. “I am spoiling for a fight! Come on, you sons of bitches—I eat dead cowboys!”

  His throat was dry and hoarse from shouting. But he grinned idiotically at the white faces that stared at him. His shirt back felt soaked with sweat. He fired into the air again, and he fired at the yellow patch over the Billiard Parlor. “Come on out and fight!” he yelled. “I have killed forty-five men, half with one shot, and I am going to run some score today!

  “Any friends of McQuown’s here? I will claw them down with Honest Abe! I am the champeen all-time cowboy killer. Any partners of Brunk’s? Come on, you muckering chittle-witted muckers and I will dice your livers for you. Any damned Yankees? No, I can hear them scampering now! Anybody! Come on out, you yellow sons of whores, or I will run this whole town out of itself!”

  He raised Dawson’s six-shooter and pulled the trigger again; the hammer snapped down dry. He tossed it and caught it by the barrel, and with a long sweep of his arm slung it through Goodpasture’s window with a smash of glass. He raised his left hand and fired Gannon’s.

  “Come on, I say! Where are those brave possemen? Where is that bunch of jailhouse bummers!” He saw several of them, standing with some cowboys along the wall near the Glass Slipper. “Step up, boys! Come out of your holes! No? Where is that mighty deputy then? He has locked himself in his own jail. Isn’t there a man in this town? Any friends of Blaisedell’s then? I will warm up on them. Speak up, boys!”

  He fired into the air to liven things again. Left-handed, he shot the panes out of the gunshop window. He flung Gannon’s used-up Colt toward the pharmacy. A man dodged out of the way, and then snapped stiffly to a standstill as though he were standing at attention.

  He drew the Banker’s Special from his belt. He laughed and howled, and fired into the air. He saw a movement in the ruin of the Glass Slipper, and he fired and chipped adobe. The dust of the street darkened as the sun went down behind him. The moon was up over the Bucksaws, pale as a cloud. It was time, he thought.

  “Yah-hoo!” he screeched. “Where is Clay Blaisedell? Where is that yellow-bellied, hollowed-out, gold-handled, long-haired marshal of Warlock? Whose skirts is he hiding behind? Come on out, Clay Blaisedell! Out of your hole and let’s see the color of your plaster guts!”

  He had come up even with the Glass Slipper now, and he saw a movement among the townsmen there; he swung the Banker’s Special and howled with laughter to see one of them dive to the boardwalk. He saw Mosbie’s dark, scarred face twisted with rage. “Come on, Clay,” he whispered. “I am starting to feel like a damned fool!”

  He walked on down Main Street, laughing and taunting; he swung toward the Billiard Parlor, and the miners there tumbled back inside. “Yah-hoo!” he scre
amed, with his voice tearing in his throat. “Every man is afraid of me! Where is Clay Blaisedell! He has posted his last man out of this town! Blaisedell! Come out here and play boys’ games with me, you yellow Yankee hound. Blaisedell!”

  Come on, Clay; come on! I am sick to death of this game already! He walked on across Broadway, and saw Dawson jump back inside the door of the hotel. He saw Clay at the next corner.

  “Morgan!” Mosbie yelled, and he spun and squeezed the trigger, and saw through the smoke Mosbie slam back against the wall in the shadow under the arcade, his Colt flying free of his hand. And in his deafened ears he heard Clay call, “Morg!”

  Clay stood in the street now with his black hat pulled down to conceal his face, his wide brown leather belt slanting across his hips, the sleeves of his white shirt fluttering in the wind; with a wild relief and jubilation Morgan knew that his luck still held, and, as he jammed the burning barrel of the Banker’s Special back into his belt, he knew, with a sudden pride, that he could beat those hands of Clay’s if he wished, and knew he could center-shot that white shirt just beneath the black tie-ends, if he wished. He yelled hoarsely, “I can beat you, Blaisedell! You had better hit it fast!”

  He cried out once more, wordlessly, in triumph, as his hand swept up with the Banker’s Special, beating Clay’s hand. Clay’s hat flew off. He heard a cry and it was Kate. “Tom!” Instantly he was flung staggering back with white-hot death impaling him. He squeezed the trigger once more, unaimed, and the sound was lost in a totality of deafening sound; he sought frenziedly to grin as he staggered forward toward the motionless figure that faced him wreathed in smoke. The Banker’s Special was suddenly too heavy. It slipped from his hand. But still he could raise his hand to his breast, slowly up, slowly across and back, while the world blurred into deeper and deeper shadow.

  He fell forward into the dust. It received him gently. One arm felt a little cramped and he managed to move it out from under his body. In his eyes there was only dust, which was soft, and strangely wet beneath him. “Tom!” He heard it dimly. “Tom!” He felt a hand upon his back. It caught his shoulder and tried to turn him, Kate’s hand, and he heard Kate sobbing through the swell of a vast singing in his ears. He tried to speak to her, but he choked on blood. The dust pulled him away, and he sank through it gratefully; still he could laugh, but now he could weep as well.