Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  [2] Sheriff Keller of Bright’s County.

  [3] General G. O. Peach, the military governor in Bright’s City.

  [4] Warlock’s situation was much as Goodpasture has described it. General Peach was a notoriously inept administrator, sulking because he felt his fame and services to the nation justified a more exalted position than military governor of the territory. Despite repeated pleas and demands, no town patent had been issued Warlock, which had a population almost as large as that of Bright’s City, both the county seat and territorial capitol; and the rumor was so strong that the western half of Bright’s County was to be formed into a new county, that Sheriff Keller was able to ignore almost completely, and evidently thankfully, the Warlock and San Pablo Valley area. There was, however, provision for a deputy sheriff in Warlock.

  [5] The town took its name from the Warlock mine, which was inoperative by this time. One story of the naming of the Warlock mine is as follows: Richelin, who made the silver strike, had been prospecting in the Bucksaws under exceedingly dangerous conditions. The inhabitants of Bright’s City, to which he returned from time to time for supplies and with specimens for assay, viewed him as mad, and his continued existence, in close proximity to Espirato’s band of marauding Apaches, as miraculous. On the occasion of his actual strike, he had, on his journey into Bright’s City, an encounter with some Apaches in which his burro was killed. He managed to reach town, however, and, when news of his escape was heard, someone remarked to him that he must have flown back, riding the handle of his shovel like a witch. Richelin is supposed to have made an obscene gesture in reply to this, and cried, “Warlock, damn you!” Be that as it may, he named his first mine the Warlock, his second the Medusa. The Warlock, after producing over a million dollars’ worth of ore, played out, and was closed down in 1878, shortly after the Porphyrion & Western Mining Company had purchased Richelin’s holdings.

  2. GANNON COMES BACK

  WARLOCK lay on a flat, white alkali step, half encirled by the Bucksaw Mountains to the east, beneath a metallic sky. With the afternoon sun slanting down on it from over the distant peaks of the Dinosaurs, the adobe and weathered plank-and-batten, false-fronted buildings were smoothly glazed with yellow light, and sharp-cut black shadows lay like pits in the angles out of the sun.

  The heat of the sun was like a blanket; it had dimension and weight. The town was dust- and heat-hazed, blurred out of focus. A water wagon with a round, rust-red tank moved slowly along Main Street, spraying water in a narrow, shining strip behind it. But Warlock’s dust was laid only briefly. Soon again it was churned as light as air by iron-bound wheels, by hoofs and bootheels. The dust rose and hung in the air and drifted down in a continuous fall, onto the jail and Goodpasture’s General Store, onto the Lucky Dollar and the Glass Slipper and the smaller saloons, onto the Billiard Parlor, the Western Star Hotel, the Boston Café and the Warlock and Western Bank, onto the houses in the Row, the cribs along Peach Street, Kennon’s Livery Stable and the freight yard, onto Buck Slavin’s stage yard and the Skinner Brothers Acme Corral in Southend Street, onto the Feed and Grain Barn and the General Peach boardinghouse in Grant Street, onto the tarpaper shacks of the miners and the wagons and the riders passing through and the men in the street. It got into men’s eyes and irritated their dry throats, it dusted them all over with a whitish sheen, and turned to mud in the sweat of their faces.

  Trails, and stage and wagon roads, led into the town like twisted spokes to a dusty hub—from the silver mines in the nearer Bucksaws: the Medusa, Sister Fan, Thetis, Pig’s Eye, and Redgold: from the hamlet of Redgold and the stamp mill there; from the more distant hamlet of San Pablo in the valley and on the river of that name; from Welltown to the northwest, where the railroad was; from Bright’s City, the territorial capitol.

  Dust rose, too, where there were travelers along the roads: a prospector with his burro; a group of riders coming in from San Pablo; great, high-wheeled, heavy-laden ore wagons descending from the mines; loads of lagging timbers for the stopes being hauled from the forests in the northern Bucksaws; a stage inbound from Bright’s City; and, close in on the Welltown road, a single horseman slowly making his way up through the huge, strewn boulders toward Warlock’s rim.

  John Gannon rode bent tiredly forward against the slope, his hand on the dusty, sweated shoulder of the gray he had bought in Welltown, urging her up this last hill out of the malpais and over the rim, where she increased her gait at the sight of town. He glanced down the rutted trail to his right that led out to the cemetery called Boot Hill, and to the dump, where he could see the sun glinting on whisky bottles and a skirl of papers blown up by a wind gust.

  The mare plodded heavy-footed past the miners’ shacks on the edge of town. Beyond, and looming above them, was the tall, narrow-windowed rear of the French Palace. A woman waved a hand at him from one of the windows and called something lost in the wind. He looked quickly straight ahead of him, and laid his hand on the mare’s shoulder once more. At Main Street he swung to the left and the mare’s hoofs sucked and plopped in thicker dust.

  The sign over the jail swung and creaked in a gust of wind as he passed it. The sign was barely legible; weathered, thick with dust, dotted with clusters of perforations, it humbly located the law in Warlock:

  DEP. SHERIFF

  JAIL

  Gannon reined left into Southend Street and turned at last into the Acme Corral. Nate Bush, the Skinner brothers’ hostler, came out to meet him. Bush took the reins as he dismounted, spat sideways, wiped his mustache, and, without looking at Gannon directly, said, “Back, huh?”

  “Back,” he said.

  “McQuown pulling them back in from all around, I guess,” Bush said, in a flat, hostile voice, and immediately turned away and led the mare clop-hoofing toward the water trough.

  Gannon stood looking after him. He felt heavy and tired after a day in the murderous sun, heavy and tired with coming back to the valley as he watched Nate Bush’s back carefully held toward him. He had tried to hope he was not coming back to trouble, but he had heard in Rincon that Warlock had hired Clay Blaisedell as town marshal, had known without hearing it that the Fort James man had been hired against Abe McQuown; and he knew Abe McQuown. He had ridden for McQuown—even in Rincon they had known it—and in Warlock they would never forget it. Billy, his brother, rode for McQuown still.

  He spat into his bandanna and closed his eyes as he tried to scrub some of the dust from his face. Then he walked slowly up to Main Street, stopping on the corner before Goodpasture’s store as a wagon rolled by in the street, dust rising beneath the mules’ hoofs in clouds and streaming from the wheels like liquid. He turned his face away and blew his breath out against Warlock’s dust, remembering its smell and prickly taste; as it settled behind the wagon he saw a thin figure appear and lean against the arcade post before the jail. It was Carl Schroeder; in his depression at the hostler’s greeting he had forgotten that there were a few men in Warlock he would be glad to see. He started catercornered across the street as Carl stared, and then raised a hand.

  “Well, Johnny Gee!” Carl said, as Gannon came down toward him along the boardwalk. Carl’s lean, hard-calloused hand wrung his. “How’s the trains running over in Rincon, Johnny?”

  “Coming and going. What’s that on your vest there, Carl?”

  Carl Schroeder glanced down and thumbed the star out where he could see it. He did not smile. His plain, sad-mustached face was older than Gannon had remembered it, tired and strained. He said, “Bill Canning got run out and I kind of fell into the hole he left. You knew Bill, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know him.”

  “I guess you have been gone a good while at that.” Carl’s eyes flickered at him, not quite casually, and then away. “Canning come in after Jim Brown got shot.”

  He nodded. His brother Billy had shot Jim Brown. The only letter he had had from Billy during the six months he had been in Rincon had been a strange mixture of brag and apology for having
shot a deputy. “Dirty-mouth, bull-ragging son of a bitch,” Billy had written. “He had it coming bad. Everybody says he had it coming. Abe says he’d choose him himself if I didn’t choose him out first, Bud.”

  “Come on in and sit,” Carl said, turning and moving into the jail. As he followed Carl inside he read the legend neatly lettered on the square of paper fastened to the adobe beside the door:

  2ND DEPUTY WANTED

  SEE SCHROEDER

  The sign above his head creaked in another gust of wind. Judge Holloway was staring up at him from the shadow inside the jail, his sick face darker, thinner, more closely hatched with red veins than ever, on one cheek the wart or mole like a peg driven into the flesh, his bloated body hunched over the battered pine table that was his bench. The crutch that substituted for the leg he had lost at Shiloh leaned against the wall behind him with his hard-hat hung from its armrest. Peter Bacon, the water-wagon driver, sat at the back, beside the alley door, with a knife and a bit of gray wood in his hands.

  “Well, Bud Gannon,” Peter said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Peter,” he said. “Judge.”

  The judge didn’t reply. Peter said, “How’s the telegraphing going, Bud?”

  No one had called him “Bud” for a long time now, but the name was as familiar and disagreeable as Warlock’s dust. He felt a silly, apologetic grin cramp his face. “Well, I gave it up,” he said.

  “Come back for good, then?” Carl asked, turning toward him. He hitched at his shell belt. “Here or San Pablo, Johnny?” he asked quietly.

  Gannon rubbed his hands on the dusty thighs of his store pants. “Why—” he said, and paused as he saw something very hard, very sharp, show for an instant in Carl’s eyes. “Why, San Pablo, I guess. The only thing I know besides telegraphing’s running a branding iron.”

  Peter bent to his whittling. The judge stared, darkly brooding, at the line of late sunlight that came a little way into the jail. Carl propped a boot up on the chair beside the cell door. “How come you to give it up, Johnny?” he asked. “Looked like you was going to make something of yourself.”

  “Laid off,” he said. He could feel their unspoken questions. Although there was no call to answer them, he said, “Fellow I was apprentice to went and died, and they brought in another had his own apprentice.” And he was pretty sure they had brought in another because it was known he had once run with McQuown, which was what Carl and Peter were surmising. But he had said enough, and he watched them both nod, almost in unison, apparently without interest.

  Carl turned away from him to gaze at the wall where former deputies of Warlock had scratched their names brown in the whitewash. Carl’s name had been added at the bottom. Above it was WM. CANNING, above that, in big, crooked letters, JAMES BROWN, above that, B. EGSTROM. Higher on the list was ED. SMITHERS, whom Jack Cade had shot in a cruel fuss at the Lucky Dollar. Gannon had seen that.

  “Matt Burbage might be needing some hands,” Peter Bacon said, without looking up from his whittling. “Usually comes in town Saturday nights, too.”

  “Thanks,” he said gratefully. “Well, I guess I’ll go have myself a drink of whisky.” No one volunteered to accompany him. The judge’s fingers drummed on the table top.

  “Got ourself a marshal now,” Peter said.

  “I heard. Did Peach come around to giving Warlock a town patent?”

  Carl shook his head. “No, the Citizens’ Committee hired him.”

  “Gunman from Fort James,” Peter said. “Name of Clay Blaisedell.”

  Gannon nodded. A gunman from Fort James hired against Abe McQuown, against McQuown’s people, against Billy, who was one of them. The town had turned against McQuown. The taste and smell of Warlock was not merely that of its dust, but the taste of apprehension, the smell of fear and anger like a dangerous animal snarling and stinking in its cage. He had come back to it, that had changed only for the worse since he had run from it. And now the town was waiting. He said quietly to Carl, “Trouble?”

  “Not yet,” Carl said, quietly too, his hand rising to pick at the dull five-pointed star limply hanging from his vest, his face, in profile as he still stared at the names on the wall, showing clearly anger and fear, determination and dread.

  As Gannon started out the judge’s hot, bloodshot eyes with their yellow whites slanted up to meet his own. No one spoke behind him. Outside, in the sun that came in under the arcade, his bootheels resounded on the planks as he started down toward the central block.

  He would look up Matt Burbage tonight, he thought, doggedly. He knew it was useless. He had been one of McQuown’s, and he would have to go back to McQuown, in San Pablo. Once he had thought he was quit of them.

  3. THE JAIL

  THE sun, misshapen and red, was resting on the jagged spine of the Dinosaurs when Pike Skinner turned into the jail. Halting in the thick arch of the doorway, he cleared his throat and said, “I guess McQuown’s coming in tonight.”

  Inside were Judge Holloway and Peter Bacon, Carl Schroeder, leaning back in the chair beside the cell door, with a hand grasping one of the bars to balance himself, and old Owen Parsons, the wheelwright at Kennon’s Livery Stable, squatting against the wall at the back.

  Schroeder nodded once, gently let his chair down, and stretched one leg out with a slow, careful motion. “Heard about it,” he said. Then he said, “Bound to come in some time.”

  Peter Bacon said, “We was just saying it was none of Carl’s worry.” He bent down to sweep his whittlings into a neat pile between his boots.

  “It’s sure none of your put-in, Carl,” Skinner said quickly.

  No one looked at Schroeder. At a sound of hoofs and wheels in the street Parsons spat. The spittoon rang deeply. Bacon glanced up at the door, and Skinner turned to watch a buggy roll by in the street, its yellow and red striped wheels bright with motion in the last of the sun.

  Skinner hooked his thumbs into the sweat-stained shell belt that hung over his broad hips, and teetered on his bootheels. He was a tall, heavy, slope-shouldered man and he filled the doorway. The others watched him remove his hat and slap it once against his leg. He scowled sideways at the square of paper tacked to the wall before he turned back inside. He had a clean-shaven, red, ugly face, and great protruding ears.

  “Blaisedell buggy-riding Miss Jessie again,” he said.

  Peter Bacon nodded. “Fine-looking man.”

  “Him and Morgan is friendly,” Old Owen Parsons said disapprovingly. “Heard they are partners in the Glass Slipper, and was before in a place in Fort James.”

  “Signifies what, if they are?” said Skinner, who was a member of the Citizens’ Committee, scowling.

  He stood aside as Arnold Mosbie, the freight-line mule skinner, came in. Mosbie’s handsome, blackly sunburnt face was marred by a great scar running down his right cheek.

  “Heard Dechine was in town saying McQuown and them was maybe coming in tonight,” he said, to no one in particular.

  Schroeder said nothing. The judge raised his eyes to the round, dented bowl of the lamp suspended above his head. Peter Bacon sighed and said, “What Owen here was saying.”

  “Abe’s been a while making up his mind to come,” Mosbie said.

  Skinner said to Parsons, “What’s it to you if Blaisedell is friendly with Morgan, old man?”

  Parsons spat, rang the spittoon, and jerked his fingers through his tobacco-stained beard. “Morgan is a damned high-rolling son of a bitch.”

  “It don’t make Blaisedell one.”

  “Maybe it don’t.”

  “A man has got a right to a friend,” Bacon said.

  “Why, what if it does make Blaisedell one?” Mosbie said, in his heavy, rasping voice. “What he is here for is against sons of bitches, and maybe a man has got to be one himself to make it. A real son of a bitch that shot Ben Nicholson loose from his boots and chased those wild Texas men out of Fort James till they are running yet, I hear—that’s the kind we need here bad.”

  The judge
folded his hands over his belly and turned his muddy-looking eyes to watch Schroeder plucking at the star on his vest. Milky dust drifted into the jail as riders passed in the street.

  “Five hundred dollars a month, I hear the Citizens’ Committee is paying him,” Parsons said. “Five hundred, and what’s Carl here—”

  “Four hundred, God damn it!” Skinner broke in. “By God, how the talk in this town makes everything something it isn’t. Old man, you’d set yourself where he sets for four hundred a month?”

  Tim French, who worked at the Feed and Grain Barn, squeezed inside past Skinner. He had a round, cheerful, bright-eyed face, like a boy’s. “Heard the news, Carl?”

  Schroeder nodded tightly, and, with the same slow, careful movement, tipped his chair back again. “Heard it. Some fellow named McQuown’s coming in.”

  There was a silence. Then French said, “Saw Bud Gannon down the street. I thought he was over at Rincon.”

  “Come back,” Schroeder said. “Just came in an hour ago.”

  “Expect McQuown figures he needs all the help he can get,” Mosbie said. “Pleasant to see Abe with the nerves.”

  “If Bud Gannon’s any shakes of a gunhand I never heard anything about it,” Skinner said scornfully.

  “Johnny’s all right,” Schroeder said. “I don’t care he’s Billy’s brother or whose. He quit them down there.”

  “Come back, though,” Parsons said, grinning sourly.

  “He got laid off over at Rincon,” Bacon said.

  “I wait and see,” Parsons said. “Looks like he come back at the right time for McQuown.” He grunted and said, “I wait and see on Blaisedell, too. Maybe he’s no son of a bitch, but all I’ve seen so far is him hanging over a faro layout or whisky-drinking with Morgan. Or buggy-riding Miss Jessie Marlow. He—”