Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  Speaking very carefully again, Gannon said, “Like you said, there are a lot that don’t think bad of Curley.”

  Carl nodded jerkily. “Part of it, too. For he is what the rest is and can fool folks to think he is not. And so he is worse.” He glanced at Gannon again with his hot eyes, and Gannon knew enough had been said.

  He nodded noncommittally.

  Carl sighed and said, careful-voiced now in his turn, “Well, it was sure a surprise to me when it was you come in here with me, Johnny. I guess you know there is some that won’t take to you kindly, right off.”

  “Surely,” he said, and he felt the questions Carl wanted to ask, but hadn’t yet.

  “Well, you come in and that’s the main thing,” Carl said. “But I guess you don’t really hate San Pablo the way I do, do you?”

  “I guess not, Carl.”

  “Don’t mean anything by mentioning it,” Carl said apologetically. “But I remember there was some talk at the time—I guess it was Burbage. How what happened to that bunch of greasers down in Rattlesnake Canyon that time wasn’t Apaches’ doing.”

  Gannon didn’t reply as footsteps came along the planks outside. Carl stiffened in his chair, slapped his hands on the shotgun, started to rise. Pony Benner came in, with the marshal a step behind him.

  “This one is getting a little bit quarrelsome,” Blaisedell said, putting Pony’s Colt down on the table before Carl. “Maybe he’d better cool off overnight, Deputy.”

  Carl got to his feet. The Colt rattled as he slid it into the table drawer and closed the drawer with a slap. Pony looked past Carl to meet Gannon’s eyes. He spat on the floor.

  Blaisedell said, “If the judge comes in tell him this one was picking away at Chick Hasty in the Lucky Dollar. It looked like trouble so I took him out of circulation.”

  “Surely, Marshal,” Carl said. Blaisedell nodded to Gannon, turned, and went out, tall in the doorway before he disappeared.

  “Well, Mister run-chicken, pee-on-your-own, Deputy Bud Gannon,” Pony said, his small, mean face contorted with fury and contempt. “Why didn’t you get down and kiss his boots for him?” he cried, swinging toward Carl. “Gimme that damned hogleg back, Carl!”

  Carl straightened his shoulders, hitched at his shell belt, and, with a swift motion, picked up the shotgun and slammed the muzzle against Pony’s belly. Pony yelped and jumped back. Carl said, “G-get in there before I blow you in!”

  Pony retreated into the cell before the shotgun, and Carl slammed the door. His face, when he turned to take the key Gannon handed him, was blotched with color.

  In the cell Pony was cursing.

  “Hear anything?” Carl said, winking at Gannon. “I believe it is those rats moaning in there again. One of these days we are going to have to clean them out, I expect.”

  “All right!” Pony cried. “All right, Carl, you have chose the way you are going to choke yourself. All right, Bud Gannon, God damn you to hell—we’ll see, God damn you all!”

  “Damned if that one rat don’t squeak just like old Pony Benner,” Carl said.

  “You will chew dust, you stringy, washed-up old bastard!” Pony yelled. His face disappeared. Immediately it returned. “And that gold-handled, muckering, God-damned long-haired son too!” Pony shouted. “He has threw his weight around for the last time, the last God-damned rotten time. We give him his chance and now he’ll eat dust, too. You hear I said it, you kiss-boot sons of bitches!”

  He retreated into the cell, and the cot creaked.

  “Quieted down,” Carl commented. “Sounds like somebody set a cat after those rats.” There was a triumphant flush to his face, but Gannon saw the flicker of fear in it, and was embarrassed to see it there. He went to lean in the doorway and stare out into the street.

  “No reason to bother the judge, I guess,” Carl said, behind him. “Judge was taking on freight heavy this afternoon, and he would need a lot of sobering up by now. We’ll just leave this one wait the night, and sweep him out with the cockroaches in the morning.”

  Gannon watched Billy coming down the boardwalk. “Billy,” he said.

  “Bud,” Billy said, casually. Gannon stepped back inside and Billy followed him in. Pony’s face reappeared between the bars.

  “Some day you will get just too feisty,” Billy said to Pony. He would not look at Gannon. He said to Carl, “What’s the fine, Schroeder? I guess I can make it up.”

  “Judge hasn’t been in,” Carl said. “I’m holding him for disturbing the peace till he comes, or morning, one.”

  “He wasn’t disturbing it that much,” Billy said. “Let him out and we’ll settle when the judge shows.”

  “I guess not, son.”

  “Kiss-boot bastards!” Pony cried, and kicked the door. Gannon stood watching his brother’s face. It was sullen and hard, with only the shadowy mustache to show the youth in it.

  “Let him out,” Billy said to Carl. He dropped his hands to his shell belt, as though to hitch at it; in an instant his Colt was in his hand, and trained on Carl behind the table.

  Gannon heard Carl’s sudden ragged breathing, and Pony’s laugh, but he stared still at Billy’s face. Those cut-steel eyes might have been Jack Cade’s, and they were eyes that had looked at Deputy Jim Brown with the same expression in the San Pablo saloon, just before Billy had shot him dead for making too much fun of his youth and his claim to being the best marksman in San Pablo.

  But it was a copy of Abe McQuown’s shy grin that twisted the corners of Billy’s mouth, and a copy of Curley Burne’s bantering tone in which he said, “Por favor, Carl. Por favor.”

  “Go to hell,” Carl whispered.

  “Listen to the rats squeaking now!” Pony crowed. “Squeaking awful quiet, seems like.”

  Billy said, “Get the keys, Bud.”

  Gannon stepped between Billy and Carl, as though he were going for the key. He stopped there, blocking Billy’s Colt. Billy started to jump sideways and Pony yelled, “Watch the shotgun!”

  Gannon stepped out of the way. Pony was cursing again.

  “Buckshot,” Carl said.

  “Birdshot,” Billy said, and again there was a reflection of Curley Burne in his tone. He grinned slightly. “I know what you carry in that piece.”

  “Buckshot,” Carl said. “On Saturday nights.” His voice was stronger. “Son,” he said. “Buckshot beats a Colt’s just like a full house does a pair.”

  Billy slipped his Colt back into its scabbard. He gave Gannon a blank look, not so much of anger as appraisal.

  “You threw me, Bud,” he said. “And took kind of a chance too.”

  “You wasn’t going to go to shooting. Whoever it was.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t, but it wasn’t a bluff you had to call. I had you and Carl covered fair enough.”

  “Get out of here,” Carl said. “Before I decide to chuck you in there with Mister Squeaky.”

  Billy said, “The marshal doesn’t run this town.”

  “Looks like he does tonight,” Carl said.

  “Nah, he doesn’t. Just some cowardy-cats in it.” Billy inclined his head almost imperceptibly at Gannon, and went out.

  Pony yelled, “You, Mister throw-your-brother! I guess maybe next time he won’t be so quick to take big Jack off you!”

  Carl slammed the barrel of the shotgun against the wooden bars, just as Pony leaped back away from the door.

  Gannon cleared his throat. “Well, I guess I will take a walk around town, Carl.”

  “Feel easy,” Carl said, grinning at him hugely. “It is a quiet night after all.”

  Gannon went out along the boardwalk. Billy was a lean shadow slanted against the wall just around the corner on Southend Street. “We had better talk some, Bud,” Billy said.

  He stepped down off the boardwalk into the dust. Up the street behind Billy were the lighted windows of the French Palace, and there were men passing on the far side of the street, laughing and talking. He heard Pony’s name, and Blaisedell’s.

  B
illy had turned to face the adobe wall beside him; he kicked a boot against it. “What’s gone and got into you, Bud? Went off to Rincon to be a telegrapher and then come back, only not going back to Pablo, you said. Warlock is no kind of place to come back to. And deputying. What’s got into you, Bud?”

  Gannon shrugged.

  Billy kicked the wall again. “Well, maybe I know why you lit out. But what the hell, Bud! What would you have done else, let them shoot us down and run that stock back?”

  “I guess if you steal stock you have got to shoot to keep it sometimes. But not the way it was done, Billy.”

  “You’ve stole before that.”

  “I never saw it run all the way through like that before, though.”

  “So you come back and went to deputying to stop it, huh?” Billy sneered. “Well, you have changed, Bud. Got religion or something.”

  “I guess you have changed, too, Billy, since you made your score. People change.”

  “Ah, Christ, Bud!” Billy said, and now for the first time in the darkness it sounded like his brother again, and not some awkward and snarling boy-man out of San Pablo. “Well, I wanted to say I didn’t blame you for what you did just now, which was slick, and— Hell, I knew it was what you had to do in there! But this is the bad thing, this God-damned marshal that thinks he is Lord God of Creation here. Where does he think he gets off, posting Nat out like that and running Pony into jail?”

  “I don’t know what Pony was doing, Billy,” he said. “I didn’t see what happened. But I know Pony—so do you.”

  “Christ, you have sure gone over, haven’t you?” Billy said. He leaned back against the wall. “Like Blaisedell pretty good now, do you? Think he is pretty fine?”

  “I don’t know him, except to say hello to.”

  “Well, sometime when you get real good sucked up to him, ask him something for me! Ask him who the hell he thinks he is. Lording it over everybody. Running everybody around and telling them when they can come and go and all. This is a free country, isn’t it? God damn it!”

  “Billy,” he said. “It’s been free the way you mean, maybe, but it is going to have to be free the other way. So people are free to live peaceable, and free of being hurrahed and their property busted up, and their stock run off, and stages robbed. And killed for no more—”

  “Who’s the killer?” Billy broke in. “It is him! He got those gold-handled guns for the grand turkey-shoot prize for killing, didn’t he?”

  “I guess he is what we have to have here, then. For people like I am afraid you have got to be.”

  He had meant to say the people Billy has got to be like, but he didn’t try to correct himself, and Billy whispered, “Jesus!” A group of horsemen turned into Southend Street and rode up toward the Row. They were laughing, and without even listening to what they were saying he knew they were laughing about Pony Benner.

  “I don’t mean to take up preaching,” he said. “But I guess if I have changed it’s because I’ve seen there has got to be law. It seems like you were always quicker and smarter to see a thing than I was. Can’t you see it, Billy?”

  “I can see this much,” Billy said, in a contemptuous voice. “Who your law is for. Petrix at the bank and Goodpasture’s store, and Buck’s God-damned stages and Kennon’s livery stable and all.”

  “Not just them. It is decent people running things, not rustlers and road agents and hardcase killers.”

  “Blaisedell isn’t a hardcase killer? I heard he killed ten men in Fort James. Ten!”

  “You can hear anything you want to hear. But there is something I saw, and got a hammer pin through my hand to prove it. Jack would have shot him in the back if I hadn’t stopped it.”

  “Oh, I know Jack is a son of a bitch,” Billy said. “Everybody knows that.”

  “Do you think Abe didn’t put him to it?”

  “Abe didn’t have anything to do with it! God damn it, Bud, there is not another man but my own brother I’d let say a thing like that about Abe! Damn, you are wrong! Damn, I don’t know how you turned so fast. You have got so damned holier-than-anybody because of us rustling a few old mossy-horns they never get around to rounding up even, they have got so many down at Hacienda Puerto. And a few sons-of-bitching greasers killed.” Billy’s voice ceased abruptly.

  “Did they get to be sons-of-bitching greasers when they came after their stock, Billy? And got shot down by a bunch dressed like Apaches—and worse than Apaches. Is that when they got to be sons of bitches?”

  Billy didn’t answer, and Gannon leaned against the wall too, and looked up at the cold stars, shivering in the wind that had come up. A newspaper rolled slow and ghostly across the street and flattened itself against the wall beyond Billy.

  Billy said in a low voice, “Listen, Bud, you don’t want to get Abe thinking you have gone over to Blaisedell’s side against him.”

  “Why not?” he said quickly.

  “Well, you couldn’t blame Abe for being down on somebody that’s trying to throw him!”

  Billy would not see, he knew. There had never been any use arguing with Billy. He laughed a little and said, “I was thinking how Daddy told me once I was to watch out for you. But I guess it got so you had to watch out for me—with Jack anyhow. That wasn’t the only time I thought he’d drink my blood, but for you.”

  He reached over and slapped Billy’s shoulder, awkwardly, and Billy punched him in the ribs. “That son of a bitch. I hate that dirty, cold-hearted, mean son of a bitch. I’d drink his blood, but it would probably poison a toad.” He went on in a rush. “Christ, Bud, Christ, how things get muckered up! Why, here we are— I mean, there is never going to be any real trouble between you and me, is there, Bud? It seems like we had trouble enough when I was a pup.”

  “I guess we didn’t have enough,” he said, and tried to laugh again. Billy’s fist punched into his ribs again; then Billy stepped away from him, to stand flat and faceless against the lights up the street.

  “Well, see you, damn it all, Bud.”

  “See you, Billy,” he said wearily.

  Billy backed up another step. He seemed about to speak again, but he did not, and turned and walked up Southend toward the Row.

  Gannon did not watch him go, but moved slowly over toward the boardwalk that ran along before the saloons and gambling houses. It was time he took a turn around Warlock. Carl did not leave the jail much on Saturday nights.

  10. MORGAN DOUBLES HIS BETS

  I

  STRIPPED to the waist, Morgan was leaning over the basin with his face close to the mirror and the razor sliding smoothly over his cheek, when there was a knock on the alley door.

  “Who is that?”

  “It’s Phin Jiggs, Morgan. Ed sent me down from Bright’s.”

  He dropped the razor into the soapy water, went around the desk to the alley door, and slid the bolt back. Jiggs, who did odd jobs for Ed Hamilton who had been Morgan’s partner for a time in Texas and now had a place in Bright’s City, slipped inside, caked with dust from head to foot except for the part of his face his bandanna had covered. His eyes were muddy around inflamed whites, and there were sweat-tracks on his forehead and cheeks. He swiped at his face with his neckerchief.

  “Ed said you might be pleased to know there is a woman named Kate Dollar coming down here.”

  He stared at Jiggs. At least he was pleased to know she was coming.

  “She put her name down as Mrs. Cletus at the Jim Bright Hotel there,” Jiggs said. “But Ed said to tell you it was Kate Dollar, all right.”

  “Mrs. Cletus?” he said, and felt stupid as he watched Jiggs nod. He turned uncertainly and went back to the basin, where he fished the razor out of the water. Mrs. Cletus. “Did you see her?” he asked, and stared at his face in the mirror.

  “I saw her. Tall woman. Black hair and eyes and a fair-sized nose. About as tall as you, I’d say.”

  He nodded and raised the razor to his cheek again. Mrs. Cletus. Pleased. “She is on the stage now,” Jig
gs said. The stage would come in a little after four; Jiggs had ridden through the Bucksaws, instead of going around them as the stage had to do.

  “Anybody with her?” he asked casually.

  “I guess it is this Cletus she was down as Missus of.”

  He contemplated the razor with which he might have removed an ear to hear that, while Jiggs continued. “He is a big feller. Heavy-set with a kind of chewed-up looking face. They was down as Mr. and Mrs. Pat Cletus at the hotel there, Ed said to tell you.”

  Morgan sighed, and his mind began to function again. It was no ghost; she had found kin of some kind, a brother maybe. God damn you, Kate, he thought, without anger. He should have known she would not let it alone. In the mirror he saw Jiggs staring up at the painting over the door.

  “Handsome woman,” Jiggs said. It was not clear whether he was talking about the nude in the painting, or Kate.

  “How many on the stage?”

  “There’s four of them. Her and him and a drummer, and the little sawed-off from the bank down here.”

  Money in the box then, he thought. He finished shaving, rinsed the lather from his face, and toweled it dry. He slipped his money belt up where he could get to it and drew out a hundred dollars in greenbacks, which he gave to Jiggs.

  “Oh, my!” Jiggs said, in awe.

  “Forget about the whole thing and tell Ed thanks. Going right back?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Surely, I guess you might as well. You know Basine’s place, out on the north end of town? Tell him to give you a fresh horse. He’ll be there still if you hurry.”

  Jiggs stuffed the money down into his jeans pocket. “Well, thanks, Morgan! Ed said you’d be pleased to hear it.”

  “Pleased,” he said. When Jiggs had gone he put on his shirt, whistling softly to himself. He opened the door; the Glass Slipper was empty still, and a barkeep was dispiritedly sweeping Saturday night’s clutter along in front of the bar.

  “Go find Murch,” he called, and went back to his desk and poured himself a larger portion of whisky than usual. He raised it before him, squinting up at the painting of the woman over the tilted flat plane of the liquor. “Here’s to you, Kate,” he whispered. “Did you find one after all that had the guts to come after him? You damned bitch,” he said, and drained the glass. Then he remembered that Calhoun and Benner, Friendly and Billy Gannon had been in town last night, and he laughed out loud at this continuing evidence of his luck.