Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  Morgan said, “Let one Cletus shoot you down because you shot down another—what kind of trade is that?”

  “Fair trade,” Clay said, and his lips twisted again, more weakly still.

  Damned fool, Morgan thought, not even angrily any more; oh, you damned fool! “Why, then it is a funny kind of trade and a funny kind of fair,” he said carefully. “It is a trade where you will have to kill a man sometimes. But any time their kin come after you, there is nothing for it but throw down your hardware and go to praying.”

  “Only Cletus’s kin,” Clay said. “You know what I mean. Don’t try to make a fool of me, Morg.” Clay carefully moved his hat two inches to the right. “There’s more to it than Pat Cletus,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “I heard there was a women came in on the stage with him. So if it was a Cletus—”

  “I guess she went looking for him when she left Fort James.”

  “There are people I’d rather see in Warlock than Kate.”

  “You didn’t use to feel that way.”

  “There was a time when I could eat hot chiles too. That was when I was younger.”

  “I can’t look her in the face,” Clay said, in an expressionless voice. “I think I could look any Cletus in the face, but I can’t her.”

  Morgan reached for the decanter again. Clay did not take on this way very much, and when he did Morgan was angry, first at Clay, and then at himself; and part of the time it would seem a foolish joke, and part of the time it would sit his back heavy as pig lead because it sat Clay’s so. He had not yet discovered how he must act with Clay when Clay was like this. “A little whisky, Clay?” he said.

  “Por favor.”

  He poured whisky into the two glasses, and wondered if Clay had any idea that the man drinking with him had done it to him. “How?” he said.

  “How,” Clay said. He drank the whisky off at a swallow and got to his feet, putting his hat on. Standing, his face remote and calm, Clay said, “There was a time when I used to pray it wasn’t so, what I’d done. It is hard to blame a person for what he does when he is scared, but you can blame yourself. Trigger-nervous and edgy like I was, and seeing a Tejano coming at me around every corner. But maybe a man has to have something like that on him.” Abruptly he stopped, and turned away from the desk.

  “Why, Clay?” Morgan said.

  “Why, just so he’ll know, I guess,” Clay said distantly. He went out. The sounds of gambling and drinking and monotonous talking were loud for a moment before Clay shut the door behind him.

  Morgan took a cheroot from the box. He lit it with steady fingers, and inhaled deeply until he felt the smoke gripe his lungs. “How?” he said, raising his glass to the fuzzy, fat nude on her red couch. She smirked back at him, flat-faced, and he said, “Don’t smile at me, for I would hire you out in a minute if I needed a stake.”

  He brought the cheroot up close before his slitted eyes, until all he could see in the world was the hoared cherry ember. Inverting the cigar, he mashed it out against the back of his hand, curling his lips back against the fierce, searing pain, and breathing deep of the stink of burning hair and flesh.

  Then he sat grinning idiotically at the red spot on the back of his hand, thinking of Clay saying that he had prayed.

  14. GANNON WATCHES A MAN AMONG MEN

  I

  GANNON waited alone at the jail. About ten o’clock the judge appeared, coming in the doorway with his hard hat cocked over his eye, a bottle under one arm and his crutch under the other, his left trouser leg neatly turned up and sewed like a sack across the bottom. Heavy and awkward on the crutch he moved around to the chair behind the table, which Gannon vacated, and sank into it, grunting. He put the bottle down before him, and leaned the crutch against the table.

  “Left you behind, did they?” he said, swinging around with difficulty to confront Gannon, who had seated himself in the chair beside the cell door. The judge’s face was the color of unfresh liver.

  Gannon nodded.

  “You see any reason why they should have?” the judge demanded, continuing to regard him with his muddy eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “What reason?”

  “I expect you know, Judge.”

  “I asked you,” the judge snapped.

  “Well, one they are after is maybe my brother.”

  “By God, if you are the law you arrest your own brother if he breaks it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But maybe you lean a little toward McQuown’s people,” the judge said, squinting at him. “Or Carl is afraid you do. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Lean toward Blaisedell then, like most here? Seeing he is against McQuown?”

  “I don’t guess I lean either way. I don’t take it as my place to lean any way.”

  Footsteps came along the boardwalk and Blaisedell turned into the doorway. “Judge,” he said, nodding in greeting. “Deputy.”

  “Marshal,” Gannon said. The judge turned slowly toward Blaisedell.

  “Any word from the posse?” Blaisedell asked. He leaned in the doorway, the brim of his black hat slanting down to hide his eyes.

  “Not yet,” he said. He felt Blaisedell’s stare. Then Blaisedell inclined his head to glance down at the judge, who had muttered something.

  “Pardon, Judge?” Blaisedell said.

  “I said, who are you?” the judge said, in a muffled voice.

  “Why, we have met, Judge, I believe.”

  “Who are you?” the judge said again. “Just tell me, so I will know. I don’t think it’s come out yet, who you are.”

  Gannon stirred nervously in his chair. Blaisedell stood a little straighter, frowning.

  “Something a man’s got a right to know,” the judge went on. His voice had grown stronger. “Who are you? Are you Clay Blaisedell or are you the marshal of this town?”

  “Why, both, Judge,” Blaisedell said.

  “A man is bound by what he is,” the judge said. “An honest man, I mean. I am asking whether you are bound by being marshal, or being Clay Blaisedell.”

  “Both, I expect. Judge, I don’t just know for sure what you are—”

  “Which first?” the judge snapped.

  This time Blaisedell didn’t answer.

  “Oh, I know what you are thinking. You think I am a drunk, one-legged old galoot pestering you, and you are too polite to say so. Well, I know what I am, Mister Marshal Blaisedell, or Mister Clay Blaisedell that is incidentally marshal of Warlock. But I want to know which you are.”

  “Why?” Blaisedell said.

  “Why? Well, I got to thinking and it seems to me the trouble in a thing like law and order is, there is people working every which way at it, or against it. Like it or not, there has got to be people in it. But the trouble is, you never know what a man is, so how can you know what he is going to do? So I thought, why not ask straight out? I asked Johnny Gannon here just now what he was and where he stood, and he told me. Are you any better than another that you shouldn’t?”

  Blaisedell still did not speak. He looked as though he had dismissed the judge’s words as idle, and was thinking of something else.

  The judge went on. “Let me tell you another thing then. Schroeder has gone after those that robbed the stage and killed a passenger. I expect him and that posse would just as soon shoot them down ley fuga as bring them back. But say he will catch them, and say he gets them back whole. Well, there will be a lynch mob on hand, like as not, from what I’ve heard around tonight. But say the lynch mob doesn’t pan out, or Schroeder sort of remembers what he is here for and stops them. Then those road agents will go up to Bright’s City to trial, and likely get off just the way Earnshaw did.

  “Then it is your turn, Mister Marshal, or whatever you are. Which is why I am asking you now beforehand if you know what you are, and what you stand for. If a man don’t know that himself, why, nobody does except God almighty, and He
is a long way off just now.”

  “Judge,” Blaisedell said. “I guess you don’t much like what you think I stand for.”

  “I don’t know what you stand for, and it don’t look like you are going to tell me, either!” Gannon heard the judge draw a ragged breath. “Well, maybe you can tell me this, then. Why shouldn’t the Citizens’ Committee have gone out and made itself a vigilante committee like some damned fools wanted to do, instead of bringing you here?”

  Blaisedell spread his legs, folded his arms on his chest, and frowned. “Might have done,” he said, in his deep voice. “I don’t always hold with vigilantes, but sometimes it is the only thing.”

  “Don’t hold with them why?”

  “Well, now, Judge, I expect for the same reason you don’t. Most times they start out fine, but most times, too, they go bad. Mostly they end up just a mob of stranglers because they don’t know when to break up.”

  “Wait!” the judge said. “You are right, but do you know why they go bad? Because there is nothing they are responsible to. Now! Any man that is set over other men somehow has to be responsible to something. Has to be accountable. You—”

  Blaisedell said, “If you are talking about me, I am responsible to the Citizens’ Committee here.”

  “Ah!” the judge said. He sat up very straight; he pointed a finger at the marshal. “Well, most ways it is a bad thing, and it is not even much of a thing, but it is an important thing and I warrant you to hang onto it!”

  “All right,” Blaisedell said, and looked amused.

  “I am telling you something for your own good and everybody’s good,” the judge whispered. “I am telling you a man like you has to be always right, and no poor human can ever be that. So you have got to be accountable somehow. To someone or everybody or—”

  “To you, you mean, Judge?” Blaisedell said.

  Gannon looked away. His eyes caught the names scratched on the wall opposite him, that were illegible now in the dim light. He wondered to whom those men, each in their turn, had thought they were responsible. Not to Sheriff Keller certainly, nor to General Peach.

  The judge had not spoken, and after a moment Blaisedell went on. “Judge, a man will say too often that he is responsible to something because he is afraid to face up alone. That is just putting off on another man or on the law or whatever. A man who has to always think like that is a crippled man.”

  “No,” the judge said; his voice was muffled again. “No, just a man among men.” He drank again, the brown bottle slanting up toward the base of the hanging lamp above him.

  Blaisedell stood with his long legs still spread and his hands upon his shell belt beneath his black frock coat. Standing there in the doorway he seemed as big a man as Gannon had ever seen. When he examined Blaisedell closely, height and girth, he was not so tall nor yet so broad-chested as some he knew, yet the impression remained. Blaisedell’s blue gaze encased him for a moment; then he turned back to the judge again.

  “Maybe where you’ve been the law was enough of a thing there so people went the way the law said,” he said. “You ought to know there’s places where it is different than that. It is different here, and maybe the best that can be done is a man that is handy with a Colt’s—to keep the peace until the law can do it. That is what I am, Judge. Don’t mix me with your law, for I don’t claim to be it.”

  “You are a prideful man, Marshal,” Judge Holloway said. He sat with his head bent down, staring at his clasped hands.

  “I am,” Blaisedell said. “And so are you. So is any decent man.”

  “You set yourself as always right. Only the law is that and it is above all men. Always right is too much pride for a man.”

  “I didn’t say I am always right,” Blaisedell said. His voice sounded deeper. “I have been wrong, and dead wrong. And may be wrong again. But—”

  “But then you stand naked before the rest in your wrong, Marshal,” the judge said. “It is what I am trying to say. And what then?”

  “When I have worn out my use, you mean? Why, then I will move along, Judge.”

  “You won’t know when it is time. In your pridefulness.”

  “I’ll know. It is something I’ll know.” Gannon thought the marshal smiled, but he could not be sure. “There’ll be ones to tell me.”

  “Maybe they will be afraid to tell you,” the judge said.

  Blaisedell’s face grew paler, colder; he looked suddenly furious. But he said in a polite voice, “I expect I’ll know when the time comes, Judge,” and abruptly turned and disappeared. His bootheels cracked away to silence outside.

  The judge raised his bottle to drain the last of the whisky in it. With a limp arm he reached down to set it beside his chair, and knocked it over with a drunken hand. It rolled noisily until it brought up against the cell door, while the judge leaned forward with his face in his hands and his fingers working and scraping in his hair.

  After a long time he rose and clapped his hat on his head, staggering as he fitted the crutch under his arm. Gannon had a glimpse of his face as he swung out the door. Hectically flushed, it was filled with a sagging mixture of pride and shame, dread and grief.

  II

  It was well after midnight when the posse returned. Gannon stared at the doorway with aching eyes as he heard the tramp of hoofs and shouting. Men began running in the street past the jail, and he felt his heart swell in his chest as though it would smother him. He thrust down hard on the table with his hand, forcing himself to his feet, and went outside.

  The street seemed filled solid with horsemen and men on foot milling around the horses. Someone was swinging a lantern to illuminate the faces of the riders—he saw Carl’s face, Peter Bacon’s, Chick Hasty’s; the lantern showed Pony Benner’s scowling, frightened face, and the men in the street howled his name. The pale light revealed Calhoun, and another shout went up. Then Gannon saw Billy sitting straight and hatless in the saddle, with his hands tied behind him.

  The lantern swung again to show a riderless horse; but not riderless, he saw, for there was a body tied over the saddle.

  “Ted Phlater!” someone said, in a sudden silence.

  Immediately a roar went up. “Hang them!” a drunken voice screamed. “Oh, hang the sons of bitches! Hang them, boys!”

  “Shut that up!” Carl shouted. Gannon swung off the boardwalk and made his way through the crowd as Carl dismounted. Carl looked into his face and gripped his arm for a moment.

  “Got Ted Phlater shot and lost Friendly, damn all,” he said.

  Another drunken voice was raised. “Where’s Big Luke, Carl?”

  “Where is McQuown? You went and forgot Abe and Curley, boys!”

  “They got the barber-killer!”

  There was laughter, more shouting. “Hang them, boys! Hang them!” the first voice continued, shrill and mechanical, like a parrot.

  “Horse!” Carl called to Peter Bacon. “You and Pike bring them inside.” He started for the jail, and Gannon made his way toward Phlater’s horse, to help Owen Parsons with the body. Men surged and shouted, mocked and joked and threatened as Pony, Calhoun, and Billy were dismounted. The crowd pressed toward the jail now, as the prisoners came up on the boardwalk, where a man held a lantern high as they moved past him.

  “Hang them! Hang them!”

  Gannon and Parsons lifted Phlater down and tried to make their way to the jail. “Get the God-damned jumping hell out of the way!” Parsons cried hoarsely. “Got any respect for the dead?”

  Inside they put Ted Phlater’s stiffening body on the floor at the rear of the jail, and Peter appeared unfolding a blanket, with which he covered it. Pike Skinner was untying Calhoun’s arms; he thrust him roughly into the cell with Billy and Pony, and Carl slammed and locked the door.

  Chick Hasty and Tim French came inside with the strongbox from the stage, which they shoved under the table. The hanging lamp swung like a pendulum when one of them brushed against it, and shadows swung more wildly still. The dusty window was cr
owded with bloated, featureless faces pressed against the glass, and men were pushing in at the door.

  “Out of here!” Carl shouted. His face was lined with fatigue and gray with dust. “Isn’t any damned assembly hall. Out of here before I get mad! You!” Pike Skinner swung around and with his arms outstretched forced the men back.

  “Hang the murdering sons of bitches!” someone yelled from outside. Pony’s scared face appeared at the cell door, and Calhoun’s lantern-jawed, cadaverous one; Gannon could see Billy’s hand on Calhoun’s shoulder.

  “Expect they mean to try something, from the sound of them,” Peter Bacon said calmly.

  “No they won’t,” Carl said. He stretched and rubbed his back, and grinned suddenly. “Well, three out of four,” he said. “That is better than one out of two like we made last time, anyhow.”

  “You going to want some of us here tonight, Carl?” Parsons said, and Gannon saw that he tilted his grizzled head in his direction. He looked quickly away, to meet Calhoun’s eyes. Calhoun pursed his slack mouth, hawked, and spat.

  “Go home and get some sleep,” Carl said, and slumped down in the chair at the table. “We are all right here.”

  “I’m staying,” Pike Skinner said.

  “Stay then. Chick, you and Pete go get some sleep. We’ll be taking them into Bright’s in the morning.”

  There was muttering among the men bunched in the doorway. A muffled shout went up outside. The possemen pushed out the door, spurs clinking and scraping.

  When they had gone, Pike Skinner swung the door closed and slid the bar through the iron keepers. The goblin faces still pressed against the window glass. There was another burst of shouting and hurrahing outside. Pike Skinner walked heavily to the rear, let himself fall into the chair there, and stared hostilely at Gannon. At the table Carl sighed and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes.

  “Didn’t take you long,” Gannon said.

  Carl laughed. “We ran onto them just before they hit the river. Pony and Calhoun, that is. They separated but we rode them down easy. Ted and Pike here kind of flushed Billy out of some trees down there and—”