Warlock

by Oakley Hall

  “So I have to give you Johnny Gannon for Bob Cletus,” he said.

  Her head jerked up, her wet eyes slid toward his. He said harshly, “Clay would no sooner go after him than—” He stopped.

  “I am afraid Johnny will make him,” Kate said. “Or—they will make him.”

  “They?”

  She shrugged, but he nodded.

  “She,” he said. “More likely. Miss Angel,” he said, nodding matter-of-factly. That would be it, although that was a part of it that Kate didn’t know enough to worry about yet.

  He said, “Well, Gannon for Cletus and square,” and laughed a little. “All right, Kate.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  “Get out of here now. People will think you are not a lady.”

  Obediently she rose and moved to the door. She was very tall; with her hat on she was taller than he was. She looked back at him as she started to pull the door closed, and he said, “You don’t need to worry, Kate. I expect Clay would rather shoot himself than your deputy.”

  The door shut her face from him. He sat slumped in the chair, chewing on his cigar and listening to her retreating footsteps. He was tired of it all, he told himself. He had no interest in Kate, less in her deputy; what did he care what happened to Clay? He did not care to see how it would all come out. Nothing ever ended anyway. He sat there brooding at the sunlit window, sometimes raising a finger to his cheek with an exploratory touch. He was the evilest man in the West, he told himself, and tried to laugh. This time it would not come.

  After a while he rose reluctantly. It was time to go and try himself against Lew Taliaferro again. Last night he had let Taliaferro beat him. But no one could beat him if he did not want it, and he was tired of that, too.

  55. JUDGE HOLLOWAY

  IN THE jail Judge Holloway sat at the table with his arms crossed on his chest and his whisky bottle before him, his crutch leaning against his chair. Mosbie sat with his hat tipped forward over his eyes. In the cell a Mexican snored upon the floor, and Jack Jameson, from Bowen’s Sawmill, waited out his twenty-four hours looking through the bars. Peter Bacon whittled on a crooked stick in his chair beside the alley door.

  Pike Skinner, standing with his hands on his hips, turned as Buck Slavin came into the doorway. Slavin was in his shirtsleeves and wore a bed-of-flowers vest with a gold watch chain across it.

  “Where is the deputy?” Slavin demanded.

  “Rid out somewhere,” Bacon said, without looking up from his whittling.

  “Run with his tail between his legs,” Jack Jameson said, from the cell. Everyone looked at him, and he winked dramatically, stooping to thrust his narrow, lantern-jawed face between the bars. “Run from the pure hypocritter of it,” he said. “To see a man hoicked in the lock-up for drunk and disorderly by a judge with a whisky bottle tied on his face.”

  “You will have another twenty-four hours for contempt before you are through,” the judge said mildly.

  “Scaring all those poor girls at the French Palace with a mean old six-shooter,” Mosbie said. “You ought to be ashamed, Jack.”

  “’Twasn’t any six-shooter that scared them,” Jameson said. “It was a dommed big gatling gun. By God, what’s things come to when a man hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a woman for two months and comes busting into town for it, and then has to spend the night with a puking dommed greaser.”

  “Rode out where?” Slavin said.

  “What’s fretting you?” Skinner said. “Somebody pop another stage?”

  “They’ve popped enough, and I’m sick of it. It’s God-damn time Gannon got out of town and did something about it!”

  “Tell it to him to his face!” Skinner said angrily.

  “I’ve told him to his face! I’ve told him he doesn’t earn his keep here. He thinks he did his job forever, shooting Wash Haggin!”

  The judge sighed and said, “Buck, let me tell you the sad, sad facts of life. There will be no justice for you or for those poor ranchers weeping over their lost stock, without cash paid on the barrelhead for it. You wail and gnash your teeth for policing, but are you willing to pay for it yet? Are those ranchers I hear screaming down there willing yet? How much louder will they wail and gnash when they see the tax collector coming? Let me tell you, Buck; the deputy is doing his job exactly right. Those Philistines down there are going to be cleaned out when the sheriff is forced to do it, and that will be when the bellyaching gets so loud it hurts General Peach’s ears.”

  “Seven stages thrown down on since McQuown got killed!” Slavin said. “When McQuown was—”

  “McQuown!” Mosbie broke in, and, in a rasping voice, he cursed McQuown at length.

  Jameson said, “By God if it don’t look like everybody is escared of old Abe yet.”

  “Let him stay buried,” Bacon said gloomily. “If he gets dug up he will stink to heaven.”

  “Morgan’ll stink,” Slavin said.

  Skinner said uncomfortably, “I just don’t see how everybody got so certain all at once it was Morgan did it.”

  “Johnny rode out to see Charlie Leagle,” Bacon said.

  “He supposed to’ve seen Morgan?” Slavin asked, and Bacon nodded.

  “Supposed to be more than Leagle saw him,” Mosbie said.

  Skinner paced the floor with his hands locked behind his back. He glared at the names scratched on the wall; he swung around and glared at the judge, who had picked up the whisky bottle. “Well, tell us about it, you righteous old son of a bitch!” Skinner cried. “I remember how you used to blister Carl, and you are blistering kind of different lately. Tell us how Johnny has to go after Morgan if it looks like Morgan was the one! Tell us how Johnny has to yank Tittle out of Miss Jessie’s place under Blaisedell’s nose, if a warrant comes down. I saw you charging down to get him out of dutch with Blaisedell like you was trying to bust the pole-vault champeenship, you damned drunken fraud. Come on, tell us, Judge! You won’t, will you? You are as sick as any man here, that used to preach at us till it came out our ears. Let’s hear you preach now!”

  The judge tipped his whisky bottle to his lips and drank.

  “Has to pour whisky in itself before it can talk,” Jameson commented.

  “Shut up!” Skinner said. He leaned back against the wall with his arms folded.

  But the judge did not speak, and Mosbie said, “Surely Johnny has got sense enough not to buck up against Blaisedell.”

  “Hasn’t,” Skinner said, “is the trouble.” He glared at the judge. “Well, what do you say? Preach us about how he is only doing his damned duty!”

  The judge nodded, and glanced up at Skinner from under his eyebrows.

  “I noticed you stopping him from it the other day fast enough.”

  “Wheels within wheels,” the judge said.

  Skinner snorted. He swung around to face Slavin. “And you’d like to see him kiting off down valley so they could snipe him off from behind some rock. I suppose you can’t see around a Concord far enough to see it is just what they want him to do.”

  “What they are doing,” Bacon said. “They are using McQuown getting killed for an excuse for hell-roaring all over the place. So I expect Johnny figures maybe he can quiet them by sticking who did it.”

  “Which is Morgan,” Mosbie said.

  “It’s a cleft stick for you,” Bacon said, and shook his head.

  “It is a cleft stick for Johnny Gannon,” Skinner said. “Well, what do you say now?” he said to the judge. “Maybe you like all this?”

  “No,” the judge said thickly. “I don’t like it, and don’t you scorn me, you great lumbering lout! I wasn’t liking it before you ever saw it.”

  “Say Morgan did it,” Mosbie said, in his rasping voice. “Say he did and he is a dirty dog, and I won’t deny it. But he is Blaisedell’s friend, and I say this town owes Blaisedell one or two things, or two hundred—what he has done here. I say we can give him Morgan.”

  “Blaisedell has to go,” Slavin said firmly. “Not just because
of the friends he picks, either.”

  “Buck!” Mosbie said. “I want to hear you say out loud that Blaisedell has done no good here. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Why, I don’t deny he has, fellows,” Slavin said. “Nobody does. It is just time for him to move on, and mostly it is time because of Morgan.”

  “Tell you what you do, Buck,” Skinner said. “Next meeting you make a motion he is to post Morgan out. Since you are starting to speak up so bold.”

  Slavin stood there biting his lip and frowning. “One thing,” he said. “One thing I have got against Blaisedell that isn’t Morgan. He makes people take sides hard against him or for him. He makes bad contention.” He nodded to the others, turned, and departed.

  “Well, I am for the marshal,” Bacon said sadly. “But it certainly makes a man sick and tired—and makes him think. How Johnny is coming against him. Want it or not, looks like.”

  “Johnny can go his way and Blaisedell his,” Skinner said. “I can’t see why they can’t go along and not scratch each other. Blaisedell has never made a move to set himself against Johnny. Not one!”

  “I guess Johnny hasn’t gone and made any move against Blaisedell, for that,” Bacon said. “I guess it just looks like he is going to have to, one of these days.”

  “Over Morgan,” Mosbie said.

  “You boys are starting to make me feel real sorrowful over the deputy,” Jameson said. “It looks like he is in dommed bad shape.”

  They all watched a fly circling in flat, eccentric planes over the judge’s head. The judge waved it away. “It is the awkward time,” he said. “It is where this town don’t know yet whether it still needs a daddy to protect it, or not.”

  “You don’t have to kick your daddy in the face when you have got your growth,” Bacon said.

  Jameson said, “You know what my old dad did to me once? I—”

  “Shut up!” Skinner yelled at him.

  Mosbie stirred in his chair. “There’s some things I wish I knew about Johnny,” he said. “I wish I knew how he felt about it when Blaisedell shot Billy. I wouldn’t want to think—”

  “He don’t hold it against Blaisedell,” Skinner said. “I can say that for sure.”

  Mosbie nodded.

  Then Bacon spoke. “Man doesn’t like to talk about him when he is not here,” he said, in an embarrassed voice. “But there’s something been bothering me too I’d better speak up about. Maybe somebody can—” He paused, and his wrinkled face turned pink. “Well, that Kate Dollar he is seeing pretty good. There is that talk how she is down on Blaisedell, and why, from Fort James. And Johnny seeing so much of her, you know.”

  “Set Johnny against the marshal, you think?” Skinner said worriedly. He began to shake his head. “I don’t think—”

  The judge slapped the palm of his hand down on the table. “If you boys would accept my judgment,” he said. “I would say that Johnny Gannon wouldn’t do anything any of you wouldn’t, nor hold to a reason you wouldn’t. And I would say he is more honest with himself than most, too.”

  Skinner was scowling. “Only—” he said, in a husky voice. “Only, God damn it to hell, if it comes to it, and pray God it don’t, Blaisedell is the one I would have to side with. Because—”

  “That’s where you are wrong,” the judge broke in. “Thinking you can put it so you are choosing between two men.”

  “Well, Judge,” Skinner said. “Maybe us poor, simple, stupid common folks has to look at it that way. Us that sees more trees than forest.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” the judge said. He let his head hang forward; he gripped the neck of his whisky bottle. “But maybe you have to see by now that the deputy here is only doing what the deputy here is going to have to do.”

  Skinner’s red gargoyle’s face grew redder still, and deep corrugations showed in his forehead. He took a deep breath. Then he shouted, “Yes, I can see it! But damned if I want to!” He swung around and stamped out the door.

  “He’s one for getting upset,” Jameson commented. “That one.”

  “You know what I get to thinking about?” Bacon said. “I get to thinking back on the old days in Texas droving cattle up to the railroad. Didn’t own a thing in the world but the clothes I had on and the saddle I sat. So nothing to worry about, and nothing but hard work day in and day out sort of purifies a man. No forests there,” he said, smiling faintly at the judge. “It is the forests that wear a man down dead inside, Judge.”

  “It is the lot of the human race,” the judge said. He raised his bottle and shook it. Staring at the bottle he said, “And it is terrible past the standing of it. But I have here the universal solvent. For wine is the color of blood and the texture of tears, and you can drink it to warm your belly and piss it out to get rid of it. And forget the whole damned mess that is too much for any man to face.”

  “That’s not wine,” Jameson said. “That’s raw whisky.”

  The judge looked at him with a bleared eye. “I will sleep in a cask of raw whisky,” he went on. “Wake me up and pump me out when everyone is dead.” His voice shook, and his hand shook, holding the bottle. “What are deputies to me?” he said hoarsely. “Deputies or marshals. They are nothing, and I will not be a hypocrite to sentimentality when I can drink myself above it all. Wake me up when they have killed each other off! Miner and superintendent, vigilante and regulator, deputy and marshal. They are as dead leaves falling and nothing to me. Nothing!” he shouted. He banged the whisky bottle down on the table top, raising it high and crashing it down again, his face twisting and twitching in drunken horror. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Nothing! Nothing!”

  They watched him in awe at his grief, as he continued to cry “Nothing!” and bang the bottle. The Mexican’s swollen, sleepy face appeared, a square below and to the right of that of Jameson, who whispered, “Listen to the dommed old bastard go!”

  56. MORGAN LOOKS AT THE CARDS

  I

  SITTING in the cane-bottomed rocker in the shade on the hotel veranda, Morgan sat watching Warlock in the morning. There were not many people on the street: a prospector with a beard like a bird’s nest sat on the bench before the Assay Office; a white-aproned barkeep swept the boardwalk before the Billiard Parlor; a Cross-Bit wagon was pulled up alongside the Feed and Grain Barn, and Wheeler and a Mexican carried out plump bags which one of Burbage’s sons stacked into the wagon-bed. To the southwest the Dinosaurs shimmered in the sun. They seemed very close in the clear air, but improbably jagged and the shadows sharply cut, so that they had a painted look, like a fanciful theater backdrop. The Bucksaws, nearer, were smooth and brown, and he watched a wagon train mounting the circuitous road to the Sister Fan mine.

  He stretched hugely, sighed hugely. Inside the dining room behind him he could hear the tinny clink and clatter of dishes and cutlery; it was a pleasant sound. He watched Mrs. Egan bustling down Broadway with her market basket, neat and crisp in starched light-blue gingham, her face hidden in a scoop bonnet. He could tell from the way she carried herself that she was daring any man to make a remark to her.

  He smiled, strangely moved by the fresh, light color of her dress. He had found himself thus susceptible to colors for the last several days. He had admired the smooth, dark, smoked tan of the burnt-out Glass Slipper yesterday, and the velvet sudden black of the charred timbers in it. Now on the faded front of the Billiard Parlor, where Sam Brown had taken his sign down to have it repainted, there was a rectangle of yellow where the paint had been hidden from the sun; yellow was a fine color. He had begun remembering colors, too; in his mind’s eye he could see very vividly the color of the grass in the meadows of North Carolina, and the variety of colors of the trees in autumn—a thousand different shades; he remembered, too, the trees in Louisiana, the sleek, warm, blackish, glistening green of the trunks after it had rained and the sun had come out; and the trees in Wyoming after an ice storm in the sun, when all the world was made of crystal, and all seemed fragile and still; and he remembered t
he sudden red slashes of earth in west Texas where the dull plains began to turn into desert country.

  “Pardon me if I take this other chair here, sir.” It was the drummer who had come to town yesterday, and had the room across the hall from his. He sat down. He wore a hard-hat, and a tight, cheap, checked suit. He was smooth-shaven, with heavy, pink dewlaps.

  “Fine morning,” the drummer said heartily, and offered him a cigar, which he took, smelled, and flung out into the dust of the street. He took one of his own from his breast pocket, and turned and stared the drummer in the eye until he lit it for him.

  “I wonder if you could point out Blaisedell for me, if he comes by,” the drummer said, not so heartily. “I’ve never been in Warlock before and we’ve heard so much of Blaisedell. I swore to Sally—that’s my wife—I’d be sure I saw Blaisedell so I could tell her—”

  “Blaisedell?”

  “Yes, sir, the gunman,” the drummer said. He lisped a little. “The fellow that runs things here. That killed all those outlaws in the corral there by the stage depot. I stopped in there yesterday when I got in for a look around.”

  “Blaisedell doesn’t run things here.” He stared the drummer in the eye again. “I do.”

  The drummer looked as though he were sucking on the inside of his mouth.

  “You can tell your wife Sally you saw Tom Morgan,” he said. He felt pleased, watching the fright in the drummer’s face, but his stomach contracted almost in a cramp. He flicked his cigar toward the drummer’s checked trousers. “Don’t go around here saying Clay Blaisedell runs Warlock.”

  “Yes, sir,” the drummer whispered.

  The water wagon passed on Broadway, Bacon sitting hunched on the seat, his whip nodding over the team. The rust on the tank shone red with spilled water. The red of rust was a fine color. When the water wagon had passed he saw Gannon coming toward him under the arcade.