Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Going out?” the judge asked.

“Looks like it.”

“You had better get out of that door, Johnny!” Buck said.

But he didn’t move, watching them come down Main Street, Joe Lacey and the breed Marko on the seat of the wagon, and the serape shading the old man in the bed behind them. The horsemen fanned out to fill the street. He watched for Jack Cade.

Cade had dropped a little behind the others. He rode with his shoulders hunched. His round-crowned hat was white with dust, his leather vest hung open; his purple and black striped pants were stuffed into his high boots. A fringed rifle scabbard hung slanting forward along his bay’s neck. He reined the bay toward the boardwalk, and behind him on the corner Gannon saw Pike Skinner lower his hand to his Colt.

The wagon rolled past him, the men on the seat staring steadily ahead. The old man’s eyes gazed at him over the side of the wagon, white-rimmed, sightless-looking, and insane. The riders had drawn their neckerchiefs up over their faces, and it was difficult to tell one from the other. They turned their faces toward him, like cavalrymen passing in review, but Jack Cade was riding toward him.

“ I’ll kill you, Bud!” Cade said in a voice that was almost a whisper and yet enormously loud in the silence. Then he nodded, and set his spurs, and the bay trotted swiftly on to catch up with the others.

They rode on down the street behind the wagon, fading shapes in the powdery drifting dust, their passage almost soundless except for the occasional eccentric creak of the dry wheel. When they had almost gained the rim, he saw one of the horses rear and a shot rang out; and at once all the horses began to rear in a confused and antic mass, and all the riders fired into the air and yipped and whooped in thin and meaningless defiance.

There was a flat loud whack above his head and the sign swung suddenly. The shooting and whooping ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and, as though team, wagon, and horsemen had fallen through a trapdoor, they disappeared over the rim on the road back to San Pablo.

He looked up at the bullet hole in the lower corner of the new, still swinging sign, and went back inside.

“Was that Cade?” Kate whispered.

He nodded and heard her sigh, and she raised a fist and, like a tired child, rubbed at her eyes. There was a new and closer whooping in the street, and suddenly Kate moved to lean on the table and stare down at the judge.

“Everything is fine now, isn’t it?” she said. “Nothing to worry about now, is there? Oh, the good ones always win out in the end and it is all right if they get crucified for it, because—”

“Now, Kate,” Buck said. “I don’t know why you’re taking on so. It’s all over now, and he’ll have a lot to back him from now on.”

“But who is to stand in front of him?” she said, just as Pike Skinner ran in.

Pike leaped on Gannon, laughing and yelling and hugging him; then the others came until the jail was filled with them, all of them talking at once and coming up to slap his shoulder or shake his good hand, to examine and exclaim over the bullet scar on his belt, and ask what Chet had had to say. He didn’t see Kate leave, he was just aware suddenly that she was gone, and the judge gone. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and was passing it around, and others were singing, “Good-by! Good-by! Good-by, Regulators, Good-by!…”

He thanked Pike, and thanked the others one by one as they came up to him. “Surely, Horse, surely,” Peter Bacon said. “It was a pleasure to see you and worth more than just standing there holding my boots down with a Winchester for ballast.” The whisky bottle was forced upon him time and again. Someone had let Buck out of the cell. He thought, with a sinking twisting at his heart, that there had not been such jollity and merriment as this in Warlock for a long time now.

He heard someone ask where Blaisedell was and French replied that he had not come up with them. He had wanted to thank Blaisedell.

He flinched as someone slapped him on the shoulder, and in the process brushed against his hand. Hap Peters stuck a finger through the hole in his shell belt. “Drink!” Mosbie was shouting, waving the bottle at him. “Drink to the rootingest-tootingest-shootingest-beatingest deputy this side of Timbuctoo!”

Mosbie forced the bottle on him, but he gagged on the sour whisky. Suddenly he could not stand it any more, and he made his way outside, and almost ran along the boardwalk to his room in Birch’s roominghouse.

GANNON was alone in the jail when Blaisedell appeared in the doorway, blotting out the late sun for a moment. “Evening, Deputy,” he said.

“Marshal,” he said, rising. He had had little occasion to speak to Blaisedell this last week. He had thanked him for his help, and Blaisedell had made acknowledgment in that uncommunicative and not quite arrogant way he had. Since then he had seen the Marshal only at a distance, usually under the arcade before the Billiard Parlor; and one night in the Lucky Dollar when there had been a quarrel between two of the Medusa strikers, which Blaisedell had already settled when he arrived.

“Mind if I sit?” Blaisedell asked.

Gannon indicated the chair beside the cell door, and pivoted his own around to face it. Blaisedell seated himself, tipped the chair back against the wall, and grasped one of the bars of the cell door to balance himself. “Quiet lately,” he said.

“Been some rustling. Blaikie’s lost a few head.”

“I meant in town.”

“Oh; yes.”

Blaisedell frowned and said, “I wanted to ask you about Haggin’s brother.”

“Chet? Well, he came in that day to say he didn’t hold it against — anyone,” Gannon said, and wondered if that was what Blaisedell had meant.

“But Cade means to take it on himself?”

“He said so.” Gannon licked his lips.

“A mean-looking one,” Blaisedell said, and Gannon felt the full force of his blue eyes. “Backshooter,” Blaisedell went on. “Worried about him?”

“I guess you can’t worry about every man that’s down on you.”

“Some can.” Blaisedell’s lips bent into a stiff, almost shy grin. “Maybe you are just not the worrying kind.”

“Why, I can worry with the best of them, Marshal.” He forced a laugh, and Blaisedell chuckled too. It occurred to him all at once that Blaisedell was trying to make contact with him in some way, and immediately what he had hoped was going to be an easy conversation for him grew taut with strain.

“Go home and puke afterwards?” Blaisedell asked. He did not ask it humorously; it was a question of consequence.

“Not till night.”

Blaisedell nodded as though satisfied. “About Cade,” he said. “If he has taken it on against you I guess the Citizens’ Committee would want to post him. If—” He stopped as Gannon shook his head.

“I guess not, Marshal,” he said.

“No?” Blaisedell said, and now his voice had an edge to it. “Standing on your own feet now, is it?”

“It is not that so much,” he said with difficulty, looking down at his bandaged hand. “It is posting I am starting to balk at. It seemed it worked for a while and it was all we had here. But something happened — I don’t know what happened. I guess I don’t know how to say this very well, Marshal.”

“Just say it,” Blaisedell said.

He felt the strain again, and he grimaced down at his hand. “I don’t say it is the killing that’s so bad in itself,” he went on. “I mean, when people wear guns like they do, they are going to use them. But it is that after some point the killing makes people turn against what was supposed to be done for them in the first place. It is hard, and it is unfair, but it is so. I guess I mean you, Marshal. You have stood for law and order here, so if they turn against you, they—”