Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Tom,” she begged. “You could ask Clay the way I am asking you. How would it hurt you to do something for me? Make Clay go with you.”

“He has got Miss Jessie Marlow to hold him. And she won’t go; she is prime angel here.”

“You could do something!”

“I might make a bargain with you.”

“What?”

“Since your deputy is the only one that matters. If you went with me I might be able to do something.”

He saw her close her eyes.

“I know you would like to marry up with a famous hardcase-killer, now that your deputy has got to be one. Like Miss Angel Marlow with Clay. But I have got to come out of it with something , so you and me is the bargain. Why, you would be a mistress to the evilest man in the West and famous in your own right. We will go around in sideshows and charge admission to see the worst old horrors there are, make a fortune at it. We’d make a pair.”

She did not speak, and he went on. “If I can figure some way to get Clay out of line toward killing your deputy, this is. I might as well set it all out for you to agree to, or not. For instance, things might get bad from time to time so that we needed a stake. It would be up to you to apply yourself to your line of work and make us one. Now and then.”

“Yes,” Kate whispered.

His voice hurt in his throat; his grin hurt his face. “Well, and you would be party to my evil schemes. Murder people together, you and me. Rob stages. Corrupt innocent people to our evil ways — all that sort of thing.”

She did not speak, but she was looking up at him. He rose to stand before her, and put a hand on her shoulder. “Why, Kate,” he said shakily. “You act like you don’t believe what I’m saying.”

She shook her head a little.

“You have gone and got yourself in terrible shape over that deputy, haven’t you? Pretty decent, is he, Kate?”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

He took his hand from her shoulder. He felt as though he had been poisoned. “Not to me?” he said viciously. “Pretty good in your bed, is he? That lean, hungry-looking kind.”

Slowly, silently, she bent her head still farther until all he could see was the top of her hat. “Tell me what you want, Tom.”

“We’ll make our bargain right here and now, then. You are sitting in the right place.”

Sour laughter coiled and wrenched inside him as he watched one of her hands rise to her throat. It fumbled at the top cut-steel button of her dress. The button came open and her hand dropped to the second one. Her shoulders were shaking. “Oh, stop it,” he said. “I don’t want you.”

He stooped and picked up the magazine, where she had dropped it. He rolled it and slapped it hard against his leg as he sat down in the chair again. Kate had not moved. Her hand fumbled at the top button again; then she folded her hands in her lap.

“You have touched my black heart,” he said. When he released his grip on the magazine it sprang open, but he did not want to see the picture again and he brushed it off onto the floor. He touched the place on his cheek. It occurred to him that he was making a mannerism of this, and it seemed strange that it should be like the one of Kate’s he knew so well.

“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.

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.”