Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Deputy,” he said. “You don’t hold any cards. You found two men that saw me riding into town, but I know, and you know, that as much as those people down the valley would be pleased if it turned out I had shot McQuown, they have jerked the carpet out from underneath it by all of them swearing up and down it was you that did it. They can’t do anything but make damned fools of themselves, and you can’t. So just sit back out of the game and rest while the people that have the cards play this one out. It is none of your business.”

“It is my business,” Gannon said.

“It is not. It’s something so far off from you you will only hear it go by. Off to the east a way. You probably won’t even hear it.”

They sat in silence for a while. He rocked. Finally Gannon said, “You leaving here, Morgan?”

He gazed at the bright yellow patch over the Billiard Parlor. “One of these days,” he said. “A few things to tend to first. Like seeing to a thing for Kate.”

He waited, but Gannon didn’t ask what it was, which was polite of him. So he said, “She thinks you are about to choose Clay out. I promised I’d watch over you like a baby.”

Gannon cleared his throat. “Why would you do that?”

Why, for one thing, he thought, because I saw you get that hand punctured by a hammer pin one night; but aloud he said, “You mean why would I do it for her?” He turned and looked Gannon in the eye. “Because she was mine for about six years. All mine, except what I rented out sometimes.” He was ashamed of saying it, and then he was angry at himself as he saw Gannon’s eyes narrow as though he had caught on to something.

“That’s no reason,” Gannon said calmly. “Though it might be a reason for you to kill Cletus.”

It shook him that Kate should have told her deputy. Or maybe she hadn’t, since it was something anybody could pick up at the French Palace, along with a dose. “That wasn’t in your territory, Deputy,” he said. “Leave that alone too.”

Gannon looked puzzled, and Morgan realized he had been speaking of Pat Cletus. He felt a stirring of anxiety, and he thought he had better set Gannon back on his haunches. He stretched and said, “Are you going to make an honest woman of Kate, Deputy?”

Gannon’s face turned boiled red.

“Morgan grinned. “Why, fine,” he said. “I’ll sign over all rights to you, surface and mining. And give the bride away too. Or don’t you want me to stay that long?”

Gannon turned away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to stay, since you asked.”

“Running me out?”

“No, but if you don’t get out I will have to take this I came to ask you about as far as it goes.”

“And you don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t want to, no,” Gannon said, shaking his head. “And like you say I don’t expect I’ll get much of anywhere. But I will have to go after it.”

“You could leave it alone, Deputy,” he said. “Just stand back out of the way awhile. Things will happen and things will come to pass, and none of it concerns you or much of anybody else. I will be going in my own time.”

Gannon got to his feet, splinter-thin and a little bent-shouldered. “A couple of days?” Gannon said doggedly.

“In my own good time.”

Gannon started away.

“Don’t post me out of town, Deputy,” Morgan whispered. “That’s not for you to do.”

He regarded what he had just said. He had not even thought of it before he had said it; or maybe he had, and had just decided it.

But it was the answer, wasn’t it? he thought excitedly. And maybe he could still keep the cake intact, and let the others think they saw crumbs and icing all over Clay’s face. He began to check it through, calculating it as though it were a poker hand whose contents he knew, but which was held by an opponent who did not play by the same rules he did, or even the same game.

II

Later he sat waiting for Clay at a table near the door of the Lucky Dollar. He watched the thin slants of sun that fell in through the louvre doors, destroyed, each time a man entered or departed, in a confusion of shifting, jumbled light and shadow as the doors swung and reswung in decreasing arcs. Then they would stand stationary again, and the barred pattern of light would reform. During the afternoon the light would creep farther in over Taliaferro’s oiled wood floor, and finally would die out as the sun went down, and another day gone.

He did not think he would do more today than test the water with his foot, to see how cold it was.

The pattern of light was broken again; he glanced up and nodded to Buck Slavin, who had come in. Slavin nodded back, hostilely. Look out, he thought, with contempt; I will turn you to stone. “Afternoon,” Slavin said, and went on down the bar. Look out, I will corrupt you if you even speak to me. He could see the faces of the men along the bar watching him in the glass; he could feel the hate like dust itching beneath his collar. From time to time Taliaferro would appear from his office — to see if he had begun to ride the faro game yet, and Haskins, the half-breed pistolero from the French Palace, watched him from the bar, in profile to him, with his thin mustache and the scar across his brown chin like a shoemaker’s seam, his Colt thrust into his belt.

He nodded with exaggerated courtesy to Haskins, poured a little more whisky in his glass, and sipped it as he watched the patterns of light. He heard the rumble of hoofs and wheels in the street as a freighter rolled by, the whip-cracks and shouts. The sun strips showed milky with dust.

Clay came in and his bowels turned coldly upon themselves. He pushed out the chair beside him with a foot and Clay sat down. The bartender came around the end of the bar in a hurry with another glass. Morgan poured whisky into Clay’s glass and lifted his own, watching Clay’s face, which was grave. “How?” he said.

“How,” Clay said, and nodded and drank. Clay grinned a little, as though he thought it was the thing to do, and then glanced around the Lucky Dollar. Morgan saw the faces in the mirror turn away. He listened to the quiet, multiple click of chips. “It is quiet these days,” Clay said.

Morgan nodded and said, “Dull with McQuown dead.” He supposed Clay knew, although there was no way of telling. Clay was turning his glass in his hands; the bottom made a small scraping sound on the table top.

“Yes,” Clay said, and did not look at him.

“Look at scarface over there,” he said. “Lew can’t make up his mind whether to throw him at me or not.”

Clay looked, and Haskins saw him looking. His brown face turned red.

“Before I go after Lew,” Morgan said.

“I asked you to leave that alone, Morg.”

He sighed. “Well, it is hard when a son of a bitch burns your place down. And hard to see the jacks so pleased because they think one of them did it.”

Clay chuckled.

Well, he had backed off that, he thought. He said, “I saw Kate last night. She is gone on that deputy — Kate and her damned puppy-dogs. This one kind of reminds me of Cletus, too.”

“I don’t see it,” Clay said.

“Just the way it sets up, I guess it is.”

Clay’s face darkened. “I guess I don’t know what you mean, Morg. It seems like a lot lately I don’t know what you are talking about. What’s the matter, Morg?”

I have got a belly ache, he observed to himself, and my feet are freezing off besides. He did not think that he could do it now. “Why, I get to thinking back on things that have happened,” he said. “Sitting around without much to do. I guess I talk about things without letting the other fellow in on what I’ve been thinking.”

He leaned back easily. “For instance, I was just remembering way back about that old Tejano in Fort James I skinned in a poker game. Won all his clothes, and there he was, stamping around town in his lousy, dirty long-handles with his shell belt and his boots on — he wouldn’t put those in the pot. Remember that? I forget his name.”