Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Things are slow out there. I can’t pick a fight with anybody.”

“Good God!” MacDonald said. “We don’t want any fights!”

“I thought I was to pick fights and shoot holes in jacks. Run some of them out of town.”

“Good God!”

“Mr. Morgan, kindly remove your dubious frontier humor and yourself. Your post is on the veranda.”

“I’m going upstairs and change my shirt, and then remove myself for a walk around town.”

“Mr. Morgan—”

“I always take a walk around sundown,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss it for the Medusa mine.” He went on upstairs to his room.

There he stripped off his coat, harness, and shirt, and washed himself in the basin. He sat down on the edge of his bed to check the action of his Banker’s Special. A thin edge of the sun came in through the window, throwing a watery red light over the bed. There was a beat like that of great slow wings in his head, and he sat with the revolver in his hand staring at the blank wall opposite him for a long time before he rose and put on a new linen shirt. He found that his fingers were shaking as he tried to insert his gold cuff links into the cuffs. “I’ll be damned!” he whispered. “Why, Rattlesnake!” He stood before the distorted mirror in his shirt sleeves, regarding his pale face with the slash of black mustache across it. He brushed his hair until it shone silver. He rubbed his hands hard together, stretching and clenching his fingers until they felt limber, and then he poured a little whisky into a glass, raised it, said, “How,” bowed to the setting sun, and drank.

Leaving his coat off, he set the Banker’s Special inside the buckle of his belt and swaggered back downstairs. Gough stared at him round-eyed. In the dining room a young miner in clean blue pants and shirt, and with disfigured, scarred hands which he held awkwardly before him, was talking to Willingham, while MacDonald stood glaring at him with his face mottled red and white.

“What goes against what’s bred into you?” said Willingham, who was still playing solitaire.

“Stope-burning,” the boy said.

“Oh, it’s stope-burning, is it?” Willingham said caustically.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “There’s most of them feel that way about it now. They figure when Peach gets back he will load us up and ship us out like he was set to do in the first place, so might as well get shipped for goats as sheep. There is some that get satisfaction from a good fire, and knowing how it’ll burn a couple-three years. It just goes against what’s bred in, with me. And some others.”

“Oh, you are talking for some others, are you?”

“I might be,” the boy said.

“Blackguarding young—” MacDonald cried, but he stopped as Willingham waved a hand at him.

“How many do you speak for, my boy?”

Leaning in the doorway, Morgan watched Willingham, who had not looked up at the boy yet. Willingham ran out of plays, and picked up the cards and shuffled them.

The boy rubbed his scarred hands together. “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Willingham. I guess that would depend. They’d just about all like to go back to work, sure enough. But you know how people get — they don’t much like feeling they’ve got backed down to nothing. That’s how come they’ve stayed out so long. Mr. MacDonald here wouldn’t give an inch.”

“Hush, Charlie,” Willingham said, as MacDonald started to speak. The boy glanced around at Morgan. He had the shadowy beginnings of a beard, and he looked like a card sharp posing as a country bumpkin.

“Not an inch, eh?” Willingham said, shaking his head.

“I guess they wouldn’t ever go back to work for Mr. MacDonald. If you’ll pardon me for being frank, Mr. Mac.”

“Mr. Willingham!” MacDonald cried, in a strangled voice. Willingham only pushed a hand at him, then began to turn the cards once more. He did not look up even now.

“How many do you speak for?” he said again.

“I guess the more I got from you, the more I could speak for.”

“I see,” Willingham said. “Well, sit down, my boy.” The young miner sat down warily, in MacDonald’s chair, and Willingham went on. “Let’s see if reasonable men cannot work this out amicably. I will warn you in advance that I do not intend to give much more than an inch, but I have always desired to be fair. Sometimes subordinates become over-eager — I recognize that much.”

It looked, Morgan thought, as though it would be a good game, with MacDonald first into the pot. He would have liked to stay to watch it, but the sun was going down. He said loudly, “I guess I had better get moving if I expect to run Blaisedell out of town tonight.”

The young miner’s head swung toward him. MacDonald’s mouth gaped open. Willingham rose out of his chair. “Great God!” one of the foremen said.

“I’ll be back to collect that thousand dollars pretty quick,” Morgan said, and grinned around the room and seated the Banker’s Special more firmly in his belt.

“Mr. Morgan!” Willingham cried, but Morgan went on out, past the wide-eyed clerk. Dawson, at the front door, stared at him; as he passed he jerked Dawson’s Colt from its scabbard.

Dawson said, “Whuh—”

“Keep out of the street, Fatty,” he said. “There’s going to be lead flying.” He thrust the other’s Colt inside his belt, and went down the steps and started west along the boardwalk.

The sun had swelled and deepened in color. It hung like a red balloon over the sharp-pointed peaks that would soon impale it. It was a sun the equal of which you saw nowhere else, he thought; bigger and brighter than anywhere else, bigger and brighter today. He took his last cigar from his shirt pocket and bit down on it.

He crossed through the dust of Broadway and mounted the boardwalk in the next block. He passed the shell of the Glass Slipper. Men stared at his waist, and he turned his head from side to side to gaze back into their faces. Not one would meet his eyes. Once a cowboy chewing on a cud of tobacco looked back at him for a moment, but he slowed his steps and the cowboy turned quickly aside. No one spoke in his wake. Faces peered out at him over the batwing doors of the Lucky Dollar; six or eight horses were tied to the rail there. He heard whispering behind him now, and he saw Goodpasture watching him from his store window. He glanced up toward the French Palace and tipped his hat in salute. Hearing a movement behind him he turned and grinned to see three cowboys hurriedly getting their horses out of the street.

He went on, under the new sign with the one bullet hole through it, and turned into the jail. Gannon glanced up at him from behind the table, and he brought out Dawson’s Colt and leveled it. “Hands up,” he said.

Stiff-faced, Gannon rose slowly; his hands continued to rise, shoulder high. “What—” he said, and stopped.

Morgan stepped forward and drew Gannon’s Colt and jammed it inside his belt. He motioned Gannon toward the open cell door. Gannon didn’t move and he thumbed the hammer back. “Get in there!”

“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Gannon said hoarsely.

“Get in there!” He jammed the muzzle into Gannon’s belly and Gannon backed into the cell. He slammed the door and locked it, and tossed the key ring toward the back of the jail. He sneered in at Gannon through the bars. “I promised Kate you wouldn’t get hurt,” he said, and added, “If this comes wrong you had better tell her if I couldn’t do it Pat Cletus couldn’t’ve either.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Pistol-whip the spots off this town.” With Dawson’s Colt in his right hand and Gannon’s in his left, he stepped outside.

“Morgan!” Gannon called after him. But he raised his hand and drowned his name in a gunblast; the new sign swung wildly, perforated again.