Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Bring me four candles over here.” He turned slowly, in the dim room. “Take off your damned hats,” he said. His voice cracked. “Sing,” he said.

There was no sound. One of the barkeepers scurried forward with four white candles. Blaisedell jammed one in the mouth of the whisky bottle, lit it, and placed it beside Morgan’s head. He took the bottle from the judge’s table and fixed and lit a second, which he placed on the other side of Morgan’s head. He handed the other two candles back to the barkeeper and indicated Morgan’s feet.

“Sing!” he said again. Someone cleared his throat. Blaisedell began to sing, in the deep, heavy, jarring voice:

“Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in thee.”

The others began to join in, and the hymn rose. The candle flames soared and shivered at Morgan’s head and feet.

“Let the water and the blood

From thy side, a healing flood,

Be of sin the double cure,

Save from wrath, and make me pure.”

They sang more loudly as Blaisedell’s voice led them. They sang the same verse three times, and then the singing abruptly died as Blaisedell’s voice ceased. Blaisedell removed the handkerchief with which he had covered Morgan’s face.

“You can come past and pay your respects to the dead,” he said, quietly now.

Several of the miners came hesitantly forward, and Blaisedell moved to the other side of the layout, so that they had to pass between him and Morgan. He stared into each face as the man passed. The others began to fall into line. There was a scrape of boots upon the floor. One of the miners crossed himself.

“Have you got a cross on?” Blaisedell said. The man’s sweating, bearded face paled. He brought from under his shirt a silver crucifix on a greasy cord, which he slipped over his head. Blaisedell took it from him and fixed it upright between Morgan’s hands. The men filed on past the faro layout, under Blaisedell’s eyes, and each glanced in his turn at Morgan’s grinning dead face, and then passed more quickly outside. The candle flames danced, swayed, flickered. Blaisedell beckoned the lookout down from his stand to join the line, and the men at the tables, and the barkeeps. Some, as they went by, crossed themselves, and some nodded with their hats placed awkwardly against their chests, but all in silence and without protest passed by as Blaisedell had directed, and on outside into the crowd that waited in Main Street.

II

“Where’s Gannon?” Pike Skinner said, in a stifled voice, when he joined the others outside in the darkness. “Oh hell, oh, God damn it, oh, Jesus Christ,” he said helplessly.

“What’s he doing now?” someone whispered. They stood crushed together upon the boardwalk, but at a distance from the louvre doors.

“Breaking bottles, it sounds like.”

The sound of breaking glass continued, and then they heard furniture being dragged across the floor. There was a wrenching sound of splintering wood. Presently they noticed that there was more light inside.

“Fire,” someone said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Fire!” another yelled.

Immediately Blaisedell appeared in the doorway, outlined against the strengthening bluish light. He had the lookout’s shotgun in his hands. “Get back!” he said, and, because they did not comply rapidly enough, shouted viciously, “Get on back!” and raised the shotgun and cocked it. They fled before him off the boardwalk into the street, and down the boardwalk right and left. Flames rose in great blue tongues inside the doors. Blaisedell looked huge, black, and two-dimensional standing against them. The fire crackled inside. Soon it coughed and roared, and red and yellow flames were mingled with the blue.

“Fire!” someone shouted. “Fire! It’s the Lucky Dollar going!” Others took up the cry. Flames licked out through the louvre doors, and Blaisedell moved aside, and, after a while, walked east along the boardwalk, the men there silently giving way before him, and disappeared into the darkness.

IN THE jail the flame in the hanging lamp was dim behind the smoky shade. Gannon watched the broad, wide-hatted shadow Pike Skinner made as he moved across before the lamp, pacing toward the names scratched on the wall, and back toward the cell where the judge snored in drunken insensibility upon the prisoners’ cot. Peter Bacon sat with his shoulders slumped tiredly in the chair beside the alley door, wiping the sweat and ashes from his face with his bandanna. The fire, at least, was out.

Gannon leaned against the wall and watched Pike and wondered that his legs still held him up. He heard the judge snort in his sleep and the clash of springs as he changed position. The whisky bottle clattered to the floor. He had locked himself in the cell and had the key ring in there with him.

“Well, by Christ,” Pike said. “Keller’s lit out of here like the fiends was after him and the judge’s drunk himself to a coma. What’s there for you and me, Pete?”

“Go home and sleep,” Peter said.

“Sleep!” Pike cried. “Jesus Christ, sleep! Did you see his eyes?”

“I saw them,” Peter said.

Pike rubbed a hand over his dirty face. The back of his hand was black with soot. Then Pike turned to face Gannon. “Johnny, he will kill you!”

“Why, I don’t know that it will come to that, Pike,” he said.

Pike glared at him with his ugly red face wild with grief and anger; Peter was watching him too, the chew of tobacco moving slowly in his jaw. He felt the skin at the back of his neck crawl. They were looking at him as though he were going to kill himself.

“You didn’t see his eyes,” Pike said. “Leave him be, for Christ’s sake, Johnny! Go home and sleep on it. Maybe he will’ve come to himself by morning.”

Gannon shook his head a little. He could look down through himself as through a hollow tube and see that he was a coward and be neither ashamed of it nor proud that he would do what he had to do. He said, “I guess it doesn’t matter much whether he comes to himself or not. You can’t go around burning a man’s place down. The whole town might’ve gone.”

“And a damned good thing,” Pike said. He resumed his pacing. “It’s what’s wrong,” he said. “A town of buildings is more important than a man is.” The judge groaned and snorted in the cell, in his troubled sleep.

“I hold it poorly on the judge,” Peter said, as bitterly as Gannon had ever heard him speak. “I hold a man should face up to a thing he has got to face up to.”

“Shit!” Pike Skinner cried. He halted, facing the names scratched upon the wall, his fists clenched at his sides. “Face up to shit!” he said. He swung around. “Johnny, he is still owed something here!”

“I thought maybe I’d tell him I wouldn’t come after him till morning. I thought maybe he might go before, then.”

“Johnny, who the hell are you to tell him to go, or arrest him either?”

He felt a stir of anger; he said, stiffly, “I am deputy here, Pike.”

“He’ll kill you!”

“Maybe he has come to himself already,” Peter said.

“Is he still down there?”

“He was just now.”

Gannon pushed himself away from the wall. He could smell on himself the stench of ashes and sweat, and fear. “I guess I will be going along, then,” he said. Neither Pike nor Peter spoke. The judge snored. He picked up his hat from the table and went on outside into the star-filled dark. The cold wind funneled down the street and he could hear the steady creaking of the sign above his head. He shivered in the cold. The moon was down already in the west, the stars very bright. He walked slowly along the boardwalk, with the hollow pound of his footfalls reverberating in the silence.