Oakley Hall - Warlock

Her reputation is spotless, which is, in itself, astonishing in this place where foul rumor is a favorite pastime, and gossip vicious and pervasive. Indeed, I think one of the quickest ways to commit suicide in Warlock would be to cast aspersion against her good name. She lives with one fat Mexican maid in a house full of the roughest kind of ignorant, crude, dishonorable fellows, with only the doctor in one of her rooms as, I suppose, a sort of duenna. She walks streets which rock with catcalls when such an old harridan as Mrs. Sturges passes by, and where women from the Row are all but physically assaulted if they dare to promenade, and is greeted always in the most polite and gentlemanly manner. She can nurse miners mouthing dreadful obscenities in their pain, and yet find men completely tongue-tied before her for fear they will utter some slight impropriety of speech that might offend her ears. She is a miracle without being in the least miraculous.

She is also, now that I find myself thinking of her, a lonely and slightly pitiful figure, and I am pleased by Blaisedell’s attentions to her, and by her reception of them.

The Marshal has, very recently, taken up residence at the General Peach, takes tea with Miss Jessie in the afternoon, and, the doctor says, submits amiably to having poetry read him. All in all, Blaisedell’s courtship of her is fitting, and I think there will be few to resent it. This romance is an ennobling thing for this foul-minded, whore-ridden town, a showing-forth to limited minds that there can be more to the conjunction of men and women than a befouled and sweating purchased trick in bed.

January 15, 1881

Blaisedell has posted a man from town. We knew it must come eventually, and I have dreaded it. For if he posts a man out, and that man comes in, he comes under threat of death. If it is carried out are not we of the Citizens’ Committee, who have hired Blaisedell and directed the posting, executioners? So I have waited in dread for this to happen, and waited in more dread still to see if the edict would be honored. Earnshaw, however, has reportedly left the territory.

Earnshaw had been acquitted by a jury of supposedly good men and true in Bright’s City. I suppose there is no reason to damn the jurors, who were bound to abide by the evidence; and ten witnesses had ridden in from San Pablo to swear that Nat Earnshaw was seen by all of them in San Pablo on the day that the prosecution claimed he had tried to rob the Bright’s City stage, and that he had been mistakenly apprehended by the posse while innocently riding into Warlock. It was not stated why he sought to flee the posse with his accomplice, who was not named.

Unfortunately, no one on the stage could identify Earnshaw as one of the bandits, for both had been masked, and the only witnesses for the prosecution were Schroeder and the possemen, whose evidence that they had followed the tracks of Earnshaw’s horse from the scene of the assault upon the stage to the point of capture, was not given as much credence as that of the San Pablo hardcases, whose threatening demeanor was no doubt more effective than their verbal testimony.

The Citizens’ Committee met upon the subject of Earnshaw, and discussed posting him with a considerable lack of resolution. Blaisedell spoke to the effect that if we ever intended to post anyone, Earnshaw was a good place to begin. Upon which we entrusted our consciences to the Marshal’s capable hands. There was no dissent, although Miss Jessie was not present, nor Judge Holloway, who, I am sure, would have loudly damned the illegality of our action. Luckily the judge had drunk himself into insensibility that day, and was not heard from for several days thereafter.

We would have heard from him had Blaisedell been forced to ventilate Earnshaw, I am sure. He can be as nettlesome as various of the wild-eyed Jewish prophets must have been to their rulers. But thank God the fatal day when we must look at each other and try to shrug off some stubborn fellow’s death as being only his own doing, is put off a little longer.

[1] The Sister Fan and Pig’s Eye were already at this time having difficulty disposing of the water encountered at the lower levels.

[2] Proprietor of the Feed and Grain Barn.

IT HAD turned chilly with the sun gone down and some quality in the atmosphere did not hold the dust, so that the air was clear and sweet now as Gannon walked back from supper at the Boston Café. The stars were already showing in the soft, violet darkness that shaded off to a pale yellow above the peaks of the Dinosaurs, where the sun had disappeared. Men lounged in groups along the boardwalk in the central block, leaning against the saloon fronts or seated on the tie rail, where a number of horses were tied. They talked in quiet voices and here and there among them was the orange glow of a cheroot or a match flame — wool-hatted miners, and cowboys in flannel shirts and shell belts, striped pants or jeans, and star boots, with the shadows cast by their sombreros making of their faces only pale ovals. They fell silent as Gannon passed. No one spoke to him, or spoke at all; there was only the stamp and snort of a horse at the rail, the hollow clumping of his bootheels.

He walked through the thin stripes of light thrown out by the louvre doors of the Glass Slipper. Other groups of men fell silent before him. Unwillingly he felt his steps hasten a little, his wrist brushed against the butt of his Colt, and his stomach twisted with its own cold colic. He glanced down to see a little light glitter on the star pinned to his vest.

It was quiet tonight, he told himself calmly, quiet for a Saturday night; the concentrated jumble of sound from the Lucky Dollar faded behind him.

When he descended into Southend Street dust prickled in his nostrils. To his right were the brightly lit houses of the Row; to his left, across Main Street, the second-story window above Good-pasture’s darkened store was a dim yellow rectangle. Light from the jail spread out across the planks of the boardwalk, beneath the hanging sign.

Carl sat alone at the table, one hand on the shotgun. “Seen the marshal?” he asked.

“I expect he’s in at the Glass Slipper.”

“Pony and Calhoun and Friendly’s in town,” Carl said. He leaned back in his chair, stiffly. “See them?”

“No.”

“And your brother,” Carl said.

Gannon went over and sat down in the chair beside the cell door. The key was in the lock and he withdrew it, and hung the ring on the peg above his head.

“They are in the Lucky Dollar, I heard,” Carl said. He chewed on the end of his mustache; he stretched. “Well,” he said, in a shaky voice. “He handled the whole bunch at once, I don’t know why he can’t four of them.”

“I expect he can,” Gannon said. At least Cade was not in, he thought, and despised himself.

“I don’t know,” Carl said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Seems like I face up to it every night as soon as I close my eyes. But damn if I can—” He shook his head, and said, “When you see a real man it surely shames you for what you are, don’t it?”

“Meaning Blaisedell?”

“Meaning Blaisedell. You know, I had got to thinking that if I didn’t go up against McQuown sometime I would know I was dirt. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe he is the one — I don’t know, maybe I mean big enough or clean enough or something — to do it. My God damn how I have chewed myself to ribbons over that bunch. But maybe McQuown is Blaisedell’s by rights.”

Gannon said nothing. It seemed to him that hate was a disease, and that he did not know a man who didn’t have it, turned inward or outward. He had felt the hate when he had walked along Main Street tonight, hate for him because he was suspected of being friendly with McQuown; he wondered if McQuown, in San Pablo, could not feel the hate all the more. Maybe McQuown had gotten used to it long ago. Carl hated both McQuown and his own self, and that was the worst kind, the pitiful kind.