Oakley Hall - Warlock

“Let him out,” Billy said to Carl. He dropped his hands to his shell belt, as though to hitch at it; in an instant his Colt was in his hand, and trained on Carl behind the table.

Gannon heard Carl’s sudden ragged breathing, and Pony’s laugh, but he stared still at Billy’s face. Those cut-steel eyes might have been Jack Cade’s, and they were eyes that had looked at Deputy Jim Brown with the same expression in the San Pablo saloon, just before Billy had shot him dead for making too much fun of his youth and his claim to being the best marksman in San Pablo.

But it was a copy of Abe McQuown’s shy grin that twisted the corners of Billy’s mouth, and a copy of Curley Burne’s bantering tone in which he said, “ Por favor , Carl. Por favor .”

“Go to hell,” Carl whispered.

“Listen to the rats squeaking now!” Pony crowed. “Squeaking awful quiet, seems like.”

Billy said, “Get the keys, Bud.”

Gannon stepped between Billy and Carl, as though he were going for the key. He stopped there, blocking Billy’s Colt. Billy started to jump sideways and Pony yelled, “ Watch the shotgun! ”

Gannon stepped out of the way. Pony was cursing again.

“Buckshot,” Carl said.

“Birdshot,” Billy said, and again there was a reflection of Curley Burne in his tone. He grinned slightly. “I know what you carry in that piece.”

“Buckshot,” Carl said. “On Saturday nights.” His voice was stronger. “Son,” he said. “Buckshot beats a Colt’s just like a full house does a pair.”

Billy slipped his Colt back into its scabbard. He gave Gannon a blank look, not so much of anger as appraisal.

“You threw me, Bud,” he said. “And took kind of a chance too.”

“You wasn’t going to go to shooting. Whoever it was.”

“Maybe I wasn’t, but it wasn’t a bluff you had to call. I had you and Carl covered fair enough.”

“Get out of here,” Carl said. “Before I decide to chuck you in there with Mister Squeaky.”

Billy said, “The marshal doesn’t run this town.”

“Looks like he does tonight,” Carl said.

“Nah, he doesn’t. Just some cowardy-cats in it.” Billy inclined his head almost imperceptibly at Gannon, and went out.

Pony yelled, “You, Mister throw-your-brother! I guess maybe next time he won’t be so quick to take big Jack off you!”

Carl slammed the barrel of the shotgun against the wooden bars, just as Pony leaped back away from the door.

Gannon cleared his throat. “Well, I guess I will take a walk around town, Carl.”

“Feel easy,” Carl said, grinning at him hugely. “It is a quiet night after all.”

Gannon went out along the boardwalk. Billy was a lean shadow slanted against the wall just around the corner on Southend Street. “We had better talk some, Bud,” Billy said.

He stepped down off the boardwalk into the dust. Up the street behind Billy were the lighted windows of the French Palace, and there were men passing on the far side of the street, laughing and talking. He heard Pony’s name, and Blaisedell’s.

Billy had turned to face the adobe wall beside him; he kicked a boot against it. “What’s gone and got into you, Bud? Went off to Rincon to be a telegrapher and then come back, only not going back to Pablo, you said. Warlock is no kind of place to come back to. And deputying. What’s got into you, Bud?”

Gannon shrugged.

Billy kicked the wall again. “Well, maybe I know why you lit out. But what the hell, Bud! What would you have done else, let them shoot us down and run that stock back?”

“I guess if you steal stock you have got to shoot to keep it sometimes. But not the way it was done, Billy.”

“You’ve stole before that.”

“I never saw it run all the way through like that before, though.”

“So you come back and went to deputying to stop it, huh?” Billy sneered. “Well, you have changed, Bud. Got religion or something.”

“I guess you have changed, too, Billy, since you made your score. People change.”

“Ah, Christ, Bud!” Billy said, and now for the first time in the darkness it sounded like his brother again, and not some awkward and snarling boy-man out of San Pablo. “Well, I wanted to say I didn’t blame you for what you did just now, which was slick, and— Hell, I knew it was what you had to do in there! But this is the bad thing, this God-damned marshal that thinks he is Lord God of Creation here. Where does he think he gets off, posting Nat out like that and running Pony into jail?”

“I don’t know what Pony was doing, Billy,” he said. “I didn’t see what happened. But I know Pony — so do you.”

“Christ, you have sure gone over, haven’t you?” Billy said. He leaned back against the wall. “Like Blaisedell pretty good now, do you? Think he is pretty fine?”

“I don’t know him, except to say hello to.”

“Well, sometime when you get real good sucked up to him, ask him something for me! Ask him who the hell he thinks he is. Lording it over everybody. Running everybody around and telling them when they can come and go and all. This is a free country, isn’t it? God damn it!”

“Billy,” he said. “It’s been free the way you mean, maybe, but it is going to have to be free the other way. So people are free to live peaceable, and free of being hurrahed and their property busted up, and their stock run off, and stages robbed. And killed for no more—”

“Who’s the killer?” Billy broke in. “It is him! He got those gold-handled guns for the grand turkey-shoot prize for killing, didn’t he?”

“I guess he is what we have to have here, then. For people like I am afraid you have got to be.”

He had meant to say the people Billy has got to be like, but he didn’t try to correct himself, and Billy whispered, “Jesus!” A group of horsemen turned into Southend Street and rode up toward the Row. They were laughing, and without even listening to what they were saying he knew they were laughing about Pony Benner.

“I don’t mean to take up preaching,” he said. “But I guess if I have changed it’s because I’ve seen there has got to be law. It seems like you were always quicker and smarter to see a thing than I was. Can’t you see it, Billy?”

“I can see this much,” Billy said, in a contemptuous voice. “Who your law is for. Petrix at the bank and Goodpasture’s store, and Buck’s God-damned stages and Kennon’s livery stable and all.”

“Not just them. It is decent people running things, not rustlers and road agents and hardcase killers.”

“Blaisedell isn’t a hardcase killer? I heard he killed ten men in Fort James. Ten!”

“You can hear anything you want to hear. But there is something I saw, and got a hammer pin through my hand to prove it. Jack would have shot him in the back if I hadn’t stopped it.”

“Oh, I know Jack is a son of a bitch,” Billy said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Do you think Abe didn’t put him to it?”

“Abe didn’t have anything to do with it! God damn it, Bud, there is not another man but my own brother I’d let say a thing like that about Abe! Damn, you are wrong! Damn, I don’t know how you turned so fast. You have got so damned holier-than-anybody because of us rustling a few old mossy-horns they never get around to rounding up even, they have got so many down at Hacienda Puerto. And a few sons-of-bitching greasers killed.” Billy’s voice ceased abruptly.

“Did they get to be sons-of-bitching greasers when they came after their stock, Billy? And got shot down by a bunch dressed like Apaches — and worse than Apaches. Is that when they got to be sons of bitches?”

Billy didn’t answer, and Gannon leaned against the wall too, and looked up at the cold stars, shivering in the wind that had come up. A newspaper rolled slow and ghostly across the street and flattened itself against the wall beyond Billy.