Oakley Hall - Warlock

Her scent of lavender water was strong in his nostrils. He was shivering a little, and he stretched, hugely. He had done well enough tonight, he thought; he had given her nothing. He had never given her anything. He saw, indelible in his mind’s eye, her tired, hate-filled face. Once there had been good times.

II

Kate had not been gone ten minutes when Clay came in from the Glass Slipper. Clay took off his hat, brushed his fingers back through his thick, fair hair, and sat down on the other side of the desk. He placed his hat on the desk before him and then moved it a little to one side, as though it were of great importance where it was placed.

“Posse back?” Morgan asked.

Clay shook his head. His eyes were deeply shadowed, his mouth a thin shadow beneath the sweep of his mustache. He had been doing some drinking, from the look of him.

“Whisky, Clay?” Morgan asked, and his hand caught the neck of the decanter as though to strangle it. But Clay shook his head again.

“I’ve just found out something to shake a man,” Clay said.

“What’s that?”

“The passenger those road agents shot. I heard his name and I didn’t believe it. But I went over to the carpenter shop for a look.”

“Somebody you knew?” Morgan said, and put the decanter down.

“Knew of. I’d heard Bob Cletus had a brother up in the Dakotas somewhere.”

Denver, he commented to himself. “Cletus?” he said aloud.

“Pat Cletus,” Clay said, looking down at his hat. “This one’s name was Pat Cletus. You would know it was his brother, looking at him.”

Morgan whistled.

“Come after me, I guess,” Clay said.

“I don’t know. Looks like he might just have happened out this way.”

Clay shook his head again, and Morgan leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets. He said easily, “What would you have done?”

“Run.”

“If he’d come after you like you think, I expect he’d’ve followed if you’d run.”

After a time Clay nodded. “Why, yes,” he said. “That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Then it seems like those San Pablo boys that shot him down did you a favor,” Morgan said. He tried to grin, and felt his lips slide dry over his teeth.

“Yes,” Clay said. His elbows on the desk, he made a steeple of his hands and gazed through, as though he were shading his eyes to sight at something a long way off.

“Foolishness!” Morgan said suddenly, savagely. “I don’t know how you managed to settle it in your mind that Bob Cletus wasn’t on the prod for you. You heard he was. It looks to me like you just chose he wasn’t so you could chew yourself forever. Foolishness. God damn it, Clay!”

“What is foolish to one man maybe isn’t to another, every time,” Clay said. “It is different with you. If you lose a stack at your trade you can push out another and win it back. If I lose a stack like that one I can’t.”

“If you lose at your trade they leave your boots on,” Morgan said. He tried to grin, and saw Clay try to grin back. But Clay only shook his head; that wasn’t what he had meant.

Morgan said, “Let one Cletus shoot you down because you shot down another — what kind of trade is that?”

“Fair trade,” Clay said, and his lips twisted again, more weakly still.

Damned fool, Morgan thought, not even angrily any more; oh, you damned fool! “Why, then it is a funny kind of trade and a funny kind of fair,” he said carefully. “It is a trade where you will have to kill a man sometimes. But any time their kin come after you, there is nothing for it but throw down your hardware and go to praying.”

“Only Cletus’s kin,” Clay said. “You know what I mean. Don’t try to make a fool of me, Morg.” Clay carefully moved his hat two inches to the right. “There’s more to it than Pat Cletus,” he said.

“I know.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“I heard there was a women came in on the stage with him. So if it was a Cletus—”

“I guess she went looking for him when she left Fort James.”

“There are people I’d rather see in Warlock than Kate.”

“You didn’t use to feel that way.”

“There was a time when I could eat hot chiles too. That was when I was younger.”

“I can’t look her in the face,” Clay said, in an expressionless voice. “I think I could look any Cletus in the face, but I can’t her.”

Morgan reached for the decanter again. Clay did not take on this way very much, and when he did Morgan was angry, first at Clay, and then at himself; and part of the time it would seem a foolish joke, and part of the time it would sit his back heavy as pig lead because it sat Clay’s so. He had not yet discovered how he must act with Clay when Clay was like this. “A little whisky, Clay?” he said.

“ Por favor .”

He poured whisky into the two glasses, and wondered if Clay had any idea that the man drinking with him had done it to him. “How?” he said.

“How,” Clay said. He drank the whisky off at a swallow and got to his feet, putting his hat on. Standing, his face remote and calm, Clay said, “There was a time when I used to pray it wasn’t so, what I’d done. It is hard to blame a person for what he does when he is scared, but you can blame yourself. Trigger-nervous and edgy like I was, and seeing a Tejano coming at me around every corner. But maybe a man has to have something like that on him.” Abruptly he stopped, and turned away from the desk.

“Why, Clay?” Morgan said.

“Why, just so he’ll know, I guess,” Clay said distantly. He went out. The sounds of gambling and drinking and monotonous talking were loud for a moment before Clay shut the door behind him.

Morgan took a cheroot from the box. He lit it with steady fingers, and inhaled deeply until he felt the smoke gripe his lungs. “How?” he said, raising his glass to the fuzzy, fat nude on her red couch. She smirked back at him, flat-faced, and he said, “Don’t smile at me, for I would hire you out in a minute if I needed a stake.”

He brought the cheroot up close before his slitted eyes, until all he could see in the world was the hoared cherry ember. Inverting the cigar, he mashed it out against the back of his hand, curling his lips back against the fierce, searing pain, and breathing deep of the stink of burning hair and flesh.

Then he sat grinning idiotically at the red spot on the back of his hand, thinking of Clay saying that he had prayed.

I

GANNON waited alone at the jail. About ten o’clock the judge appeared, coming in the doorway with his hard hat cocked over his eye, a bottle under one arm and his crutch under the other, his left trouser leg neatly turned up and sewed like a sack across the bottom. Heavy and awkward on the crutch he moved around to the chair behind the table, which Gannon vacated, and sank into it, grunting. He put the bottle down before him, and leaned the crutch against the table.

“Left you behind, did they?” he said, swinging around with difficulty to confront Gannon, who had seated himself in the chair beside the cell door. The judge’s face was the color of unfresh liver.

Gannon nodded.

“You see any reason why they should have?” the judge demanded, continuing to regard him with his muddy eyes.

“Yes.”

“What reason?”

“I expect you know, Judge.”

“I asked you,” the judge snapped.

“Well, one they are after is maybe my brother.”

“By God, if you are the law you arrest your own brother if he breaks it, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“But maybe you lean a little toward McQuown’s people,” the judge said, squinting at him. “Or Carl is afraid you do. Do you?”