Oakley Hall - Warlock

And I wonder if Canning did not feel the web beginning to encase him and the red spider gently shaking the strands. For soon rumors started. Canning had better get out of town. The threat was nameless at first, but after a time it was joined with McQuown’s name. What other name would do?

I had heard rumors of impending trouble between Canning and McQuown, and dismissed them as idle gossip. At some point, I cannot say when, I realized they were not; I realized it as Warlock itself did, with a jerk to deadly anxiety as of a rope pulled suddenly tight and singing with strain. I have said that Canning was a prudent man. Had he been prudent enough he would have left town as soon as these rumors started, while still he could have done so without too great a loss of face. Yet he had come too far along the course. He had his own reputation as man and gunman now. He was caught in his own web as well as in McQuown’s. He did not get out in time, and McQuown came in from San Pablo day before yesterday with all his men.

They hurrahed the town that night. Not so wildly, though, as to be much out of the ordinary, and I see that, too, as cunning upon McQuown’s part: there was cause, but perhaps not urgent or completely justifiable cause (by our standards!), for Deputy Canning to step in. But Canning made no trouble; we did not see him abroad that night.

By then, however, the handwriting was etched upon the wall for all to see, and early yesterday men were loitering in the street, and Canning was early at the jail. I watched from my window as avidly as the rest of Warlock, in that crackling deadly tension, waiting for the trouble to start.

It was noon before McQuown came down the center of Main Street in his shining sugar-loaf hat and his buckskin shirt, stepping with disdain through the powdery dust. He fired into the air and shouted his taunts, such as, “Come out into the street, for you have murdered too many good men!” etc. Canning came out of the jail and I retreated — no more cowardly, I say in defense of myself, than any other citizen of Warlock — from my store to my rooms upstairs where I could watch from a more protected coign of vantage. There I watched Canning advance unfalteringly down the street toward McQuown. Once he looked back, and I saw behind him, almost hidden in the shadows under the arcade — two men. One from his short stature I knew to be Pony Benner, the other I have heard since was Jack Cade, both henchmen of McQuown’s.

Canning came on still, but a few yards more and his steps slowed. They quickened again, but not with courage. He ran down Southend Street and got his horse from the Skinner Bros. Acme Corral, and fled Warlock.

My eyes smarted with rage and shame that there was not a man in Warlock to get out in the street with a Winchester and face down those devils behind him, and to see McQuown tip his white hat back on his head and laugh, as though he had won a trick at cards. My eyes smart still.

Last night honest men barricaded their doors, and no lights were left burning for fear they would be shot at. The Cowboys roamed the street and quarreled, and loudly joked, and shot at the moon to their hearts’ content. They only quieted, like stallions, when they trooped off to the French Palace and the cribs along Peach Street. After a brief respite their unholy din began again, and lasted until morning, when the wagons that transport the miners out to the mines were held up, and the mules set loose and chased out of town. The doctor’s buggy was commandeered and put to a wild race down Main Street against the water wagon, and many other pranks were played. Before noon they had departed for San Pablo with much hilarity, leaving our poor barber dying at the General Peach with a bullet through his lungs. Pony Benner shot him, evidently because he cut Pony’s cheek while shaving him.

So the wild boys have had their fun, and played their mischievous games, driving a good man from this town, and murdering a poor, harmless fellow whose razor slipped because he was deadly afraid.

I think we would have done nothing about Canning, for his shame was ours. McQuown must know our cowardice well, and count on it, and despise us for it. So he should, and so should we despise ourselves. Yet, as with Canning, an inconsequential act may have set in train forces of adversity against McQuown. Our little barber’s death has caused a congealing of feeling and determination here such as I have never seen before. If we cannot give voice to our indignation over Canning’s shame, since it is too much our own, we can cry out in righteous wrath against the murder of the barber.

The Citizens’ Committee meets tonight, called upon to defend Warlock’s Peace & Safety, not righteously, only sensibly, for as this town is affected adversely by anarchy, violence, and murder, so are we, its merchants. Furthermore, Warlock has no other possible protector. It is to be hoped that the Citizens’ Committee can, on this occasion, pull itself together and gain for itself, at last, the name of action.

The original organization, from which the Citizens’ Committee sprang, was perhaps more fittingly titled the Merchants of Warlock Committee, including Dr. Wagner in his capacity as proprietor of the Assay Office, Miss Jessie in hers as boardinghouse mistress, and the judge as the operator of a commercial enterprise in his judgeship.[1] Some time ago, however, when it became obvious that the granting of a town patent, and so of some measure of government, to Warlock, was not imminent, it was resolved that the original committee be expanded into something more. Since we were the only organization that existed, except for the Mine Superintendents Assn., we, the merchants, seemed the ones to initiate some sort of pro-tem governing assembly.

The old town-meeting style of government was immediately proposed. The suggestion was met with high democratic enthusiasm, which, however, waned rapidly. I, who made this proposal myself, immediately came to regard it as patently unworkable here, in a place where passions in all things run high, and men go armed as they wear hats against the sun, and where such a large proportion of the inhabitants is of the ignorant and unwashed class, if not actual renegades from the law elsewhere.

There are, for instance, the miners, the bulk of the town’s population. Are they intelligent and responsible enough to be entrusted with the vote? They are not, we feel, perhaps a little guiltily. Then there are the brothel, gambling, and saloon interests; it is true that Taliaferro and Hake belonged to the Merchants Committee, but could we afford to give them and their disreputable employees proportionate power over the more decent citizenry? The question also arose as to how extensive the city-state should be. If it were to include ranchers from the San Pablo valley, what of such as Abe McQuown, not to speak of the Haggins, Cade, and Earnshaw, all of them landholders at least in a small way, and at the same time Warlock’s scourges?

Our projected state was thus gradually whittled down, to become a kind of club restricted to the decent people, the right-thinking people, the better class of citizens; became, ultimately, restricted to the merchants of Warlock — ourselves; with a few additions, for Warlock had grown meanwhile; and a new name: The Citizens’ Committee of Warlock. Now we must act, or abandon all claim to that name.

The situation is indeed fantastic. Keller[2] never appears here. We are none of his concern, he says firmly. When given argument by various volunteers passing through Bright’s City, or by any of the numerous subcommittees that have been assigned to plead with him and General Peach[3] himself on the subject of law enforcement here, Keller gives it as his opinion that the country beyond the Bucksaws is not properly Bright’s County at all, and that General Peach and his aides are presently working on boundaries of the new county, which will soon be established. Warlock will then be given a town patent, and will, of course, be the county seat. This will be any day, he says; any day, he repeats, and again repeats — but it has not been yet. Keller points out, when badgered further, that he did not campaign for our votes when running for his office, and promised us nothing, which is true; and that he has given us deputies, when they could be hired, which also is true enough.