Oakley Hall - Warlock

“All right,” Bud said, nodding. “How are you, Curley?”

“Fine as paint.”

“We are going up to Bright’s,” Abe said.

Bud nodded again.

“Where’s your big-chief deputy?”

“Bright’s City.”

“Looks like half Warlock’s gone up.” Curley flipped his hat off, so that it hung down his back by its cord. Whistling through his teeth, he stepped over to the cell door and batted it back and forth between his hands.

“Lot of yours going up, Abe?” Bud asked.

“Some,” Abe said gravely. “Some people down there are interested pretty good.”

“Be jam-packed up there,” Curley said, pushing the door in faster, shorter arcs. “People all squunched together in court there and everybody calling everybody else a liar.” He laughed to think of it, and to think of the fat, sweaty-faced townsmen in the jury box.

Abe leaned back against the wall and crossed his legs. “You look worried, Bud,” he said. “Don’t worry about Billy. It’ll come right.”

“Will it?” Bud said, and he sounded hoarse. “I’m glad to hear that.” His thin face had paled. “How will it?” he said.

“Because I will see it does,” Abe said. “Because they are friends of mine and I intend to see they are not blackguarded and false-sworn into hanging for something they didn’t do — by people that’s after me. I will stand up for my own, Bud.”

Curley looked down as Bud’s eyes turned toward him; he knew Abe had meant what he said, not just about Billy, but about Pony and Calhoun as well. But Luke had told them that Pony and Calhoun had planned to stop the stage. It was all right to stand up for your own, it was the first principle; but there was no need to throw up a dust cloud about what they had or had not done. It was as though Abe were trying to fool himself as well as the rest.

“You wouldn’t see what you are doing to your own,” Bud said, in the hoarse voice.

“Doing!” Abe said. With a lithe movement he leaned his hands on the table and stared into Bud’s face. “What would you do, let them hang? Let your own brother hang? By God, I think you would do it, just so Blaisedell would pat you on the head and call you a good boy.”

“I’d let them have a fair trial,” Bud said.

“Fair trial!” Abe said, and straightened and grinned. “I hear Buck is running passengers up free so everybody in Warlock can go swear against them. Fair trial?”

Bud said nothing, and it came over Curley with a sickening shock that Bud would not do anything, that he would let Billy hang and not make a move. “Holy smoke, Bud!” he said. “I believe you— What the hell has happened to you?”

Bud swung toward him. “Do you think I want—”

“I know what’s happened to him,” Abe broke in. “Clay Blaisedell is what’s happened to him.”

He went on, but Curley didn’t listen, staring at Bud who was, in turn, watching Abe. It came on him strongly, all at once, that Bud did not hate Abe, that maybe Bud felt something of the way he did toward Abe. Yet there was some cold lack in him, where friends didn’t matter, or even his brother.

“Whose town is it?” Abe was saying. “I mean, who was here to begin with? You know who, when Warlock was nothing but Cousins’ store and Bill Hake’s saloon. But then Richelin got his silver strike and everybody comes crowding in, and now it’s beginning to look like there is no more room for the ones that was here first.”

“There is room, Abe,” Bud said.

“Just if I make room, it looks like. Bud, I was friendly with people and took care of my own and got along, and people looked up to me some. But not any more. Because there is someone come in that is trying to run me off like you would a dirty, stinking dog. Turning people against me—” His voice began to shake, and he stopped.

Bud said, “So now you are going up to Bright’s City and have your own lied free, or the jury scared off, one. Or both. You will trick and mess the law around like you want it until—” He hesitated. “Until you get Clay Blaisedell brought in against you, and then you can’t understand it.”

“I understand it,” Abe said. “I understand he has got people thinking he is Jesus Christ, so that makes me a black devil from hell. I understand it, and you too, Bud. I put you and Billy on when your Daddy died, Bud, but I guess you have surely forgot that.”

“No,” Bud said. “I haven’t forgot it. But there is other things I can’t forget either.”

Curley said quickly, “There is some things better forgot.”

“You son of a bitch!” Abe whispered. Curley saw that he had his hand on the haft of his knife. His lips were pulled back white against his teeth, and the long wrinkles in his cheeks were etched deep. “You son of a bitch!”

Bud licked his lips. When he spoke his voice was dead and dry. “I’ve come against things like that, is all,” he said. “A thing happened there at Rattlesnake Canyon that I guess had to happen because of what’d gone before. So what went before was wrong, and I will try to see— Do you think it is easy?” he said loudly. “Because you think I am for Blaisedell against you, when I am not. And people here think the other way around, when I am not. But I am come against what we did in Rattlesnake Canyon, Abe. And against what was tried that night in the Glass Slipper when Jack would have shot a man in the back like you’d kill a fly. One fly, or seventeen flies.”

Abe sucked his breath in; he cried, “If you say I fixed it to back-shoot Blaisedell you are a liar!”

Curley tried to say jokingly, “Why, Bud, that kind of hits at me, don’t it? I thought that was my fight. My back-off, anyhow.” But he felt sick all the way down. He sighed and said, “Where you’ve gone wrong, Bud. You know where you went wrong? There’s been bad things done, surely, but you went wrong lining up against your own instead of trying to change them. Against your friends, Bud; against your brother! That’s no good! They are the most important people there is to a man; why, nobody else counts. Your friends and kin — Billy. You know that’s wrong!”

“He doesn’t think so,” Abe said, easily now. “You can see that.”

Curley said, “Do you think Billy run that stage and killed that passenger, Bud?” He watched Bud look down at his hat, and crease the top with the edge of his hand.

“Happen to know he didn’t,” Abe said.

“Luke says he didn’t, Bud.”

“But you’d have him hang,” Abe said.

“He killed a posseman,” Bud said tiredly.

“Oh, that’s right,” Abe said, mockingly. “Banging away at him and he was supposed to just let himself get shot up. Hang for just trying to defend himself.”

“Let him plead it then,” Bud said. “He wouldn’t hang if he got a fair trial. But he will be lied off for what he didn’t do in the first place, and stuck with it. No, he won’t hang and he won’t even go to the territorial, for you will get him off. And I don’t guess you will ever see how you killed him by it.”

Curley stared at him, uncomprehending, and Abe laughed and said, “My, you are a real worrier, aren’t you?” His voice tightened as he went on. “Well, I know what you want — you want us all to hang for that in Rattlesnake Canyon. Don’t you? You are like a hellfire-and-damnation preacher gone loco on bad whisky. All for a bunch of stinking, murdering greasers that wasn’t worth the lead it cost to burn them down!” He stopped and rubbed a hand across his mouth, and Curley thought of Dad McQuown in one of his fits as he saw the shine of spit in Abe’s beard. “But you were there!” Abe cried. “Shooting and hollering with the rest!”

Then Abe said softly, “Well, I am warning you, Bud.”