Oakley Hall - Warlock

Bud got to his feet and stood, stoop-shouldered, facing Abe. All at once he looked angry. “Warning me what?”

“Why, how Cade knows you have been making talk he was out to backshoot Blaisedell.” Abe swiped at his mouth again, and Curley saw his eyes waver from Bud’s; they would not meet his, either. Then Abe grinned and said, “But maybe Billy will keep him off you, if he doesn’t get hung.”

“Cade must be scared I’ll tell Blaisedell,” Bud said slowly. “Are you, Abe?”

Abe grunted as though he’d been hit in the belly, and snatched for his knife. Curley leaped toward him and caught his wrist. It took all his strength to thrust that steel wrist down, and the knife down, while Abe glared past him at Bud, panting, his teeth bared and beads of sweat on his forehead. “You are to quit this, Abe!” Curley whispered. “I mean right now directly! You are making a damned fool of yourself!” And Abe’s hand relaxed against his. Abe resheathed the knife.

“Because I won’t,” Bud said. “And haven’t. That’s done. You can get out of here now. We have said all we have to say, I guess.”

Abe’s eyes glittered as Curley stepped back away from him. “Why, Bud,” Abe said. “I’ll take almost anything off you, and have today — because we’ve been friends. But I won’t take you telling me to get out.”

“Let’s go get some whisky and get along to Bright’s, Abe,” Curley said. “I mean! I’m not going to hang around here if I’m not wanted.”

“Go, if you want,” Abe said. Footsteps came along the planks outside, a shadow fell in the door. Abe swung around with his hand jerking back.

Pike Skinner came in, and Curley almost laughed with relief. Pike looked uncomfortable in a tight-fitting suit; he wore a new black, broad-brimmed hat and his shell belt under his sack coat. He halted as he saw them, and scowled. His flap ears turned red.

“Well, howdy, Pike,” Curley said. “That is a mighty fine-looking suit of clothes you have got on there.”

“Friends come in to see you, did they?” Pike said to Bud, in a rasping voice.

“Anything wrong with it?” Abe said.

“Yes!” Pike said, his face going as red as his ears. He squinted suddenly as though he had a tic. “Looks like something going on to me. There is two sides clear now, Gannon. You’ve got your pick!”

“You’ve picked, have you?” Abe said. “It was clear enough brother Paul already did.”

“I surely have,” Pike said. He stood with his hands held waist-high, as though he didn’t really want to make a move, but thought he’d better have them handy in case his mouth got away from him.

“Boo!” Curley said, and laughed to see him start.

Pike flushed redder still. He said to Gannon, “If you are with these people, say so. And get out of here. You have got your pick now, and I will—”

“What if I don’t pick?” Bud said.

Pike’s eyes kept moving, watching Abe’s hands, and Curley’s. Curley heard Abe laugh softly. “Nobody sits the rail any more!” Pike said.

Grinning, Curley rested his hands on his shell belt and stretched his shoulders. “Why, give me a good rail to sit for comfort. I will do it every time.”

Bud said nothing, and Curley realized that Bud could have made to please Pike, who was on the Citizens’ Committee, and decent enough for a townsman, by repeating the order to get out. Bud didn’t, and he respected him for it. Bud looked as though he didn’t give a good God damn about anything right now.

“Let’s move along, Abe. I can’t stand this being picked against. Hurts my feelings.”

“Going to Bright’s City, Pike?” Abe asked.

“God-damned right I am!”

“See you there.” Abe moved sideways toward the door. “See you, Bud,” he said. “See you when we all hang together.”

Abe went on out. Curley tipped his hat back onto his head, saluted Pike, and followed Abe out. He didn’t look at Bud. Silently he walked back along the boardwalk beside Abe.

“Let’s get riding to Bright’s,” Abe said in a stifled voice. “I hate this rotten town.”

“Sure is down on you,” he said. He felt for Abe. It was hard when everybody turned against you. It would be hard on any man, but it was a terrible thing on Abe.

“Sons of dirty whore bitches,” Abe said. “Damn them to burning hell and Bud Gannon the first of them!”

Reluctantly Curley said, “Abe, you shouldn’t have gone at him so. He is a cold one and no mistake, and I couldn’t see it the way he does and ever look at myself shaving again, but—” He broke off as Abe halted and swung toward him. Abe’s face was fierce again, his eyes like green ice. “—but you have got to hand it to a man that’s doing what he thinks is right,” he went on, staring straight back. “Whatever.”

“I’ll hand him what he handed me,” Abe said. “Which is shit.”

“Abe—” he started again, but Abe moved off across the street toward Goodpasture’s store. Following him, he felt a dull anguish, for Abe, for Bud, for everyone. He wondered how everything had got so messed up; worse, it seemed, all the time. Maybe it was Blaisedell after all.

He glanced down toward where Mosbie stood. He and Mosbie had drunk together many a time; now he felt the anguish sharpen to see the carefully blank expression on Mosbie’s face, and the same expressions on the faces of the other men watching. Why, they all hated Abe, he thought; and they hated him, too.

As he followed Abe through the dust to Goodpasture’s corner, and then down the boardwalk toward the Acme Corral, he felt anger begin to stir in him, and a retaliation of hate. What had done it to them all, he wondered? It must, he thought again, have been Blaisedell, after all.

February 1, 1881

THE latest bag of road agents has been acquitted by a Bright’s City jury. There is high feeling here, and those who journeyed to Bright’s City to give evidence or as spectators are exceedingly violent in their anger against judge, jury, lawyers, Bright’s City in general, and Abraham McQuown in particular. Since Benner was the only bandit positively identified by his victims, the defense mounted the outrageous presumption that the other two were consequently innocent, and, that since both of these swore that Benner had been with them all day and that they had engaged in no crimes whatsoever, then Benner was also innocent. The witnesses who identified Benner were tricked into admitting that the main factor in their identification was his small stature, which was made to seem ridiculous. The posse itself, it was claimed, was responsible for Phlater’s death, since it had begun firing wildly at the “innocent cowboys” as soon as they were within range, and the Cowboys plainly could not be blamed for defending themselves from such a vicious assault. It was implied even further that the whole affair was staged by “certain parties,” and the strongbox carefully disposed where it would implicate the poor Cowboys most foully.

It is said that the prosecution was pursued with less than diligence. It is also said that judge and jury were bribed, and that the courtroom was crowded with McQuown’s men brandishing six-shooters and muttering threats. Along the way my credulity begins to fail, amongst all this evidence of perfidy, but the fact remains that the three men have been freed. They rode through here yesterday on their way back to San Pablo. They encountered a sullen and most unfriendly Warlock, and had sense enough not to linger here in their triumph.

I think next time it may be very difficult to discourage a lynching party from its objective.

Still, certain good has come out of the affair. Public opinion, as it did when our poor barber was killed and Deputy Canning driven out of town, has again congealed, so that the Citizens’ Committee feels itself in not so exposed and arbitrary a position in trying to administer some kind of law in Warlock.