Oakley Hall - Warlock

“What did he want here, Sheriff?” Goodpasture asked.

The sheriff leaned back in his chair, his face crinkling with amusement. “Why, he didn’t really want to resign. He was just trying to blackguard me with it. He wanted four more deputies down there. Four!” He held up four fat fingers. Well, he’s young, but he is all right. I promised him if he’d wait over a day or so, I’d get him a new sign made for that jail down there, though.”

“That will be an improvement,” Goodpasture said.

“Now, see here, Sheriff!” Slavin said heatedly, and then he stopped and sighed.

Keller sat rubbing his red-veined nose and glancing from face to face again. “You gentlemen ought to try to get on with your deputies down there. Down on him, are you? Well, let me tell you. Either he went and lied to get Curley Burne off, or else he didn’t lie. You gentlemen know for sure he went and lied?”

“Everybody knows he lied,” Slavin said.

“Well, now, I meant proof, Mr. Slavin. No, now, you don’t know for sure. You have got to look at it this way, anyhow. I mean, say he did lie; what’re you going to do if a man lies for an old partner of his? You’d do it; maybe I’d do it, though I won’t admit it straight out. I mean, that is a poor place to be down there, terrible bad pay, and a man doesn’t live long enough to take much of it home, either. Look at poor old Carl. And he lasted a coon’s age compared with most. I mean, you have got to give a man with a job like that a little leeway.”

“There’s another way of looking at it, too,” Hart said. “Burne probably would have gone free anyway if he’d come up here to trial.”

The prisoners broke out laughing. Keller scowled and scratched his nose. “Well, now!” he said. “You know what the man said when he saw the black-headed Swede, don’t you? That’s a Norse of a different color!” He roared with laughter, amid a further chorus from the cell. The delegation from Warlock looked at each other despairingly.

Then Keller’s face assumed a serious expression, and he said, “Well, now, about McQuown’s boys getting off up here. I might doubt it some. Things’ve gone and changed in people’s eyes up here a little. I don’t expect no jury here is going to let those Pablo ’cases run quite so pecker-up any more. What I mean — it looks like Abe’s just about run his string. People used to take a fright you just creep up behind them and whisper ‘ McQuown! ’ It’s not so any more, not with Clay Blaisedell salting his tail for him and lopping his gun hands off like he is doing. It is like when the old general got after Espirato and made him run for cover.”

Hart said, “You make it sound almost safe enough for you to come down and be a proper sheriff, Sheriff.”

“Now it is not going to do any good for you to get insulting, Mr. Hart. I swear, you people come up here and play me the same tune every time, and all I can tell you is just any day now there is going to be a separate county set up down there. Peach County, I expect it’ll be called. You will have your own sheriff to pick at then. I was talking to Whiteside just last week, and he was saying any day now that—”

“I do hate to remind you, Sheriff,” Goodpasture said. “But it has been any day now for over a year.”

“Two years,” Hart said.

“Well, it is any day now for sure. I’d put money on it — not more than a month, for sure.”

“Bellywash!” Slavin cried. “I’ll tell you this, Keller. If we don’t get some satisfaction from you this time, we will see Peach himself!”

“See him!” Keller said, smiling, nodding. “Do that.”

“And if we don’t get any satisfaction from him we will by God go to Washington, if we have to!”

“Go,” Keller said. “You will probably have to. I’d sure like to go back there myself. I hear it is pleasant this time of year, back there.”

“We are asking for your help, Sheriff,” Goodpasture said. “The situation in Warlock is much more difficult than you realize.”

Keller’s eyes flickered a little. He hunkered forward in his chair, and spread his hands. “But what would you want me to do, Mr. Goodpasture? I mean! I’d be all my time riding back and forth between here and Warlock, and I am too old for that foolishness. And don’t mind saying I am scared. Mr. Goodpasture, I just don’t claim to be anything I’m not. I run for sheriff here, surely, but to my mind this county stops at the Bucksaws there and that is all I run for. That is so, now; you know I didn’t come down there beforehand, either. Now, I like this big belly here as it is and not all shot full of holes. Like Carl, and that feller Brown and how many others before that? I am not sheriff down there, that’s all. If it was put to me hard I had to be, why, I’d quit. What’s the matter with Blaisedell all of a sudden you are so dissatisfied again? Sounds from here like everything is going nice as pie.”

Will Hart said, “It has not worked out, Sheriff. He has had to kill too many men.”

“Why, my stars! You fellows aren’t shedding tears for those rustlers he is popping off, are you?”

“Sheriff,” Goodpasture said. “He has no authority. And we had none when we hired him. He and the Citizens’ Committee have had to take too much upon themselves.”

“It looks from here like it is going nicely. He has got McQuown tramped down and Pablo thinned out some. Those cowboys will stop getting their fingers burnt pretty quick, and settle down. I will give you gentlemen the same advice I gave Gannon. Let Blaisedell work it out. There is no better man nowhere, from what I have heard. I told Gannon to quit worrying, and you too. The time to worry’s when things is in bad shape, not—”

“They are in bad shape,” Hart said.

“You are an officer of the court!” Slavin cried.

“Not down there.”

Hart said, “Well, maybe if we had three or four more deputies, as Gannon suggested—”

Keller shook his head. “You would have to collect taxes down there to have your three or four, and that would take a dozen. And fighting men! Now, maybe you gentlemen wouldn’t mind paying taxes, and maybe Mr. Slavin wouldn’t even mind having it run into his franchise about transporting prisoners up here, but you gentlemen ought to know those ranchers down that way never even heard of taxes. They’d think a tax collector was a road agent! Why, it’d take Peach and the whole shooting match from the fort to collect taxes down there. All that for some deputies? Why, Blaisedell is serving you better than ten deputies could in a month of Sundays. Now, isn’t that so, Mr. Goodpasture?”

“Blaisedell is a very fine man,” Goodpasture said. “We have had no cause to be anything but highly satisfied with him. It is a matter of authority. We are in a position of ordering him to kill men. We are in a position of trying to administer severe laws that do not exist, when the responsibility is yours.”

“No, sir! It is not mine either. No, sir, you just take all the authority you need.”

Goodpasture sighed and said, “And the kind of thing that Blaisedell can deal with is necessarily limited. You should be able to understand that.”

“You mean those Cousin Jacks running wild and tearing things up? MacDonald was up here complaining about that just lately, but I thought you people had worked up some sort of regulation committee to deal with those wild men.”

“MacDonald has,” Hart said. “Please don’t connect us with that pack of mongrels.”

“I thought it was a Citizens’ Committee thing,” Keller said. “So did everybody. Well, it goes to show you.”

“Say!” one of the prisoners called. “Does it look like McQuown is going to make a play against Blaisedell? There is betting here he won’t.”