Oakley Hall - Warlock

There has been talk of nothing else since we returned early this evening. The town is crowded; somehow news of this nature is disseminated instantaneously throughout the valley. We, the delegation, returned full of defense and explanation of our defeat in Bright’s City; what happened to us there is of no interest to anyone.

The feeling among the more intelligent here is that these posters are probably more than a joke, but less than an open declaration of war — that it may be a gambit, a bluff, a theatrical gesture of righteousness. They have certainly done their work in arousing and confirming suspicions over the Curley Burne tragedy. The seeds they may have been intended to broadcast have fallen on rich soil. On the other hand can McQuown afford to make such a bluff if it is to be an empty one? Or is this an attempt to rouse Warlock against Blaisedell so that we ourselves will run him out, thus saving McQuown the trouble and the danger? If so, McQuown has woefully misjudged our tempers.

The miners, I understand, feel this is some trick of MacDonald’s, since MacDonald was the proprietor of the original Regulators. They feel that McQuown may have been won over by MacDonald, but that they, the Medusa strikers, are the actual quarry, and Blaisedell only a ruse.

The town seethes with argument, speculation, and fearful expectation. Yet many in Warlock are eager for a showdown, and, in their minds, this can only satisfactorily be a street duel between Blaisedell and McQuown. McQuown would surely not be such a fool (ah, but I said this of Curley Burne!), and yet McQuown may feel he has some moral advantage now.

There will be a Citizens’ Committee meeting in the morning.

PIKE SKINNER swung into the jail doorway and stopped there, with his red face set into a scowl. Inside, Peter Bacon sat at the table spooning juice from a can of peaches into his mouth, and Tim French sat beside the cell door, just outside the circle of light cast by the lamp. A flat, square, newspaper-wrapped package leaned against the wall.

“Gannon back yet?” Skinner demanded.

“Come and gone,” French said.

“I am deputying tonight,” Bacon said, wiping his mouth with his shirt sleeve. “But I don’t want to hear about any trouble. I am just what you might say sitting here so nobody can look in and see nobody’s sitting here.”

“Where the hell’d he go now?”

“Pablo,” French said.

“Threw us again, did he?” Skinner cried. “Gone down there so’s he can come in with those Regulators—”

“Hold on!” French said.

“You get down on a man he can’t do nothing right, can he?” Bacon said. “He went down there to stop them from coming in here.”

“He told you that, did he?”

“Did,” Bacon said.

“You believed it, huh?”

“Did.”

“There was a time before I didn’t believe him,” French said. “But it looks like I was wrong about it.”

“I still say he was lying in his damned teeth!” Skinner said.

Bacon shrugged. “Well, anyway, I told him I’d sit it out till he got back. Or till somebody brought his poor, shot-up, hacked-on, chewed-to-pieces corpse back to bury.”

“How’s he think he’s going to stop them?” Skinner sneered.

“Didn’t say. He come in blown from riding it down from Bright’s, and when he heard the news he just said he’d better go stop them, and borrowed Tim’s mare and went.” Bacon began spooning peach juice into his mouth again.

Skinner kicked the door jamb. “Buck and them just got back from Bright’s,” he said. “Buck said Johnny got Keller to half-believing what Carl was supposed to’ve told him.”

“Some do,” Bacon said.

“God damn it, Pete; I thought Carl was a friend of yours! God damn it, it played right to McQuown, didn’t it?”

“That don’t make it not so, Pike,” French said.

Skinner shook his head and said, “You mean to say Gannon went down there all by himself to tell them not to come in here?”

“Bound to go he was bound to go by himself, I guess,” Bacon said. He looked at Skinner with his pale eyes.

“Catch me going down there,” Skinner said. He glanced almost furtively down the wall to where the names were scratched in the whitewash. “What’s that wrapped up there?”

“New sign Keller gave him,” Bacon said. He stared down into the empty can. “Would’ve pleased Carl.”

Skinner went over to where the package leaned, picked it up, and stripped off the string and newspaper. The sign was square, with black letters on a white ground within a black border:

WARLOCK JAIL

DEPUTY SHERIFF

Skinner turned it over; it was the same on the reverse. “Nice piece of work,” he said. “The old one’s got so you can’t hardly make it out any more.”

“Looks like we might hang it for Johnny tomorrow,” French said. “While we’re waiting.”

Skinner set the sign back where it had been. “I see Gannon got his name scratched on the wall there,” he said, straightening and turning away.

“He’s deputy,” French said. “Deputies get to set their names down there. Why shouldn’t he?”

“I just noticed he had it down there, was all.”

“You had better quit looking at them names there, Pike,” Bacon said, not quite humorously. “Or they will reach out and grab you one of these times.”

GANNON counted the horses as he reined up before the ranch house — ten, eleven, twelve of them. Light shone out on the glossy sweep of manes and rolling eyewhites. The dogs began to bark down by the horse corral.

In the lamplit windows he could see the shadows of the men. He heard the sour, thin chording of a guitar. A voice was raised in drunken song, and was lost in laughter.

He dismounted slowly, leaden with fatigue. He tethered Tim’s mare to the rail with the others, sighed, hitched on his shell belt, and started up the steps. On the porch he paused to wipe the palms of his hands on his jeans; then with anxious haste he knocked on the door. It swung inward under the pressure of his knuckles, and the voices died. The guitar chorded on for a moment longer; then it too ceased, in a strum of strings.

The faces were all turned toward him, pale and oily-looking in the lamplight. Abe was leaning on the pot-belly stove with his hand gripped around the neck of the whisky jug. Old man McQuown lay on his pallet on the floor. Chet Haggin was slumped, spread-legged, on the buggy-seat sofa beside Joe Lacey, and Wash sat on the floor before them with a crockery cup in his hand. Beyond Abe were Pecos Mitchell, hunched over the guitar, Quint Whitby, with his fat face and cavalry mustaches, the breed Marko cleaning his nails with a knife, Walt Harrison, Ed Greer, Jock Hennessey, and five or six others he did not know — all staring at him. Standing behind Chet was Jack Cade, his round-crowned, leather-banded hat pulled low upon his forehead, his prune of a mouth bent into a disagreeable smile.

“Why, it’s Bud Gannon come back to San Pablo,” Abe said, and put the whisky jug down.

“Bud,” Joe Lacey said. No one else spoke. Mitchell began to strum the guitar again, humming to himself and watching Gannon with an eyebrow cocked in his smallpox-pitted face. The old man hunched himself up on his pallet.

“Well, come on in, Bud,” Abe said. “Don’t stand there acting like you mightn’t be welcome.” He wore a buckskin shirt that reached below his hips and was belted with a concho belt from which hung his knife, in a silver-chased scabbard. He looked drunk, but bright-eyed, keen, young — Abe looked as he had when he had first known him.

“Blaisedell run him out!” the old man said suddenly.