Oakley Hall - Warlock

Petrix asked Blaisedell, who had been showing signs of wishing to speak, if he desired the floor. Blaisedell replied that he would like to answer some of the things the Judge had had to say. As he spoke I saw Miss Jessie watching him with her great eyes, tugging a little handkerchief between her hands, and if ever I saw a woman’s heart in her eyes I saw it then.

Blaisedell’s face was very stern as he proceeded upon a track that surprised us. He said that he thought it would be a shame to put too much on the Deputy too soon. He said a new horse should not be racked too hard. “You will bust him to running, or kill him, putting too much on him,” he said, to the Judge. And he said, “He has stood up to every man here calling him a liar when he was not, but I don’t think he is able yet to stand off a wild bunch from San Pablo.”

He went on in this vein. But after we had grasped the fact that he believed that Gannon had not lied, and seemed to favor him — even though he did not feel he was qualified to stop McQuown yet — our comprehension of what he was saying ceased and we stared at him in confusion. I saw Buck Slavin’s jaw hanging open like that of a dull-witted boy, and Pike Skinner’s face grow fiery red. Miss Jessie had put her handkerchief to her mouth, and her eyes were round as dollars.

“Gentlemen,” Blaisedell said. “I have done some service here and I think you know it. But I think a good many of you are beginning to wish I would move along, and not just Mr. Hart.” He smiled a little then. “I had better, before you all start thinking of me like the Judge here does.”

Skinner and Sam Brown protested emotionally, as did Buck, but Blaisedell only smiled and went on to thank the Citizens’ Committee for having paid him well, and backed him as well as he could have wished. “But,” he said, “there is value in knowing when to move on. For the Judge is right in more ways than one, though I have argued with him and got as mad at him as the rest of you do.”

Blaisedell said, however, that he had one thing which he would ask of us. “I will ask you to let me handle McQuown and his Regulators my own way.” He said this in such a way that it was clearly a command for us to stay out of his affair. “It is my job,” he went on. “And he is coming after me, so it is my job two ways. If there are going to be Vigilantes I’ll ask that they stay out of it unless I go down.” He looked straight at MacDonald and said, “For I have been known to go down.”

There was a general gasp as it was realized that Blaisedell meant to stand alone, or perhaps only with Morgan, against the San Pabloites. A storm of exclamations and protests broke out, to which Blaisedell did not even attempt to reply, while Petrix exercised his gavel violently.

It was at this moment that Gannon made his entrance. He was freshly shaven, his hair neatly combed, but his upper lip was bruised and swollen and his face was drawn with exhaustion. I noticed that his right hand was bound up in a white cloth. He said, in a truculent tone, that there would be no Vigilantes in Warlock.

We were all as shocked at the arrogance of his first words as we had been at the implication of Blaisedell’s last ones. I had the impression, however, that Gannon had been steeling and rehearsing himself to his statement for some time, and was prepared, too, for a violent response to it. When there was none he seemed suddenly timid in our august presence.

In a more reasonable voice he said that he was sorry to butt in upon us, but that he had heard the Citizens’ Committee intended to form a Vigilante Troop, and he had come to inform us that there would be none of that in Warlock.

Jed Rolfe asked him if those had been his orders from McQuown.

Gannon replied without heat that he did not take orders from McQuown. Neither did he take them from the Citizens’ Committee. He had just come back from San Pablo, he said, whence he had ridden to tell McQuown there would be no Regulators. He was now telling us there would be no Vigilantes either. I felt a certain respect for the fellow then, thinking that he must not have pleased McQuown any more than he was pleasing us.

Skinner sneered that he would bet Gannon had scared McQuown out of his foolishness, and it was certainly nice that Warlock, and Blaisedell, had nothing to worry about. At this Gannon looked childishly angered and hurt. He said, however, that if McQuown did come in he would deputize whoever was needed to meet him, and reiterated his statement that there were to be no Vigilantes. I noticed that he studiously avoided Blaisedell’s eye.

Joe Kennon cried out that no one trusted Gannon enough to be deputized by him, to which Gannon replied that whoever he deputized would be deputized or go to Bright’s City to explain why not to the court. This exchange was followed by other angry statements, until Blaisedell interceded to say that it was his part to make a play against McQuown and whoever came in with him. “It is against me,” he said. “So it is me against them, Deputy.”

He spoke in a firm voice, and Gannon blanched noticeably. He stood still not facing Blaisedell, with his bandaged hand upon the counter and his forehead creased with what must have been painful thought. To our surprise he shook his head with determination.

“If it was just you against McQuown, I would keep out, Marshal,” he said. “I can’t when it is the whole bunch coming in and calling themselves Regulators.”

“Yes, you can,” Blaisedell said. It did not seem to me he said it particularly threateningly, but he drew himself up to his full height as he looked down at the Deputy.

Gannon, however, stood his ground. He said in an emotional voice, “I have told McQuown he is not to come in here with those people. I told him I will stop him if he does. I mean to stop them.”

With that he swung around to depart, and, although we waited breathlessly for Blaisedell’s reply, he made none. It was the Judge who broke the silence. “Hear! Hear!” he cried, in obnoxious triumph. His voice was drowned in the ensuing outcry, and Gannon was verbally flayed, drawn and quartered, and otherwise disposed of.

In the end, however, nothing was done about the Vigilance Committee.

April 19, 1881

I will confess that for a time I subscribed to a higher opinion of our Deputy than I had previously held. That was yesterday. Today the mercury of my esteem has sunk quite out of sight, for Gannon, in claiming he would stop McQuown from coming into Warlock, has perpetrated one of the most monstrous, grotesque, and completely senseless frauds of which I have ever heard.

Gannon is, in short, accused of murder. McQuown will not bring his Regulators into Warlock because he is dead, shot in the back, and Gannon is named by a host of witnesses as his murderer.

The Regulators have, indeed, arrived, but not in that role. They are pall-bearers, and Abraham McQuown is their charge. The story I have from Joe Lacey, who swears he was witness to it all.

As he informed the Citizens’ Committee yesterday, Gannon had ridden down to San Pablo the night before. He accosted the Regulators, who were gathered at McQuown’s, with the same brusquerie he showed the Citizens’ Committee at the bank. Hot words passed, and shortly, Lacey claims, Gannon drew his six-shooter on McQuown. Here I become a little dubious as to whether I am hearing the whole story, since drawing upon McQuown in the bosom of his friends sounds an act of incredible asininity. Be that as it may, McQuown then closed and tussled with Gannon, and, defending himself, stabbed Gannon through the hand, which accounts for the bandage we saw yesterday. Gannon was then allowed to depart, which he did ungraciously, calling back that he and Blaisedell would “get even.”

Lacey claims he thought Gannon might still be skulking about, for the dogs, which were locked up, had started barking when he first left the ranch house and were never entirely quiet thereafter, as though sensing a sinister presence. About an hour later the door was flung open and Gannon fired upon McQuown, who was standing with his back to the door, killing him instantly. He then fled, but not before he was recognized by old Ike McQuown, Whitby, and several others.