Oakley Hall - Warlock

“And maybe with a fraud like that one you could win. But this here, now, is the United States of America, and it is my statue of justice that stands for here. You can cross swords with her till you die doing it, and you are always going to lose. Because back of her, standing right there behind her — or maybe pretty far back, like here in the territory — there is all the people. All the people, and when you set yourself against her, you are set against every one of us.”

“Get me out of here, boys,” old McQuown said. “It is too close in here. Let’s get out and bury my son, and then tend to our business.”

“Just a minute now!” Pike Skinner said. “I have heard you threatening Johnny Gannon. That is deputy sheriff in this town. I am warning you there are a deal of people watching for you damned rustlers to start trouble.”

“There surely are,” French said. “You count them when you go out of here.”

“Get me outside, boys!” old McQuown cried. “Get me out of here where I can see some decent faces of my own kind, that’s not all crooked and mean-scared and town-yellow.” The Haggin brothers lifted the pallet, and the old man was borne outside through the men standing in the doorway, who respectfully made a passage for him.

GANNON sat with his chair tilted back against the wall and his boot-tips just touching the floor, pushing the oily rag through the barrel of his Colt with the cleaning rod. He forced it through time after time, and held the muzzle to his eye to peer up the dark mirror-shine of the barrel. He tested the action and placed the piece, awkward with his bandaged hand, in its holster, and looked up to see Pike Skinner watching him with an almost ludicrous grimace of anxiety. The judge sat at his table with his face averted and his whisky bottle cradled against his chest.

Gannon tapped the wounded hand once against his thigh, then shot it for the Colt. His hand wrapped the butt gingerly, his forefinger slipping through the trigger guard as he pulled it free, his thumb joint clamping down on the reluctant cock of the hammer spring. He did not raise it, holding it pointed toward the floor.

“Christ!” Pike said.

It had not been as slow as all that, Gannon thought. He had never been fast, but he could shoot well enough. He felt very strange; he remembered feeling like this when he had had the typhoid and had waked finally with the fever broken. Then, too, all the outer things had seemed removed and unimportant, and as though slowed somehow, so there was much time to examine all that went on around him, and especially any movement seen in its entirety, component by component. Then, as now, there had been a very close connection between the willed act, and the arm, and hand and fingers that were the objects of the will; so that, too, his life and breathing had become conscious acts, and he could almost feel the shape of his beating heart, and watch the slow expansion and collapse of his lungs.

The judge drank, spluttered, and went into a coughing fit. Pike pounded him upon the back until he stopped. “They must be about through burying by now,” Pike said, scowling.

Gannon nodded.

“You just sit, son,” the judge said, in a choked voice. His eyes were watering, and he drank again and wiped his mouth. “You just let them go on out if they see fit, now, you hear?” he said feebly. “There is nothing gained anywhere if you are shot dead.”

“You let us handle them if they are calky,” Pike said. In a placating tone he said, “No, now, not vigilantes either, Johnny. There is Blaisedell down there and no reason for him not to be, and just some of the rest of us around. Now you hear, Johnny?”

“Why, I’m not going to hide in here,” Gannon said, and felt the necessity to grin, and, after it, the grin itself. He looked at the judge, whose face sagged in dark, ugly, bloated lines. “Nothing is gained if I sit it out in here, either.”

“You don’t have to prove anything,” Pike said. “You leave it to us, now. There is some of us got to stand now like we never did for Bill Canning. You leave us that.”

Gannon didn’t answer, for there was no point in arguing it further. Pike said, “They ought to be about through out there. I am going down.” He hitched at his shell belt, loosened his Colt in its holster, gave Gannon another of his confused and accusing glances, and disappeared.

When Pike was gone Gannon took out his own Colt again, and began to replace the heavy, vicious, pleasingly shaped cartridges in the cylinder.

“Blaisedell was right,” the judge said. “He said I would put too much on you and I have done it.”

“You put nothing on me, Judge. There is just a time and a place for a show. You know that.”

“But what place, and what time? Who is to know that?” The judge swung a hand clumsily to try to capture a fly that planed past his head. He contemplated his empty hand with bloodshot eyes, and made a contemptuous sound. “I saw you draw just now, son. Time you got that piece out, Jack Cade or either of the Haggins or any fumble-handed plowboy would have shot you through like a colander and had a drink to celebrate and rode halfway back to San Pablo.” He sighed heavily and said, “I thank you for saying I didn’t put it on you. Are you scared?”

Gannon shrugged. He felt not so much fright as a curious, flat anxiety. He was only afraid that it would be Jack Cade.

“I’m scared for you,” the judge said. “I don’t think you have got a Chinaman’s chance unless you let Pike and the marshal and those give you a chance. You too proud for that?”

“Proud’s nothing to do with it,” he said. It touched him that the judge felt responsible for this. “Well, maybe a little,” he said. “But if a deputy is going to be worth anything he can’t hole up when there is trouble.”

“All men are the same in the end,” the judge said. “Afraider to be thought a coward than afraid to die.”

Gannon rubbed his itching palm on the thigh of his pants, grimacing at the almost pleasant pain. The judge held the bottle up before him and squinted at it.

“Some men drink to warm themselves,” he said. “I drink to cool the brain. I drink to get the people out of it. You are nothing to me, boy. You are only a badge and an office, is all you are. Get yourself killed, it is nothing to me.”

“All right,” he said.

The judge nodded. “Just a process,” he said. “That’s all you are. What are men to me?” He rubbed his hand over his face as though he were trying to scrape his features off. “I told them they had put Blaisedell there, and put him there for the rest of us. I talk, and it makes me puke to hear myself talking. For Blaisedell is a man too. I wish to God I didn’t feel for him, or you, or any man. But do you know what whoever it was that shot down McQuown took away from Blaisedell? Who was it, do you suppose?”

Gannon shook his head.

“What they took away from him,” the judge went on. “Ah, I can’t stand to see what they will make of him. They will turn him into a mad dog in the end. And I can’t stand to see what they will do to you now, just when you—” He drank again. “Whisky used to take the people out of it,” he said, after a long time.

Footsteps came along the planks outside. Buck Slavin appeared in the doorway, carrying a shotgun. Kate entered a step behind him. “They are coming,” Kate said.

Gannon heard it now, the dry, protesting creak of a wagon wheel and the muffled pad of many hoofs in the dust. He got to his feet, and as he did, Buck raised the shotgun and pointed it at him.

“Now, you are not going out there, Deputy,” Buck said patronizingly. “There are people to deal with this. You just sit.”