Warlock

“You can come past and pay your respects to the dead,” he said, quietly now.

Several of the miners came hesitantly forward, and Blaisedell moved to the other side of the layout, so that they had to pass between him and Morgan. He stared into each face as the man passed. The others began to fall into line. There was a scrape of boots upon the floor. One of the miners crossed himself.

“Have you got a cross on?” Blaisedell said. The man’s sweating, bearded face paled. He brought from under his shirt a silver crucifix on a greasy cord, which he slipped over his head. Blaisedell took it from him and fixed it upright between Morgan’s hands. The men filed on past the faro layout, under Blaisedell’s eyes, and each glanced in his turn at Morgan’s gri

II

“Where’s Ga

“What’s he doing now?” someone whispered. They stood crushed together upon the boardwalk, but at a distance from the louvre doors.

“Breaking bottles, it sounds like.”

The sound of breaking glass continued, and then they heard furniture being dragged across the floor. There was a wrenching sound of splintering wood. Presently they noticed that there was more light inside.

“Fire,” someone said, in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Fire!” another yelled.

Immediately Blaisedell appeared in the doorway, outlined against the strengthening bluish light. He had the lookout’s shotgun in his hands. “Get back!” he said, and, because they did not comply rapidly enough, shouted viciously, “Get on back!” and raised the shotgun and cocked it. They fled before him off the boardwalk into the street, and down the boardwalk right and left. Flames rose in great blue tongues inside the doors. Blaisedell looked huge, black, and two-dimensional standing against them. The fire crackled inside. Soon it coughed and roared, and red and yellow flames were mingled with the blue.

“Fire!” someone shouted. “Fire! It’s the Lucky Dollar going!” Others took up the cry. Flames licked out through the louvre doors, and Blaisedell moved aside, and, after a while, walked east along the boardwalk, the men there silently giving way before him, and disappeared into the darkness.

66. GANNON TAKES OFF HIS STAR

IN THE jail the flame in the hanging lamp was dim behind the smoky shade. Ga

Ga

“Well, by Christ,” Pike said. “Keller’s lit out of here like the fiends was after him and the judge’s drunk himself to a coma. What’s there for you and me, Pete?”

“Go home and sleep,” Peter said.

“Sleep!” Pike cried. “Jesus Christ, sleep! Did you see his eyes?”

“I saw them,” Peter said.

Pike rubbed a hand over his dirty face. The back of his hand was black with soot. Then Pike turned to face Ga

“Why, I don’t know that it will come to that, Pike,” he said.

Pike glared at him with his ugly red face wild with grief and anger; Peter was watching him too, the chew of tobacco moving slowly in his jaw. He felt the skin at the back of his neck crawl. They were looking at him as though he were going to kill himself.

“You didn’t see his eyes,” Pike said. “Leave him be, for Christ’s sake, Joh

Ga

“And a damned good thing,” Pike said. He resumed his pacing. “It’s what’s wrong,” he said. “A town of buildings is more important than a man is.” The judge groaned and snorted in the cell, in his troubled sleep.

“I hold it poorly on the judge,” Peter said, as bitterly as Ga

“Shit!” Pike Ski

“I thought maybe I’d tell him I wouldn’t come after him till morning. I thought maybe he might go before, then.”

“Joh

He felt a stir of anger; he said, stiffly, “I am deputy here, Pike.”

“He’ll kill you!”

“Maybe he has come to himself already,” Peter said.

“Is he still down there?”

“He was just now.”

Ga

A light burned in the window above Goodpasture’s store. The French Palace was dark. He crossed Southend Street and stepped carefully past the clutter of boards before the Lucky Dollar where a part of the arcade roof had fallen in. He could smell wet ashes now, and smoke, and the stink of char and whisky, and the sweeter, stomach-convulsing odor with them. Further on there were still a few loiterers standing along the railing. Some of them greeted him as he went by. He passed the burnt-out ruin of the Glass Slipper and crossed Broadway. A lamp burned in a second-story window of the hotel. The rocking chairs were dark, low shapes on the veranda. One of them was occupied, and his heart clenched breathless and painful in his chest for a moment, because it was the chair in which Morgan had always sat. But it would be Blaisedell now.

He heard a faint creak as it rocked. He went to the bottom of the veranda steps and halted there, ten feet away from the chairs. He could make out the faint, pale mass of Blaisedell’s face beneath his black hat, the smaller shapes of his pale hands on the chair arms.

“I’m sorry, Blaisedell,” he said, and waited. The face turned toward him, and he could see the gleam of Blaisedell’s eyes. Blaisedell did not speak.

“It is time, Blaisedell,” he said, and he hoped that Blaisedell would remember, but still there was no answer. The rocking chair creaked again. He repeated the words.