Warlock

II

Blaisedell came out of the hotel, and immediately the men began moving back off the boardwalks, into doorways and the ruins of the Glass Slipper and the Lucky Dollar. Blaisedell walked slowly out into the street, and then Blaisedell was facing him, a block away, like some mirror-image of himself seen distant and small, but all in black, and Blaisedell began to walk at the same instant that he did. He could see the slant of Blaisedell’s shell belt through the opening of his unbuttoned coat, and the gold-handled Colt thrust into his belt there. Blaisedell walked with a slow, long-legged stride, while his own star boots felt heavy in the dust. The boots hurt his feet and his wrist brushed past the butt of his Colt with almost an electric shock. He watched the dust spurting from beneath Blaisedell’s boots.

He could see the angry-looking stripes on Blaisedell’s face. He felt Blaisedell’s eyes, not so much a force now as a kind of meaningless message in a buzzing like that of a depressed telegrapher’s key. The sun was very bright in his face, and the figure approaching him began to dance and separate into a number of black-suited advancing figures, and then congeal again into one huge figure that cast a long, oblique shadow.

Then he saw Kate; she stood against the rail before the Glass Slipper, motionless, as though she had been there a long time. She too was dressed all in mourning black, heavily bustled in a black skirt of many folds, a black sacque with lines of fur down the front, her black hat with the cherries on it, black mesh mitts on her hands that gripped the rail. A veil hid her face. He saw her raise her hands to her breast, and he saw Blaisedell glance toward her, and make a curt motion as though he were shaking his head.

Straight down, straight up, Blaisedell had told him; it burst in his mind so there was room for nothing else. He walked steadily on, trying not to limp in his tight boots, and his eyes fixed themselves on Blaisedell’s right hand swinging at his side. He felt the muscles in his own arm tighten and strain at every step. He could feel Blaisedell’s eyes upon him and now he felt their thrust and still the confused buzzing inside his mind. But he watched Blaisedell’s hand; it would be soon. Now, now, now, he thought, at every jolting step; now, now. He felt himself being crushed beneath a black and corrosive despair. Now, he thought; now, now—

It was as though there had been no movement at all. One instant Blaisedell’s hand had been swinging at his side, the next it contained the Colt that had been thrust inside his belt. His own hand slammed down — straight down, straight up — but already he was staring into the black hole of Blaisedell’s gun muzzle and saw Blaisedell’s mouth shaped into a crooked contemptuous half-smile. He steeled himself against the bullet, halting with his feet braced apart and his body tipping forward as though he could brace himself against the shock.

But the shock, the explosion, the tearing pain, did not come. As he brought his own Colt up level, he hesitated, his finger firm against the trigger, and saw Blaisedell’s hand turn with a twisting motion. The gold handle gleamed suddenly as the six-shooter was flung forward and down to disappear in the street with a puff of dust.

Blaisedell’s hand moved swiftly again, and the mate of the first Colt appeared. Again his finger tensed against the trigger and again he held it back as Blaisedell flung the other down. The slight contemptuous smile still twisted Blaisedell’s lips in his battered face. Blaisedell’s arms hung at his sides now, and slowly, uncertainly, he let his own hand drop. His eyes caught another splash of dust, in the street below the railing where Kate stood, her right hand extended and open and her face invisible behind the veil. Blaisedell stood staring at him with his swollen eyes looking shut.

The realization burst in him that all he had to do now was walk the remaining thirty feet and arrest Blaisedell. But he did not move. He would not do it, he thought, in sudden rebellion, as though it were his own thought; but now he was feeling intensely the thrust of all the other eyes that watched this, and it was a force much stronger than that of his own gratitude, his own pity, and he knew all he served that was embodied in the vast weight pi

Blaisedell started forward again, no longer coming toward him but walking along the track of his shadow toward Goodpasture’s corner. He walked with the same, slow, long-legged, stiff-backed stride, not even glancing at Ga

As Ga

Miss Jessie appeared among them, hurrying along the boardwalk with a dark rebozo thrown over her shoulders and her brown hair tumbling around her head with her steps. She stopped with one hand braced against one of the arcade posts, and stared at Kate, and then, blankly, at him.

He heard the pad of hoofs. Blaisedell came out of Southend Street on a black horse with a white face, white stockings; the horse pranced and twisted his sleek neck, but Blaisedell’s pale, stone profile did not turn. The black swung around the corner, and, hindquarters dancing sideways, white stockings brilliant in the sun, trotted away down Main Street toward the rim.

“Clay!” he heard Miss Jessie call. Blaisedell did not turn, who must have heard. Ga

Miss Jessie ran down Main Street in the dust, holding her skirts up; she would run swiftly for a time, then decrease her pace to a walk, then run again. “Clay!” she cried.

Ga

Ga

III

From the rim the great, dun sweep of the valley was laid out before them. There were wild flowers on the slopes from the recent rain. The long dead spears of ocotillo were covered with a thin mist of leaves, and from their ends red flaming torches waved and bowed in the breeze. Someone extended an arm to point out Blaisedell, where he guided the black horse among the huge tumbled boulders of the malpais. He was hidden from time to time among the boulders and each time he reappeared it was a smaller figure on a smaller horse, trailing tan clouds of dust that lingered in the air behind him. They watched in silence as he rode on down the stage road toward San Pablo and the Dinosaurs, until they could not be sure they saw him still at all, he was so distant. Yet now and then the tiny black figure on the black horse would stand out clearly against the golden, flower-speckled earth, until, at last, a dust devil rose in a gust of wind. Rising high and leaning across his path, it seemed to envelop him, and, when it had passed and blown itself apart, Blaisedell too was finally lost to sight.