Warlock

“I didn’t know him.”

“I guess you have been gone a good while at that.” Carl’s eyes flickered at him, not quite casually, and then away. “Ca

He nodded. His brother Billy had shot Jim Brown. The only letter he had had from Billy during the six months he had been in Rincon had been a strange mixture of brag and apology for having shot a deputy. “Dirty-mouth, bull-ragging son of a bitch,” Billy had written. “He had it coming bad. Everybody says he had it coming. Abe says he’d choose him himself if I didn’t choose him out first, Bud.”

“Come on in and sit,” Carl said, turning and moving into the jail. As he followed Carl inside he read the legend neatly lettered on the square of paper fastened to the adobe beside the door:

2ND DEPUTY WANTED

SEE SCHROEDER

The sign above his head creaked in another gust of wind. Judge Holloway was staring up at him from the shadow inside the jail, his sick face darker, thi

“Well, Bud Ga

“Peter,” he said. “Judge.”

The judge didn’t reply. Peter said, “How’s the telegraphing going, Bud?”

No one had called him “Bud” for a long time now, but the name was as familiar and disagreeable as Warlock’s dust. He felt a silly, apologetic grin cramp his face. “Well, I gave it up,” he said.

“Come back for good, then?” Carl asked, turning toward him. He hitched at his shell belt. “Here or San Pablo, Joh

Ga

Peter bent to his whittling. The judge stared, darkly brooding, at the line of late sunlight that came a little way into the jail. Carl propped a boot up on the chair beside the cell door. “How come you to give it up, Joh

“Laid off,” he said. He could feel their unspoken questions. Although there was no call to answer them, he said, “Fellow I was apprentice to went and died, and they brought in another had his own apprentice.” And he was pretty sure they had brought in another because it was known he had once run with McQuown, which was what Carl and Peter were surmising. But he had said enough, and he watched them both nod, almost in unison, apparently without interest.

Carl turned away from him to gaze at the wall where former deputies of Warlock had scratched their names brown in the whitewash. Carl’s name had been added at the bottom. Above it was WM. CANNING, above that, in big, crooked letters, JAMES BROWN, above that, B. EGSTROM. Higher on the list was ED. SMITHERS, whom Jack Cade had shot in a cruel fuss at the Lucky Dollar. Ga

“Matt Burbage might be needing some hands,” Peter Bacon said, without looking up from his whittling. “Usually comes in town Saturday nights, too.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully. “Well, I guess I’ll go have myself a drink of whisky.” No one volunteered to accompany him. The judge’s fingers drummed on the table top.

“Got ourself a marshal now,” Peter said.

“I heard. Did Peach come around to giving Warlock a town patent?”

Carl shook his head. “No, the Citizens’ Committee hired him.”

“Gunman from Fort James,” Peter said. “Name of Clay Blaisedell.”

Ga

“Not yet,” Carl said, quietly too, his hand rising to pick at the dull five-pointed star limply hanging from his vest, his face, in profile as he still stared at the names on the wall, showing clearly anger and fear, determination and dread.

As Ga

He would look up Matt Burbage tonight, he thought, doggedly. He knew it was useless. He had been one of McQuown’s, and he would have to go back to McQuown, in San Pablo. Once he had thought he was quit of them.

3. THE JAIL

THE sun, misshapen and red, was resting on the jagged spine of the Dinosaurs when Pike Ski

Inside were Judge Holloway and Peter Bacon, Carl Schroeder, leaning back in the chair beside the cell door, with a hand grasping one of the bars to balance himself, and old Owen Parsons, the wheelwright at Ke

Schroeder nodded once, gently let his chair down, and stretched one leg out with a slow, careful motion. “Heard about it,” he said. Then he said, “Bound to come in some time.”

Peter Bacon said, “We was just saying it was none of Carl’s worry.” He bent down to sweep his whittlings into a neat pile between his boots.

“It’s sure none of your put-in, Carl,” Ski

No one looked at Schroeder. At a sound of hoofs and wheels in the street Parsons spat. The spittoon rang deeply. Bacon glanced up at the door, and Ski

Ski

“Blaisedell buggy-riding Miss Jessie again,” he said.

Peter Bacon nodded. “Fine-looking man.”

“Him and Morgan is friendly,” Old Owen Parsons said disapprovingly. “Heard they are partners in the Glass Slipper, and was before in a place in Fort James.”

“Signifies what, if they are?” said Ski

He stood aside as Arnold Mosbie, the freight-line mule ski

“Heard Dechine was in town saying McQuown and them was maybe coming in tonight,” he said, to no one in particular.

Schroeder said nothing. The judge raised his eyes to the round, dented bowl of the lamp suspended above his head. Peter Bacon sighed and said, “What Owen here was saying.”

“Abe’s been a while making up his mind to come,” Mosbie said.

Ski

Parsons spat, rang the spittoon, and jerked his fingers through his tobacco-stained beard. “Morgan is a damned high-rolling son of a bitch.”