55. JUDGE HOLLOWAY

IN THE jail Judge Holloway sat at the table with his arms crossed on his chest and his whisky bottle before him, his crutch leaning against his chair. Mosbie sat with his hat tipped forward over his eyes. In the cell a Mexican snored upon the floor, and Jack Jameson, from Bowen’s Sawmill, waited out his twenty-four hours looking through the bars. Peter Bacon whittled on a crooked stick in his chair beside the alley door.

Pike Skinner, standing with his hands on his hips, turned as Buck Slavin came into the doorway. Slavin was in his shirtsleeves and wore a bed-of-flowers vest with a gold watch chain across it.

“Where is the deputy?” Slavin demanded.

“Rid out somewhere,” Bacon said, without looking up from his whittling.

“Run with his tail between his legs,” Jack Jameson said, from the cell. Everyone looked at him, and he winked dramatically, stooping to thrust his narrow, lantern-jawed face between the bars. “Run from the pure hypocritter of it,” he said. “To see a man hoicked in the lock-up for drunk and disorderly by a judge with a whisky bottle tied on his face.”

“You will have another twenty-four hours for contempt before you are through,” the judge said mildly.

“Scaring all those poor girls at the French Palace with a mean old six-shooter,” Mosbie said. “You ought to be ashamed, Jack.”

“’Twasn’t any six-shooter that scared them,” Jameson said. “It was a dommed big gatling gun. By God, what’s things come to when a man hasn’t seen hide nor hair of a woman for two months and comes busting into town for it, and then has to spend the night with a puking dommed greaser.”

“Rode out where?” Slavin said.

“What’s fretting you?” Skinner said. “Somebody pop another stage?”

“They’ve popped enough, and I’m sick of it. It’s God-damn time Gannon got out of town and did something about it!”

“Tell it to him to his face!” Skinner said angrily.

“I’ve told him to his face! I’ve told him he doesn’t earn his keep here. He thinks he did his job forever, shooting Wash Haggin!”

The judge sighed and said, “Buck, let me tell you the sad, sad facts of life. There will be no justice for you or for those poor ranchers weeping over their lost stock, without cash paid on the barrelhead for it. You wail and gnash your teeth for policing, but are you willing to pay for it yet? Are those ranchers I hear screaming down there willing yet? How much louder will they wail and gnash when they see the tax collector coming? Let me tell you, Buck; the deputy is doing his job exactly right. Those Philistines down there are going to be cleaned out when the sheriff is forced to do it, and that will be when the bellyaching gets so loud it hurts General Peach’s ears.”

“Seven stages thrown down on since McQuown got killed!” Slavin said. “When McQuown was—”

“McQuown!” Mosbie broke in, and, in a rasping voice, he cursed McQuown at length.

Jameson said, “By God if it don’t look like everybody is escared of old Abe yet.”

“Let him stay buried,” Bacon said gloomily. “If he gets dug up he will stink to heaven.”

“Morgan’ll stink,” Slavin said.

Skinner said uncomfortably, “I just don’t see how everybody got so certain all at once it was Morgan did it.”

“Johnny rode out to see Charlie Leagle,” Bacon said.

“He supposed to’ve seen Morgan?” Slavin asked, and Bacon nodded.

“Supposed to be more than Leagle saw him,” Mosbie said.

Skinner paced the floor with his hands locked behind his back. He glared at the names scratched on the wall; he swung around and glared at the judge, who had picked up the whisky bottle. “Well, tell us about it, you righteous old son of a bitch!” Skinner cried. “I remember how you used to blister Carl, and you are blistering kind of different lately. Tell us how Johnny has to go after Morgan if it looks like Morgan was the one! Tell us how Johnny has to yank Tittle out of Miss Jessie’s place under Blaisedell’s nose, if a warrant comes down. I saw you charging down to get him out of dutch with Blaisedell like you was trying to bust the pole-vault champeenship, you damned drunken fraud. Come on, tell us, Judge! You won’t, will you? You are as sick as any man here, that used to preach at us till it came out our ears. Let’s hear you preach now!”

The judge tipped his whisky bottle to his lips and drank.

“Has to pour whisky in itself before it can talk,” Jameson commented.

“Shut up!” Skinner said. He leaned back against the wall with his arms folded.

But the judge did not speak, and Mosbie said, “Surely Johnny has got sense enough not to buck up against Blaisedell.”

“Hasn’t,” Skinner said, “is the trouble.” He glared at the judge. “Well, what do you say? Preach us about how he is only doing his damned duty!”

The judge nodded, and glanced up at Skinner from under his eyebrows.

“I noticed you stopping him from it the other day fast enough.”

“Wheels within wheels,” the judge said.

Skinner snorted. He swung around to face Slavin. “And you’d like to see him kiting off down valley so they could snipe him off from behind some rock. I suppose you can’t see around a Concord far enough to see it is just what they want him to do.”

“What they are doing,” Bacon said. “They are using McQuown getting killed for an excuse for hell-roaring all over the place. So I expect Johnny figures maybe he can quiet them by sticking who did it.”

“Which is Morgan,” Mosbie said.

“It’s a cleft stick for you,” Bacon said, and shook his head.

“It is a cleft stick for Johnny Gannon,” Skinner said. “Well, what do you say now?” he said to the judge. “Maybe you like all this?”

“No,” the judge said thickly. “I don’t like it, and don’t you scorn me, you great lumbering lout! I wasn’t liking it before you ever saw it.”

“Say Morgan did it,” Mosbie said, in his rasping voice. “Say he did and he is a dirty dog, and I won’t deny it. But he is Blaisedell’s friend, and I say this town owes Blaisedell one or two things, or two hundred — what he has done here. I say we can give him Morgan.”

“Blaisedell has to go,” Slavin said firmly. “Not just because of the friends he picks, either.”

“Buck!” Mosbie said. “I want to hear you say out loud that Blaisedell has done no good here. I want to hear you say it.”

“Why, I don’t deny he has, fellows,” Slavin said. “Nobody does. It is just time for him to move on, and mostly it is time because of Morgan.”

“Tell you what you do, Buck,” Skinner said. “Next meeting you make a motion he is to post Morgan out. Since you are starting to speak up so bold.”

Slavin stood there biting his lip and frowning. “One thing,” he said. “One thing I have got against Blaisedell that isn’t Morgan. He makes people take sides hard against him or for him. He makes bad contention.” He nodded to the others, turned, and departed.

“Well, I am for the marshal,” Bacon said sadly. “But it certainly makes a man sick and tired — and makes him think. How Johnny is coming against him. Want it or not, looks like.”

“Johnny can go his way and Blaisedell his,” Skinner said. “I can’t see why they can’t go along and not scratch each other. Blaisedell has never made a move to set himself against Johnny. Not one!”

“I guess Johnny hasn’t gone and made any move against Blaisedell, for that,” Bacon said. “I guess it just looks like he is going to have to, one of these days.”

“Over Morgan,” Mosbie said.

“You boys are starting to make me feel real sorrowful over the deputy,” Jameson said. “It looks like he is in dommed bad shape.”

They all watched a fly circling in flat, eccentric planes over the judge’s head. The judge waved it away. “It is the awkward time,” he said. “It is where this town don’t know yet whether it still needs a daddy to protect it, or not.”