“You don’t have to kick your daddy in the face when you have got your growth,” Bacon said.

Jameson said, “You know what my old dad did to me once? I—”

“Shut up!” Skinner yelled at him.

Mosbie stirred in his chair. “There’s some things I wish I knew about Johnny,” he said. “I wish I knew how he felt about it when Blaisedell shot Billy. I wouldn’t want to think—”

“He don’t hold it against Blaisedell,” Skinner said. “I can say that for sure.”

Mosbie nodded.

Then Bacon spoke. “Man doesn’t like to talk about him when he is not here,” he said, in an embarrassed voice. “But there’s something been bothering me too I’d better speak up about. Maybe somebody can—” He paused, and his wrinkled face turned pink. “Well, that Kate Dollar he is seeing pretty good. There is that talk how she is down on Blaisedell, and why, from Fort James. And Johnny seeing so much of her, you know.”

“Set Johnny against the marshal, you think?” Skinner said worriedly. He began to shake his head. “I don’t think—”

The judge slapped the palm of his hand down on the table. “If you boys would accept my judgment,” he said. “I would say that Johnny Gannon wouldn’t do anything any of you wouldn’t, nor hold to a reason you wouldn’t. And I would say he is more honest with himself than most, too.”

Skinner was scowling. “Only—” he said, in a husky voice. “Only, God damn it to hell, if it comes to it, and pray God it don’t, Blaisedell is the one I would have to side with. Because—”

“That’s where you are wrong,” the judge broke in. “Thinking you can put it so you are choosing between two men.”

“Well, Judge,” Skinner said. “Maybe us poor, simple, stupid common folks has to look at it that way. Us that sees more trees than forest.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” the judge said. He let his head hang forward; he gripped the neck of his whisky bottle. “But maybe you have to see by now that the deputy here is only doing what the deputy here is going to have to do.”

Skinner’s red gargoyle’s face grew redder still, and deep corrugations showed in his forehead. He took a deep breath. Then he shouted, “Yes, I can see it! But damned if I want to!” He swung around and stamped out the door.

“He’s one for getting upset,” Jameson commented. “That one.”

“You know what I get to thinking about?” Bacon said. “I get to thinking back on the old days in Texas droving cattle up to the railroad. Didn’t own a thing in the world but the clothes I had on and the saddle I sat. So nothing to worry about, and nothing but hard work day in and day out sort of purifies a man. No forests there,” he said, smiling faintly at the judge. “It is the forests that wear a man down dead inside, Judge.”

“It is the lot of the human race,” the judge said. He raised his bottle and shook it. Staring at the bottle he said, “And it is terrible past the standing of it. But I have here the universal solvent. For wine is the color of blood and the texture of tears, and you can drink it to warm your belly and piss it out to get rid of it. And forget the whole damned mess that is too much for any man to face.”

“That’s not wine,” Jameson said. “That’s raw whisky.”

The judge looked at him with a bleared eye. “I will sleep in a cask of raw whisky,” he went on. “Wake me up and pump me out when everyone is dead.” His voice shook, and his hand shook, holding the bottle. “What are deputies to me?” he said hoarsely. “Deputies or marshals. They are nothing, and I will not be a hypocrite to sentimentality when I can drink myself above it all. Wake me up when they have killed each other off! Miner and superintendent, vigilante and regulator, deputy and marshal. They are as dead leaves falling and nothing to me. Nothing!” he shouted. He banged the whisky bottle down on the table top, raising it high and crashing it down again, his face twisting and twitching in drunken horror. “Nothing!” he shouted. “Nothing! Nothing!”

They watched him in awe at his grief, as he continued to cry “Nothing!” and bang the bottle. The Mexican’s swollen, sleepy face appeared, a square below and to the right of that of Jameson, who whispered, “Listen to the dommed old bastard go!”

56. MORGAN LOOKS AT THE CARDS

I

SITTING in the cane-bottomed rocker in the shade on the hotel veranda, Morgan sat watching Warlock in the morning. There were not many people on the street: a prospector with a beard like a bird’s nest sat on the bench before the Assay Office; a white-aproned barkeep swept the boardwalk before the Billiard Parlor; a Cross-Bit wagon was pulled up alongside the Feed and Grain Barn, and Wheeler and a Mexican carried out plump bags which one of Burbage’s sons stacked into the wagon-bed. To the southwest the Dinosaurs shimmered in the sun. They seemed very close in the clear air, but improbably jagged and the shadows sharply cut, so that they had a painted look, like a fanciful theater backdrop. The Bucksaws, nearer, were smooth and brown, and he watched a wagon train mounting the circuitous road to the Sister Fan mine.

He stretched hugely, sighed hugely. Inside the dining room behind him he could hear the tinny clink and clatter of dishes and cutlery; it was a pleasant sound. He watched Mrs. Egan bustling down Broadway with her market basket, neat and crisp in starched light-blue gingham, her face hidden in a scoop bonnet. He could tell from the way she carried herself that she was daring any man to make a remark to her.

He smiled, strangely moved by the fresh, light color of her dress. He had found himself thus susceptible to colors for the last several days. He had admired the smooth, dark, smoked tan of the burnt-out Glass Slipper yesterday, and the velvet sudden black of the charred timbers in it. Now on the faded front of the Billiard Parlor, where Sam Brown had taken his sign down to have it repainted, there was a rectangle of yellow where the paint had been hidden from the sun; yellow was a fine color. He had begun remembering colors, too; in his mind’s eye he could see very vividly the color of the grass in the meadows of North Carolina, and the variety of colors of the trees in autumn — a thousand different shades; he remembered, too, the trees in Louisiana, the sleek, warm, blackish, glistening green of the trunks after it had rained and the sun had come out; and the trees in Wyoming after an ice storm in the sun, when all the world was made of crystal, and all seemed fragile and still; and he remembered the sudden red slashes of earth in west Texas where the dull plains began to turn into desert country.

“Pardon me if I take this other chair here, sir.” It was the drummer who had come to town yesterday, and had the room across the hall from his. He sat down. He wore a hard-hat, and a tight, cheap, checked suit. He was smooth-shaven, with heavy, pink dewlaps.

“Fine morning,” the drummer said heartily, and offered him a cigar, which he took, smelled, and flung out into the dust of the street. He took one of his own from his breast pocket, and turned and stared the drummer in the eye until he lit it for him.

“I wonder if you could point out Blaisedell for me, if he comes by,” the drummer said, not so heartily. “I’ve never been in Warlock before and we’ve heard so much of Blaisedell. I swore to Sally — that’s my wife — I’d be sure I saw Blaisedell so I could tell her—”

“Blaisedell?”

“Yes, sir, the gunman,” the drummer said. He lisped a little. “The fellow that runs things here. That killed all those outlaws in the corral there by the stage depot. I stopped in there yesterday when I got in for a look around.”

“Blaisedell doesn’t run things here.” He stared the drummer in the eye again. “I do.”

The drummer looked as though he were sucking on the inside of his mouth.

“You can tell your wife Sally you saw Tom Morgan,” he said. He felt pleased, watching the fright in the drummer’s face, but his stomach contracted almost in a cramp. He flicked his cigar toward the drummer’s checked trousers. “Don’t go around here saying Clay Blaisedell runs Warlock.”