“Yes, sir,” the drummer whispered.

The water wagon passed on Broadway, Bacon sitting hunched on the seat, his whip nodding over the team. The rust on the tank shone red with spilled water. The red of rust was a fine color. When the water wagon had passed he saw Gannon coming toward him under the arcade.

“Get out of here,” he said to the drummer. “Here comes another one that thinks he runs Warlock.”

The drummer rose and fled; Morgan laughed to hear the clatter of his boots diminishing, watching Gannon coming on across Broadway. The sun caught the star on his vest in a momentarily brilliant shard of light. He came on up on the veranda and sat down in the chair the drummer had vacated.

“Morning, Morgan,” he said, and nervously rubbed his bandaged hand upon his leg.

“Is, isn’t it?” He crossed his legs and yawned.

Gannon was frowning. “Going to be hot,” he said, as though he had just thought it out.

“Good bet.” He nodded and looked sideways at Gannon’s lean, strained face, his bent nose and hollow cheeks. He touched a finger gently to his own cheek, waiting for Gannon to get his nerve up.

“I’ve found two of them saw you coming back,” Gannon said finally, “the morning after McQuown was killed.”

He didn’t say anything. He flicked the gray ash from his cigar.

“I heard you when you went by me,” Gannon said, staring straight ahead. “Off to the east of me a way. I couldn’t say I saw you, though.”

“No?”

“I’d like to know why you did it,” Gannon said, almost as though he were asking a favor.

“Did what?”

Gannon sighed, grimaced, rubbed the palm of his hand on his leg. The butt of his Colt hung out, lop-eared, past the seat of his chair; if he wanted to draw it he would have to fight the chair like a boa constrictor. “I think I know why,” he went on. “But it would sound pretty silly in court.”

“Just leave it alone, Deputy,” Morgan said gently.

Gannon looked at him. One of his eyes was larger than the other, or, rather, differently shaped, and his nose looked like something that had been chewed out of hard wood with a dull knife. It was, in fact, very like the face of one of those rude Christos carved by a Mexican Indio with more passion than talent. It was a face only a mother could love, or Kate.

“Deputy,” he said. “You don’t hold any cards. You found two men that saw me riding into town, but I know, and you know, that as much as those people down the valley would be pleased if it turned out I had shot McQuown, they have jerked the carpet out from underneath it by all of them swearing up and down it was you that did it. They can’t do anything but make damned fools of themselves, and you can’t. So just sit back out of the game and rest while the people that have the cards play this one out. It is none of your business.”

“It is my business,” Gannon said.

“It is not. It’s something so far off from you you will only hear it go by. Off to the east a way. You probably won’t even hear it.”

They sat in silence for a while. He rocked. Finally Gannon said, “You leaving here, Morgan?”

He gazed at the bright yellow patch over the Billiard Parlor. “One of these days,” he said. “A few things to tend to first. Like seeing to a thing for Kate.”

He waited, but Gannon didn’t ask what it was, which was polite of him. So he said, “She thinks you are about to choose Clay out. I promised I’d watch over you like a baby.”

Gannon cleared his throat. “Why would you do that?”

Why, for one thing, he thought, because I saw you get that hand punctured by a hammer pin one night; but aloud he said, “You mean why would I do it for her?” He turned and looked Gannon in the eye. “Because she was mine for about six years. All mine, except what I rented out sometimes.” He was ashamed of saying it, and then he was angry at himself as he saw Gannon’s eyes narrow as though he had caught on to something.

“That’s no reason,” Gannon said calmly. “Though it might be a reason for you to kill Cletus.”

It shook him that Kate should have told her deputy. Or maybe she hadn’t, since it was something anybody could pick up at the French Palace, along with a dose. “That wasn’t in your territory, Deputy,” he said. “Leave that alone too.”

Gannon looked puzzled, and Morgan realized he had been speaking of Pat Cletus. He felt a stirring of anxiety, and he thought he had better set Gannon back on his haunches. He stretched and said, “Are you going to make an honest woman of Kate, Deputy?”

Gannon’s face turned boiled red.

“Morgan grinned. “Why, fine,” he said. “I’ll sign over all rights to you, surface and mining. And give the bride away too. Or don’t you want me to stay that long?”

Gannon turned away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want you to stay, since you asked.”

“Running me out?”

“No, but if you don’t get out I will have to take this I came to ask you about as far as it goes.”

“And you don’t want to do that.”

“I don’t want to, no,” Gannon said, shaking his head. “And like you say I don’t expect I’ll get much of anywhere. But I will have to go after it.”

“You could leave it alone, Deputy,” he said. “Just stand back out of the way awhile. Things will happen and things will come to pass, and none of it concerns you or much of anybody else. I will be going in my own time.”

Gannon got to his feet, splinter-thin and a little bent-shouldered. “A couple of days?” Gannon said doggedly.

“In my own good time.”

Gannon started away.

“Don’t post me out of town, Deputy,” Morgan whispered. “That’s not for you to do.”

He regarded what he had just said. He had not even thought of it before he had said it; or maybe he had, and had just decided it.

But it was the answer, wasn’t it? he thought excitedly. And maybe he could still keep the cake intact, and let the others think they saw crumbs and icing all over Clay’s face. He began to check it through, calculating it as though it were a poker hand whose contents he knew, but which was held by an opponent who did not play by the same rules he did, or even the same game.

II

Later he sat waiting for Clay at a table near the door of the Lucky Dollar. He watched the thin slants of sun that fell in through the louvre doors, destroyed, each time a man entered or departed, in a confusion of shifting, jumbled light and shadow as the doors swung and reswung in decreasing arcs. Then they would stand stationary again, and the barred pattern of light would reform. During the afternoon the light would creep farther in over Taliaferro’s oiled wood floor, and finally would die out as the sun went down, and another day gone.

He did not think he would do more today than test the water with his foot, to see how cold it was.

The pattern of light was broken again; he glanced up and nodded to Buck Slavin, who had come in. Slavin nodded back, hostilely. Look out, he thought, with contempt; I will turn you to stone. “Afternoon,” Slavin said, and went on down the bar. Look out, I will corrupt you if you even speak to me. He could see the faces of the men along the bar watching him in the glass; he could feel the hate like dust itching beneath his collar. From time to time Taliaferro would appear from his office — to see if he had begun to ride the faro game yet, and Haskins, the half-breed pistolero from the French Palace, watched him from the bar, in profile to him, with his thin mustache and the scar across his brown chin like a shoemaker’s seam, his Colt thrust into his belt.

He nodded with exaggerated courtesy to Haskins, poured a little more whisky in his glass, and sipped it as he watched the patterns of light. He heard the rumble of hoofs and wheels in the street as a freighter rolled by, the whip-cracks and shouts. The sun strips showed milky with dust.

Clay came in and his bowels turned coldly upon themselves. He pushed out the chair beside him with a foot and Clay sat down. The bartender came around the end of the bar in a hurry with another glass. Morgan poured whisky into Clay’s glass and lifted his own, watching Clay’s face, which was grave. “How?” he said.