“How,” Clay said, and nodded and drank. Clay grinned a little, as though he thought it was the thing to do, and then glanced around the Lucky Dollar. Morgan saw the faces in the mirror turn away. He listened to the quiet, multiple click of chips. “It is quiet these days,” Clay said.

Morgan nodded and said, “Dull with McQuown dead.” He supposed Clay knew, although there was no way of telling. Clay was turning his glass in his hands; the bottom made a small scraping sound on the table top.

“Yes,” Clay said, and did not look at him.

“Look at scarface over there,” he said. “Lew can’t make up his mind whether to throw him at me or not.”

Clay looked, and Haskins saw him looking. His brown face turned red.

“Before I go after Lew,” Morgan said.

“I asked you to leave that alone, Morg.”

He sighed. “Well, it is hard when a son of a bitch burns your place down. And hard to see the jacks so pleased because they think one of them did it.”

Clay chuckled.

Well, he had backed off that, he thought. He said, “I saw Kate last night. She is gone on that deputy — Kate and her damned puppy-dogs. This one kind of reminds me of Cletus, too.”

“I don’t see it,” Clay said.

“Just the way it sets up, I guess it is.”

Clay’s face darkened. “I guess I don’t know what you mean, Morg. It seems like a lot lately I don’t know what you are talking about. What’s the matter, Morg?”

I have got a belly ache, he observed to himself, and my feet are freezing off besides. He did not think that he could do it now. “Why, I get to thinking back on things that have happened,” he said. “Sitting around without much to do. I guess I talk about things without letting the other fellow in on what I’ve been thinking.”

He leaned back easily. “For instance, I was just remembering way back about that old Tejano in Fort James I skinned in a poker game. Won all his clothes, and there he was, stamping around town in his lousy, dirty long-handles with his shell belt and his boots on — he wouldn’t put those in the pot. Remember that? I forget his name.”

“Hurst,” Clay said.

“Hurst. The sheriff got on him about going around that way. ‘Indecent!’ he yelled. ‘Why, shurf, I’ve been sewed inside these old long-johns for three years now and I’m not even sure I have got any skin underneath. Or I’d had them in the pot too, and then where’d we be?’

“Remember that?” he said, and laughed, and it hurt him to see Clay laughing with him. “Remember that?” he said again. “I was thinking about that. And how people get sewed up into things even lousier and dirtier than those long-handles of Hurst’s.”

He went on hurriedly, before Clay could speak. “And I was remembering back of that to that time in Grand Fork when those stranglers had me. They had me in a hotel room with a guard while they were trying to catch George Diamond and hang him with me. Kate splashed a can of kerosene around in the back and lit up, and came running upstairs yelling fire and got everybody milling and running down to see, and then she laid a little derringer of hers on the vigilante watching me. She got me out of that one. Like you did here, you and Jessie Marlow. I have never liked the idea of getting hung, and I owe Kate one, and you and Miss Jessie one.”

“What is this talk of owing?” Clay said roughly. He poured himself more whisky. “You can take it the other way too, Morg — that time Hynes and those got the drop on me. But I hadn’t thought there was any owing between us.”

No? he thought. It would have pleased him once to know that there was no owing between them; it did not please him now, for debts could be canceled, but if there were no debts then nothing could be canceled at all.

“Why, there are things owed,” he said slowly. And then he said, “I mean to Kate.”

Clay’s cheeks turned hectically red. Clay said in an uncertain voice, “Morg, I used to feel like I knew you. But I don’t know you now. What—”

“I meant about the deputy,” he said. He could not do it. “She is scared,” he said, and despised himself. “She is scared you and the deputy are going to come to it.”

“Is that what you have been working around to asking me?”

“I’m not asking you. I’m just telling you what Kate asked me.”

“There is going to be no trouble between the deputy and me,” Clay said stiffly. “You can tell Kate that.”

“I already told her that.”

Clay nodded; the color faded from his cheeks. The flat line of his mouth bent a little. “Foolishness,” he said.

“Foolishness,” Morgan agreed. “My, I have a time saying anything straight out, don’t I?”

Clay’s face relaxed. He finished the whisky in his glass. Then he said abruptly, “Jessie and me are getting married, Morg. If you are staying maybe you would stand up for me?”

It seemed to him it had been a long time coming, what he knew was coming. But he would not stand up for Clay this time. “When?” he said.

“Why, in about a week, she said. I have to get a preacher down from Bright’s City.”

“I guess I won’t be staying that long.”

“Won’t you?” Clay said, and he sounded disappointed.

He could not stay and stand up for Clay, and give the proper wedding gift to him and to his bride; not both. “No, I guess I can’t wait,” he said. “You will be married half a dozen times before you are through — a wonder like you. I will stand up for you at one of the others. Besides, there’s an old saying — gain a wife and lose your friend. What a man I used to travel with said. He said he had been married twice and it was the same both times. First wife ran off with his partner, and number two got him worked into a fuss with another one — shot him and had to make tracks himself.”

Clay was looking the other way. “I know she is not your kind of woman, Morg. But I’ll ask you to like her because I do.”

“I admire the lady!” he protested. “It is not every man that gets a crack at a real angel. It’s fine, Clay,” he said. “She is quite a lady.”

“She is a lady. I guess I have never known one like her before.”

“Not many like her. She is one to make the most of a man.”

“I’m sorry you can’t stay to stand for me.”

“Not in Warlock,” he said. “I’m sorry too, Clay.” He wondered what Clay thought he wanted, married to Miss Jessie Marlow — to be some kind of solid citizen, with all the marshaling and killing behind him and his guns locked away in a trunk? He wondered if Clay knew Miss Jessie would not allow it, or, if she would, that the others would not. And what was he, Clay’s friend, going to do? I will put you far enough ahead of the game, Clay, so you can quit, he thought. I can do that, and I will do it yet.

“Morg,” Clay said, looking at him and frowning. “What got into you just now?”

Morgan picked up his glass with almost frantic hurry. “How!” he said loudly, and grinned like an idiot at his friend. “We had better drink to love and marriage, Clay. I almost forgot.”

Grief gnawed behind his eyes and clawed in his throat as he watched Clay’s face turned reserved and sad. Clay nodded in acceptance and grasped his own glass. “How, Morg,” he said.

III

When he returned to his room at the hotel it was like walking into a furnace. He threw the window up and opened the door to try to get a breeze to blow the heat out. He had started to strip off his coat when Ben Gough, the clerk, appeared.

“Some miner just brought this by and wanted to know was you here.” Gough handed him a small envelope and departed. The envelope smelled of sachet, and was addressed in a thin, spidery script: Mr. Thomas Morgan. He tore open the flap and read the note inside.

June 1, 1881

Dear Mr. Morgan,

Will you please meet me as soon as possible in the little corral in back of “The General Peach,” to discuss a matter of great importance.