“Clay—” he started. “Clay, what are you taking on like this for? All I am asking is post me and I will get out of town on the first stage or before it. Good Christ! Do you think I am fool enough to—”
“I will not!” Clay said. His lips were stretched tight over his teeth, and his face looked pitted, as though with some skin disease.
Morgan got up and stood with his back to him. He could not look at that face. He said, “If you had been any kind of marshal here you would have posted me before this. But I guess you couldn’t see the hand in front of your nose. That everybody else saw.”
“What?” Clay asked.
“You should have posted me for killing McQuown, for one. If you had been any kind of marshal.”
Clay said nothing, and he felt a dart of hope. “If you had been any kind of marshal,” he said again, “which was supposed to be your trade, but I guess you did not think so much of your trade as you liked to make out. And before that. Those cowboys that stopped the Bright’s City stage didn’t kill Pat Cletus.”
“I don’t believe that, Morg,” Clay said, almost inaudibly. Then he cleared his throat. “Why?”
Morgan swung around. “Because Kate was bringing him out here to show me she had another Cletus to bed her, as big and ugly as the first one. I am tired of watching that parade. Do you think I like her throwing every trick she has rutted with in my face?” His heart beat high and suffocating in his throat as Clay raised his head, and the blue stare was colder than he had ever seen it before. Then, almost in the same instant, it seemed to turn inward upon itself, and Clay only looked gray and old once more.
Do you have to have more? he cried, to himself. For maybe the curse upon him was that now even the truth itself would not be enough. He said calmly, “Why, then, if you will have more I will tell you why Bob Cletus came after you in Fort James.”
Clay’s head jerked up, and Morgan laughed out loud, proud that he could laugh.
“Are you listening, Clay?” he said. “For I will tell you a bedtime story. Do you know why he came after you? Because he wanted to marry Kate, the son of a bitch. And the bitch — she told him I might make trouble, and he had better see me. So he came to see me. You didn’t know you killed Cletus over Kate, did you?”
“Kate?” Clay said; his eyes had a pale, milky look.
“I told him it wasn’t me he had to worry about, it was you. You. For you had been rutting Kate and you were jealous by nature and no man to fool with. He was mad because she hadn’t told him about you, so I told him if he wanted Kate he had better get you before you got him, and sent word roundabout to you that he was out—”
His breath stopped in his throat as Clay got to his feet. But Clay only went to stand at the window. He leaned one hand upon the sash, staring out.
When Morgan spoke again his voice had gone hoarse. “By God, it was the best trick I ever pulled,” he said. “It made you a jackass and him a dead jackass — and Kate—” He stopped to catch his breath again. “Do you know what has always eaten on me? That nobody knew how I had served you all. It was a shame nobody knew. But how I laughed to think of Cletus jerking for that hogleg like it was a fence-post stuck in his belt. And you—”
Clay faced him. “He never did draw,” Clay said. “I don’t think he ever meant to. You are lying, Morg.” There was a little pink in his face and his expression was strangely gentle. “Why, Morg, are you trying to give me that, too? I don’t need that any more.” Then his eyes narrowed suddenly, and he said, “No, it is not even that, is it? You are telling me something to kill you for, not post you.”
“I told you I don’t play boys’ games!”
“Stop playing this one.”
“It is so, God damn you to hell!”
“Why, I expect part of it is,” Clay said. “I knew you had been in on it, for I have seen you chewing yourself. I expect you told him something like that to scare him so he would let Kate be. Not thinking he would come to me, though maybe you fixed it so that cowboy told me he’d heard Cletus was after me on account of Nicholson and I had better watch out — just in case Cletus did decide to make trouble. But I don’t believe he meant to draw on me; he just wanted to find out about Kate when he called after me. I was just edgy about any friends of Nicholson’s, was all, and thought he was out for blood.” He stopped, and his throat worked as he shook his head. “It is not so, Morg.”
Morgan stared back at him. Strangely it did not shake him that Clay had known, or guessed; he only felt dazed because he could not see what he could do next. He had chewed the end of his cigar to shreds, and with an uncertain movement he took it from his lips. He flung it on the floor. Clay said, “Once I would’ve wanted pretty bad to think what you just told me was so. But it was more my fault than it was yours. Whatever you did.”
“I served you up!” Morgan cried. He could feel the sweat on his face. “Hollow!” he cried. “Hollow as a damned plaster statue.”
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Clay said. “If it hadn’t been Bob Cletus dead to teach me a lesson, it would have been another. I learned that day a man could be too fast. I thought I had learned it,” he said.
“Damn you, Clay!” he whispered. All at once there was nothing in the world to hold to except this one thing. “Damn you! I will have my way!”
Clay shook his head almost absently. “Do you know what I wish?” he said. “I wish I was some measly deputy in some measly town a thousand miles away. I wish I was not Clay Blaisedell. Morg, you have killed men for my sake — Pat Cletus and McQuown that I know of. But I can’t thank you for it. It is the worst thing you have done to me, because it was for me, and I am more of a fraud of a thing than I knew. Morg — we think different ways, I guess.” He took up his hat; he turned his face away. When he went out he pulled the door quietly but firmly closed behind him.
“Don’t you have the dirty rotten gall to forgive me, damn you to hell!” Morgan whispered, as though Clay were still present. “You didn’t take that away too, did you? You didn’t take that!” He put his hands to his face; his mouth felt stretched like a knife wound. A burst of laughter caught and froze in his bowels like a cramp. “Well, I am sorry, Miss Jessie Marlow,” he said aloud. “But he was iron-mouthed beyond me.” You took me to the last chip, Clay, and won my pants and shirt too, and my longjohns are riveted on and too foul to bear. He shook his head in his hands. He would rather Clay had shot him through the liver than say what he had said, as he had said it, meaning what he had meant by it: We think different ways, I guess.
He pressed his hands harder to his aching face, suffocating in the sour, dead stench of himself. It was a long time before he remembered that he was lucky by trade, and that no one had ever beaten him.
60. GANNON SITS IT OUT
THE sun was standing above the Bucksaws in the first pale green light of morning as Gannon came like a sleepwalker along the echoing planks of the boardwalk, along the empty white street. The inside of the jail was like an icehouse, and he sat at the table shivering and massaging his unwashed, beard-stubbled face. He felt sluggish and unrested, and his blood as slow and cold in the morning chill of the adobe as a lizard’s blood.
He sat staring out through the doorway at the thin sunlight in the street, waiting for the sounds of Warlock waking and going about its Sunday business, and waiting especially for the sound of the early stage leaving town. Today, like every other day, the sun would traverse its turquoise and copper arch of sky; a particular sun for a particular place, it seemed to him, this sun for this place bounded by the Bucksaws and the Dinosaurs, illuminating indiscriminately the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the unjust, the wise and the foolish. Shivering in the cold he waited for Warlock to waken, and for Kate Dollar to leave, examining the righteousness that both moved and paralyzed him, the injustice he had performed upon himself because of his love of justice. He called himself a fool and prayed for wisdom, and saw only that he could not change his mind, for nothing was changed. He felt as though he were a monk bound to this barren cell by some vow he had never even formulated to himself. He thought of the end of the vow that Carl had known, and accepted. Maybe the only thing changed now was that that end was so much harder to accept.