Then he desisted. He swung around toward the troopers and roared, “What are you men waiting for? Do I have to cut his onions before you will move?”

Major Standley started and called a command. Half the troopers dismounted, and, in single file, followed the major up on the porch, where Colonel Whiteside held Miss Jessie Marlow and General Peach stood astride Clay Blaisedell, mopping his red face with a blue handkerchief, panting. His vacant, small blue eyes watched the troopers enter, almost sleepily. One of them stumbled over one of the gold-handled six-shooters. The next kicked it off the porch. Colonel Whiteside held Miss Jessie’s arms, whispering to her; she was not struggling now.

“See that they find that man Tittle, Whiteside,” the general said suddenly. “Willingham wants him in particular.”

“Yes, sir,” Whiteside said.

Peach nodded solemnly. “Then nothing to do but load ’em up, take ’em out; see to it, Whiteside. Load ’em up, take ’em out,” he said, nodding again. “Willingham is a power at the convention, Whiteside. Oh, he is a powerful force at the convention. He will be useful to us, Whiteside.”

“Yes, sir,” the colonel said.

General Peach took off his great hat and wiped his pink bald head. Then he stepped clear of Blaisedell and walked heavily back down the steps. An orderly helped him mount the gray horse. MacDonald sat staring at the porch with his teeth showing in a kind of paralyzed grimace. Troopers began to come out of the door, herding the boarders before them. None of the miners looked at Miss Jessie, or at Blaisedell. The major came out.

“Where is Tittle, ma’am?” he said.

“I won’t tell you!”

“Now, ma’am,” the colonel said chidingly. “You would do just as well to tell us. We—”

“What will you do if I do not?” Miss Jessie cried. “Turn me over to your men for rape?”

“Now, ma’am!” the colonel groaned. He released her arms. Instantly she ran down the steps toward the general’s horse.

She cried, in a hoarse voice, “An army of jackals led by an old boar with a ring in his nose!”

“Hush!” Whiteside said, catching her again. “Hush now, please, ma’am! It is bad enough already. Hush, please!”

“Bloody old boar!” she cried. “Crazy old boar!” She began to sob wildly. General Peach stared down at her in silence, frowning. The men on the roof across the street averted their eyes.

Then there was a gasp as Blaisedell rose. He stood clinging to one of the posts that supported the roof of the porch, his face cruelly striped with red welted lines. Again Miss Jessie broke away from the colonel and ran to him, but now her cry was lost in a shout that went up from the corner, and General Peach awoke from his stupor as though galvanized by an electric shock.

“Espirato!” someone was shouting, pushing his way through the crowd. “Espirato!” He appeared between two of the troopers’ horses; it was Deputy Gannon. He ran toward the general.

“Oh, good God!” the colonel cried, as the general slashed the stick across the gray’s rump. The gray leaped forward toward the deputy.

“What’s that, man?” Peach roared. “What’s that you say?”

“Apaches!” the deputy cried. He grasped the gray’s bridle, his narrow, crooked-nosed face bent back to peer up into the general’s face. The major appeared and ran down the steps, and troopers hurried out of the door behind him. “It’s Apaches!” the deputy cried. “Joe Lacey just rode in to say they have killed a bunch of cowboys in Rattlesnake Canyon! He is at the saloon now!”

His further words were lost in shouting. The gray bucked away from his grasp as the general slashed back with the stick again.

“Whiteside!” Peach shouted. “Whiteside! Espirato, d’you hear? Do you hear, Whiteside? By the Almighty we will run him to earth this time, Whiteside! Standley, get your men mounted and ready!” The gray started forward through the townspeople. Men crowded around the deputy, shouting questions. No one looked now to see Miss Jessie Marlow helping Blaisedell back inside the General Peach.

The men descended from the rooftops, and the crowd moved away down Main Street. There were a few backward glances, and those made quickly and almost furtively. When they had all gone only Tom Morgan was left, leaning against the adobe wall of the Feed and Grain Barn, still staring at the porch. There was a fixed, contorted grin upon his face that was part a snarl, like that of a stuffed, savage animal, and part expectant, as though he were waiting for something that would change what had happened there.

62. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE

June 5, 1881

IT WAS a thing I wish I had never seen, a man’s downfall and degradation. Poor Blaisedell; should he have pulled that trigger? I have fought the question, pro and con, to exhaustion in my mind. Yet was he not subscribed to it when he made his stand? And was it Miss Jessie’s will directing him to that stand? I will not blame her. Poor Blaisedell, we had already seen that incapacity that brought him low today; it was evident too when he was overrun by miners before the jail, that flaw of mercy or humanity, or of a fatal hesitation to be the aggressor at gunplay, or too much awareness of the consequences if he had pulled the trigger, on both occasions — not to himself but to this town.

How would I have him be different? If he had not had this flaw he would have been no more than a hired, calloused killer of men, and we would have turned against him finally for that very heedlessness. Instead, we will turn against him for his failure to be heedless, of consequences or of life, for seeming weakness, for that hesitation that was his ruin; for failure. Now he is pitied, and pity is no more than contempt beribboned and scented.

Pity and shame, a shame for him and for ourselves, who share it. Shame and pain, and pain must savagely turn upon its cause, which is Blaisedell. He should have fired.

Yet how could he have fired upon an old man, an insane old man, but one still to be honored for past deeds and for his position. Ah, but a cunning and treacherous insane old man, who, by the contrivance of turning his back upon Blaisedell, confessed that he knew Blaisedell to be honorable. And must have known that Blaisedell would not fire upon the man who is, after all, the embodiment of law and authority in this place.

Poor devil, he must wish himself dead, honorably dead. That is, perhaps, what should have been. He should have killed General Peach, and been himself instantly, unambiguously, and honorably killed by a volley of carbine fire. We would have crowned him then with laurels for tyrannicide.

Now, too late, I can formulate it: I asked of him only that he not fail. He has failed, yet how can a man be human and not fail? I remember once, before he came, jesting that he would have to be not of flesh and blood to succeed here. He did, until now, succeed, and was human, and is still. I could not grieve for him if he were not. So do most of us grieve; Warlock, for a day, will bleed for those wounds upon his face and spirit, and then, as a man will manage to thrust into oblivion something of which he is mortally ashamed, we will turn away from him.

My first thought, of course, was that Gannon was trying rather ridiculously to create a diversion. It was presently obvious that this was not so. Joe Lacey had indeed arrived in Warlock, with a frightful bullet-furrow across his forehead and a frightful story. It seems that the San Pabloites, including Lacey, Whitby, Cade, Harrison, Mitchell, Hennessey, and others — thirteen in all — were returning empty-handed from Hacienda Puerto, having been driven off by Mexicans, when, yesterday at nightfall, they were ambushed in Rattlesnake Canyon by a band of half-naked Apaches with their bodies horribly daubed with mud. Lacey swears (although this is not given much credence) that he marked Espirato among them, an old man supposedly very tall for an Apache. Any tall Apache immediately becomes Espirato, by which device he was, in the old days, capable of being seen in several places at once. The ambush was carried out with devilish cleverness. The men were riding closely grouped along a narrow and boxlike defile in which the whole group was enclosed at once, when there was a war cry as a signal, whereupon Apaches rose from behind every bush and rock — at least a hundred of them, Lacey says — and began to pour a torrent of hot lead down upon the hapless whites. In a few moments all but Lacey were dead. He saw with his own eyes one brave leap down to cut Whitby’s heart from his still living body, and others join to begin the usual disfigurement of the dead.