7. CURLEY BURNE PLAYS HIS MOUTH ORGAN

IN THE night Curley let Spot pick his own way, only pushing on him when he began to fritter. By day it was a six-hour ride from Warlock to San Pablo, but by night it was slow. The stars were out and a burnt quarter-moon hung in the west, but the darkness was thick, and shapes came suddenly out of it to make his heart start and pound. From time to time he brought out the mouth organ that hung on a cord inside his shirt, and blew a tune through it.

He had dropped the others behind, but Abe had dropped him, too. Still, it was pleasant riding alone in the night, hearing now the wind whispering through trees he couldn’t even see. He reined up a moment to locate himself by the sound; he must be on the slope where, below, the river made a bend around a thick stand of cottonwoods. He turned downhill toward the river, Spot picking his way along with care. He heard the river itself and immediately, as he always did when he first heard it, he reined up again and dismounted to make water.

He rode on alongside the river, with its trembling rapid sheen under the moon and the trees soaring against the black sky, light-streaked where the wind turned the leaves. He listened for the thick rush of the rapids, and saw before him the outline of a horseman. He raised his mouth organ and blew into it, tunelessly. Spot scrambled down a rocky ledge, striking hoof-sparks.

“Curley?” Abe said.

“Ho,” he replied, and Spot whinnied at Abe’s black. They were on the northwest corner of the spread now, and Abe always stopped and watered here.

“Pretty night for a ride,” Curley said, dismounting and giving Spot a slap on the flank. “But I sure don’t own night eyes like you do. It is lucky Spot knows the route.”

“Where’s the others?” Abe asked.

“Back somewhere, bickering and whickering.”

Abe said nothing, and Curley waited to see if he would start off or wait. If he started off he would let him go in alone. But Abe waited until he remounted, and together they rode on down along the river beneath the cottonwoods.

After a time Curley said, “Quite a one, the marshal!”

“Yes,” Abe said. “He is quite a one.” Abe didn’t pick it up any more than that, nor, although his voice had seemed short, quite cut him off either.

Curley was silent for a time, thinking that it was still all right between the two of them, but thinking painfully now, too, that if he, Curley Burne, left San Pablo and moved west, or north, or down to Sonora somewhere, the way he had been considering lately, Abe would turn into pure son of a bitch. Like Jack Cade, only a bigger one; and that would be too bad. Abe had been knocking at it close for a good while now — he knew well enough that Abe had put Jack there to backshoot Blaisedell if it came to it — and it seemed to him more and more that but for him, and some kind of decency Abe owed him, Abe would go all the way over.

And the old man, he thought, shaking his head. The old man was a trial and a terror, and born unholy mean.

“Let’s go on along the river instead of cutting in,” Abe said.

“Sounds nice tonight, don’t it?” He reined right as Abe cut back down under the deep shadow of the cottonwoods. He spat, scraped his hand over his face, and braced himself to try again. Once he and Abe had been able to talk things out.

“Well,” he said loudly. “Looks like I am some beholden to him. He could’ve burned me down there as well as not.”

“No,” Abe said.

“Surely,” he insisted. “I was looking right down it, six feet long and six deep. And lonely!”

“No,” Abe said again. “It looks better for him like this.”

He grimaced to think of having to try to figure everything that way. “Well, he is greased lightning, sure enough,” he went on. “I never saw a man get unhooked that fast and have himself in hand enough so he didn’t have the trigger on the pull. I am some pleased to be with us here, tonight.”

Abe didn’t turn, didn’t speak.

“Well, it was coming anyhow,” Curley said. “Warlock was about due to get fed up with folks. There’s been things done that would make me mad, I know. Pony, now; Pony is an aggravating kind of man. Sometimes I think he don’t have good sense. Looks like Warlock was due for somebody like this Blaisedell.”

“I was here before he was,” Abe said, in a stifled voice. “But now he is set up to say who comes and goes in Warlock.”

“Aw, Abe,” he said. He didn’t know how to go on, but he was filled with it now and he had to try to say it out. “What’s got into you, Abe?” he asked.

“Meaning what?” Abe said.

He couldn’t bring himself to reproach Abe for setting Jack Cade to backshoot Blaisedell. He said, “Well, it used to be you’d come out and shoot tomato cans off fence posts with the rest of us. And mostly you’d win, but sometimes you’d lose out — that will happen to any man. And Indian wrestle and hand wrestle with us when we got to fooling, and that the same. But you have stopped it.”

The black cantered ahead, but when Curley caught up again he kept at it.

“Like you had got to be too big a man to lose any more.” His voice felt thick in his throat. “Like if you lost even one time at anything now you lost face, or some damned foolish thing. Like—” He cleared his throat. “Like I kind of think you couldn’t stand to lose tonight.”

This time Abe glanced back at him, and Curley turned in his spurs in order to draw up even.

“Abe,” he said. “Anything where you stand to win, you have got to be able to stand to lose, too. For that’s the way things go. Abe,” he said. “Maybe I know how you feel some. But say you kept on being the biggest man in the San Pablo valley and Warlock too. You still wouldn’t be the biggest man in the territory by a damn sight. And say you called out old Peach and the cavalry, and massacreed them and took Peach’s scalp — where’d you go then? What’d you have to be the biggest of then?”

It sounded as though Abe laughed, and his spirits rose.

“Why, Curley,” Abe said. “The last time I saw that scalp of Peach’s there wasn’t a hell of a lot of hair to take. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Espirato took his Paches out of here — when he saw old Time had beat him to Peach’s hair.”

He laughed too. It sounded like the old Abe.

“Bud Gannon coming along with the others?” Abe asked.

“He stayed in town.”

“He did?” Abe said. When he spoke again his voice had turned somber. “I know there is some that’s turned against me.”

“That’s not so, Abe!” he protested.

“It’s so. Like Bud. And Chet — you see how he has been staying clear. And I felt it hard in Warlock tonight. But you can’t back off.”

“Nothing ever stopped me from it.” Curley tried to say it lightly. “I surely backed tonight, and glad to.”

“I couldn’t have done that,” Abe said. “I guess you know that’s why I let you take it.”

He nodded sickly. He thought again of Cade, and he thought of how it had been worked when they had run Canning; he had tried to shut that from his mind, but it had been as clear as this tonight. He felt sick for Abe. “Surely I knew it,” he said. “But what the hell? Abe — I am damned if I think poor of myself for backing off tonight. Or why you—”

“There gets a time when it don’t matter what you think of yourself,” Abe broke in. “That’s it, you see. Maybe it is what everybody else thinks instead.” The black cantered on ahead again. “Let’s get on in,” Abe called back to him.

Curley spurred Spot to a half-trot, but he stayed behind Abe all the way.

As they walked up from the horse corral, the dogs barked and jumped around their legs. Curley sighed as he looked up at the squat ranch house, where a little light showed in a window. Behind it soared the monolith of the chimney of the old house, which had burned down. The lonely chimney seemed incredibly high and narrow against the night sky, pointing its stone and crumbling mortar height at the stars. He wondered if that chimney would not fall some day, despite the poles that propped it up, and mash them all to smithereens.