He stepped down off the boardwalk into the dust. Up the street behind Billy were the lighted windows of the French Palace, and there were men passing on the far side of the street, laughing and talking. He heard Pony’s name, and Blaisedell’s.

Billy had turned to face the adobe wall beside him; he kicked a boot against it. “What’s gone and got into you, Bud? Went off to Rincon to be a telegrapher and then come back, only not going back to Pablo, you said. Warlock is no kind of place to come back to. And deputying. What’s got into you, Bud?”

Gannon shrugged.

Billy kicked the wall again. “Well, maybe I know why you lit out. But what the hell, Bud! What would you have done else, let them shoot us down and run that stock back?”

“I guess if you steal stock you have got to shoot to keep it sometimes. But not the way it was done, Billy.”

“You’ve stole before that.”

“I never saw it run all the way through like that before, though.”

“So you come back and went to deputying to stop it, huh?” Billy sneered. “Well, you have changed, Bud. Got religion or something.”

“I guess you have changed, too, Billy, since you made your score. People change.”

“Ah, Christ, Bud!” Billy said, and now for the first time in the darkness it sounded like his brother again, and not some awkward and snarling boy-man out of San Pablo. “Well, I wanted to say I didn’t blame you for what you did just now, which was slick, and— Hell, I knew it was what you had to do in there! But this is the bad thing, this God-damned marshal that thinks he is Lord God of Creation here. Where does he think he gets off, posting Nat out like that and running Pony into jail?”

“I don’t know what Pony was doing, Billy,” he said. “I didn’t see what happened. But I know Pony — so do you.”

“Christ, you have sure gone over, haven’t you?” Billy said. He leaned back against the wall. “Like Blaisedell pretty good now, do you? Think he is pretty fine?”

“I don’t know him, except to say hello to.”

“Well, sometime when you get real good sucked up to him, ask him something for me! Ask him who the hell he thinks he is. Lording it over everybody. Running everybody around and telling them when they can come and go and all. This is a free country, isn’t it? God damn it!”

“Billy,” he said. “It’s been free the way you mean, maybe, but it is going to have to be free the other way. So people are free to live peaceable, and free of being hurrahed and their property busted up, and their stock run off, and stages robbed. And killed for no more—”

“Who’s the killer?” Billy broke in. “It is him! He got those gold-handled guns for the grand turkey-shoot prize for killing, didn’t he?”

“I guess he is what we have to have here, then. For people like I am afraid you have got to be.”

He had meant to say the people Billy has got to be like, but he didn’t try to correct himself, and Billy whispered, “Jesus!” A group of horsemen turned into Southend Street and rode up toward the Row. They were laughing, and without even listening to what they were saying he knew they were laughing about Pony Benner.

“I don’t mean to take up preaching,” he said. “But I guess if I have changed it’s because I’ve seen there has got to be law. It seems like you were always quicker and smarter to see a thing than I was. Can’t you see it, Billy?”

“I can see this much,” Billy said, in a contemptuous voice. “Who your law is for. Petrix at the bank and Goodpasture’s store, and Buck’s God-damned stages and Kennon’s livery stable and all.”

“Not just them. It is decent people running things, not rustlers and road agents and hardcase killers.”

“Blaisedell isn’t a hardcase killer? I heard he killed ten men in Fort James. Ten!”

“You can hear anything you want to hear. But there is something I saw, and got a hammer pin through my hand to prove it. Jack would have shot him in the back if I hadn’t stopped it.”

“Oh, I know Jack is a son of a bitch,” Billy said. “Everybody knows that.”

“Do you think Abe didn’t put him to it?”

“Abe didn’t have anything to do with it! God damn it, Bud, there is not another man but my own brother I’d let say a thing like that about Abe! Damn, you are wrong! Damn, I don’t know how you turned so fast. You have got so damned holier-than-anybody because of us rustling a few old mossy-horns they never get around to rounding up even, they have got so many down at Hacienda Puerto. And a few sons-of-bitching greasers killed.” Billy’s voice ceased abruptly.

“Did they get to be sons-of-bitching greasers when they came after their stock, Billy? And got shot down by a bunch dressed like Apaches — and worse than Apaches. Is that when they got to be sons of bitches?”

Billy didn’t answer, and Gannon leaned against the wall too, and looked up at the cold stars, shivering in the wind that had come up. A newspaper rolled slow and ghostly across the street and flattened itself against the wall beyond Billy.

Billy said in a low voice, “Listen, Bud, you don’t want to get Abe thinking you have gone over to Blaisedell’s side against him.”

“Why not?” he said quickly.

“Well, you couldn’t blame Abe for being down on somebody that’s trying to throw him!”

Billy would not see, he knew. There had never been any use arguing with Billy. He laughed a little and said, “I was thinking how Daddy told me once I was to watch out for you. But I guess it got so you had to watch out for me — with Jack anyhow. That wasn’t the only time I thought he’d drink my blood, but for you.”

He reached over and slapped Billy’s shoulder, awkwardly, and Billy punched him in the ribs. “That son of a bitch. I hate that dirty, cold-hearted, mean son of a bitch. I’d drink his blood, but it would probably poison a toad.” He went on in a rush. “Christ, Bud, Christ, how things get muckered up! Why, here we are— I mean, there is never going to be any real trouble between you and me, is there, Bud? It seems like we had trouble enough when I was a pup.”

“I guess we didn’t have enough,” he said, and tried to laugh again. Billy’s fist punched into his ribs again; then Billy stepped away from him, to stand flat and faceless against the lights up the street.

“Well, see you, damn it all, Bud.”

“See you, Billy,” he said wearily.

Billy backed up another step. He seemed about to speak again, but he did not, and turned and walked up Southend toward the Row.

Gannon did not watch him go, but moved slowly over toward the boardwalk that ran along before the saloons and gambling houses. It was time he took a turn around Warlock. Carl did not leave the jail much on Saturday nights.

10. MORGAN DOUBLES HIS BETS

I

STRIPPED to the waist, Morgan was leaning over the basin with his face close to the mirror and the razor sliding smoothly over his cheek, when there was a knock on the alley door.

“Who is that?”

“It’s Phin Jiggs, Morgan. Ed sent me down from Bright’s.”

He dropped the razor into the soapy water, went around the desk to the alley door, and slid the bolt back. Jiggs, who did odd jobs for Ed Hamilton who had been Morgan’s partner for a time in Texas and now had a place in Bright’s City, slipped inside, caked with dust from head to foot except for the part of his face his bandanna had covered. His eyes were muddy around inflamed whites, and there were sweat-tracks on his forehead and cheeks. He swiped at his face with his neckerchief.

“Ed said you might be pleased to know there is a woman named Kate Dollar coming down here.”

He stared at Jiggs. At least he was pleased to know she was coming.

“She put her name down as Mrs. Cletus at the Jim Bright Hotel there,” Jiggs said. “But Ed said to tell you it was Kate Dollar, all right.”

“Mrs. Cletus?” he said, and felt stupid as he watched Jiggs nod. He turned uncertainly and went back to the basin, where he fished the razor out of the water. Mrs. Cletus. “Did you see her?” he asked, and stared at his face in the mirror.