The judge bent, grunting, to recover his crutch, and then, red-faced with effort, thrust himself upright and hooked the crutch under his armpit. He set his hat, which was too small for him, on his head. He said contemptuously, “Maybe you will see, some day, how if you are bound to arrest some of McQuown’s people for a thing, you are bound to arrest another man the same. So if Blaisedell goes out and murders—”

“Great God, Judge!” Schroeder cried. “You are getting it all switched around who is murderers here!”

The judge hobbled toward the door, his crutch tip racketing. Pike Skinner glared at him. At the door the judge turned again, the hat slipping forward over one eye. “We all are, boys,” he said. He swung on outside on his crutch and his one good leg.

20. GANNON HAS A NIGHTMARE

IT IS a dream, he told himself; it is only a dream. Sweating, naked, daubed with mud, he crouched behind a crag upon the canyon wall and watched against the curtain of his memory the sandy river bottom of Rattlesnake Canyon, listening in the waiting silence to the pad of hoof irons in the sand and the sharper, urgent sound as a hoof struck stone, and, nearer, the musical clink of harness, and nearer still, voices soft-mouthed with Spanish; his heart turning over on itself as the first one came around the far bend upon a narrow-faced white horse, looking very tall at first in his high, peaked sombrero, but small, compact, brown, watchful-eyed, with pointed mustachios, behind him another and another, some with striped serapes hung over their shoulders and all with rifles carried underarm; seven, eight, and more and more, until there were seventeen in all, and Abe’s Colt crashed the signal. The echo was instantaneous and continuous. Smoke drifted up from all around the canyon where the other mud-daubed figures were concealed, and it was as though an invisible flash flood had in that instant swept down the canyon: horses reared and screamed, swept backward in the flood, and died; men were thrown tumbling, a rifle flung up in a wide arc turning end over end with weird slowness, and there were gobbling Apache cries mixed with the screams of dying men. There was the white horse lying on the reddening sand, there was the leader in his high, silver-chased hat crawling in the stream; then the hat gone, then a part of his head gone, and he lay still in the channel with his jacket shiny and bloated in the water that ran red over him. And now the half-naked, muddy Apache figures stood all around the canyon, yelling as they fired into the mass of dying men and horses below them, the faces magnified and slowly revolving before his eyes — Abe, and Pony and Calhoun and Wash and Chet, and on the far side Billy and Jack Cade, Whitby and Friendly, Mitchell, Harrison, and Hennessey.

And at the end there came the Mexican running and scrambling up the steep bank toward him, hatless, screaming hoarsely, brown eyes huge and rimmed with white like those of a terrified stallion, and the long gleam of the six-shooter in his hand, slipping and sliding but coming with unbelievable rapidity up the canyonside toward him, John Gannon. He changed as he came. Now he came more slowly; now it was a tall, black-hatted figure walking toward him through the dust, slow-striding with the massive and ponderous dignity not of retribution but of justice, with great eyes fixed on him, John Gannon, like ropes securing him, as he cried out and snatched in helpless weakness at his sides, and died screaming mercy, screaming acceptance, screaming protest in the clamorous and horrible silence.

It is only a dream, he told himself, calmly; it is only the dream. But there was another reverberating clap of a shot still. He died again, in peace, and waked with a jolt, as though he had fallen. There was another knock in the darkness of his room.

“Who is it?” he called.

“It’s me, Bud,” came a whisper. He swung off his cot in his underwear and went to open the door. Billy came in, stealthily. A little moonlight entered through the window, and Billy was visible as he moved past it, wearing a jacket and jeans, his hatbrim pulled low over his face.

“What are you doing in town?”

“Come to see you, Bud.” Billy laughed shakily. “Sneaked in. Tomorrow I don’t sneak in.”

Billy took off his hat and flung it down on the table. He swung the chair around and sat down facing Gannon over its back. The moonlight was white as mother-of-pearl on Billy’s face.

Gannon slumped down on the edge of the bed, shivering. “Just you?” he said.

“Pony and Luke and me. Calhoun weaseled.”

“Why Pony?”

“What do you mean, why Pony?”

“He hasn’t any right to come — he was at the stage. Was Luke in on it, or not?”

“Not,” Billy said shortly. Then he said, “It doesn’t matter who was at the stage or not.”

“No, it doesn’t matter now. They were lied off and you with them, so it is too late to tell the truth.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Billy said. Gannon could see that he was shivering too. “But I have got to do it, Bud.”

“Got to get yourself killed?” He had not meant to speak so harshly.

“Don’t be so damned sure about that!”

“Got to kill Blaisedell then?”

“Well, somebody’s got to, for Christ’s sake!”

Gannon closed his eyes. It might be the last time he saw Billy; probably it was; he knew it was. And they would wrangle meaninglessly over who was the son of a bitch, Blaisedell or Abe McQuown. It seemed to him that if he was any kind of man at all he could let Billy have his way tonight.

“Listen, Bud!” Billy said. “I know what you think of Abe.”

“Let’s not talk about it, Billy. It’s no good.”

“No, listen. I mean, what is different about him? He goes along the way he always did that used to be all right with everybody, but everybody’s got down on him. He gets blamed for everything! He—”

“Like the Apaches used to,” he said, and despised himself for saying it.

Billy said in a husky voice, “I know that was a piss-poor thing. Do you think I liked that? But you make too much of it.”

“I know I do.”

“Well, like the Paches; surely,” Billy went on. “But you know what it’s like all around here. Every son with a true-bill out against him ends up here, and he has got to eat so he swings a wide loop or tries to agent a coach or something. And Abe gets blamed for it all! But you know damned well—”

“Billy, you are not coming in tomorrow because of Abe.”

“Coming in because a man has to stand up and be a man!” Billy said. “That suit you? Because it is a free country and sons of bitches like Blaisedell is trying to make it not.”

He looked at Billy’s taut, proud young face with the glaze of moonlight on it, and slowly lowered his head and massaged his own face with his hands. Billy’s voice had been filled with righteousness and it tore him to hear it, and to hear Abe McQuown behind it furnishing the words that were true enough when Billy spoke them and yet were lies because they came from Abe McQuown.

“But I guess you don’t think that way,” Billy said.

Gannon shook his head.

“He is after Abe,” Billy went on. “He is after all of us! A person can’t stand it when there is somebody on the prod for him all the time. Trying to run him out or kill him. A man has got to stand up and—”

“Billy, Blaisedell saved your life when he backed off that lynch party. And Pony’s, and Cal’s, and maybe mine. And he could have killed Curley that night in the Glass Slipper, if that was what he was after. And you too. And Abe.”

“He just wanted to look good, was all. And us to look bad. I know how it would’ve been if he’d had us alone and nobody to see.”

“What if he kills you tomorrow?” he whispered.

“I’ve got to die some day, Christ’s sake!” Billy said, with pitiful bravado. “Anyway he won’t. I figure Pony and Luke can stand off Morgan and Carl, or that Murch or whoever he’s got to back him. I figure I can outpull him and outshoot him too. I’m not scared of him!”