“That’s almost twenty-five per cent.”

“It is, and there is going to be hell. MacDonald’s not likely to step out of his way to miss any trouble, either. Well, and easy enough to wreck a mine, to give him his due. Charge of giant powder somewhere, or a fire in the stope. There was that one on the Comstock burned for three years and then had to be all retimbered before they could work it again. So MacDonald is getting ready to bust them before they bust him.”

“Bust them how? Did he say?”

“He has got his mind set on running out that Brunk he fired a while back, the one he tried to get Blaisedell to post. And Frenchy Martin and old Heck, and some others he says’re agitators too. Wants us to run them out for him.” Carl looked up at him and grinned a little.

“No,” Gannon said.

“What I told him,” Carl said. The lump of tobacco moved in his cheek like a mouse. “So Mister Mac is down on me; he is a man that doesn’t take kindly to anybody saying him no. I told him we would come out to the Medusa Saturday when they announced it — try to stop trouble. But he’d got other ideas by then.”

Carl sighed and said, “And I think what he’s got in mind now is rounding up a crew of hardcases to do his dirty work for him. Regulators was what he said, and I thought he meant some Citizens’ Committee people he’d get together. But now I wonder if he wasn’t thinking San Pablo.”

“It’s what he did before.”

“Cade,” Carl said. “By God, I forgot about that. Damn it to hell!” he burst out. “I wish we could count on Blaisedell if MacDonald intends on pulling something like that. By God if I want to see Warlock run by MacDonald and a bunch of San Pablo hardcases any more than McQuown and Curley and the same. What the hell’s got into Blaisedell, you suppose, anyhow?”

Gannon went over to sit down beside the alley door, and Carl scraped his chair around to face him. “Maybe he is just waiting for McQuown to come in,” Carl went on. “Maybe that’s what he is doing. Except why’d he quit marshaling?”

“Maybe he is sick of killing.”

Carl stared at him; he licked his lips. “Johnny, you haven’t gone and turned against him because of Billy? I thought you hadn’t.”

Gannon shook his head, patiently. He had prayed that he could remain patient. Always he could feel the accusations, from both sides, picking at him like knives whenever he walked the streets. He had ignored them so far, but he was afraid he was not always going to be able to.

“Well, somebody’s got to be peace officers,” Carl said. “And killing is part of it. I don’t see—” He stopped, and shook his head and said, “I wonder if it wasn’t that Miss Jessie went and turned against him. That’d sour a man. He is not rooming there any more, and they say he don’t see her any more. That would turn a man sour.”

He rose and paced the floor, his hands gripping his shell belt, his face puzzled and angry. “There is Blaisedell banking faro for Morgan and a glass of whisky right near all the time — and why? And there is McQuown keeping down to San Pablo. Scared to death, some say, but I think he is just waiting like a damned coyote. Everything is too quiet. It is so quiet it sets my nerves to banging like a dinner bell. Everybody just sitting around waiting for something to happen. What to happen?”

“I’ve felt it too.”

“Well, there’s going to be fireworks and the band playing with this pay drop, anyhow.”

Carl went over and kicked the cell door; it swung slowly shut. Carl stood facing the cell, his head bent down dejectedly. “Well, I never said I wasn’t a scaredy-cat,” he said. “But it sure comes on me hard sometimes. If we just had Blaisedell to yell for if MacDonald starts up anything, or those jacks either. Like that night they tried to lynch Billy and the other two, out of here. That was a night! A man knew what he had to do that night, and it was surely a comfort to have Blaisedell by.”

Gannon kept silent while Carl brooded — over Blaisedell, he knew, more than that there might be trouble at the mines. Gannon found himself almost looking forward to trouble. It had been too quiet. More than once, faced with the fact that some thought him one kind of coward, and some another, one kind of traitor, or another, it had all seemed hopeless and he had thought of quitting. Now, he thought, he might be of some use.

30. THE DOCTOR CONSIDERS THE ENDS OF MEN

THE doctor sat opposite Jessie with the checkerboard between them. He watched her take his king; he was used to letting her win because he loved to hear her laugh and clap her hands in triumph. But these days she did not laugh, nor even smile much. She had been this way since Blaisedell had come back from Bright’s City, and had not come back to the General Peach. Blaisedell had not even been to see her, so far as he knew. But still she kept his room for him, and still she turned expectantly toward the door whenever anyone entered.

Her white, nervous hand moved her checkers out, and his own square, short, hairy hand retreated. She took his last king. “Oh, I have beaten you again, David!” she said.

“You can’t do it three times in a row,” he said, and began spreading the checkers out on the squares for another game. Footsteps sounded; her eyes swung toward the door. He turned too, and saw that it was only a miner, who leaned heavily upon the rail as he mounted the stairs.

“There are many of them drunk tonight,” Jessie said. “Almost every one.”

“They know a wage cut is coming tomorrow. I’m afraid they will do more than get drunk when they find it is to be a dollar a day.”

“Yes,” she said listlessly. She leaned forward to study his move.

“We may be very busy,” he said. “It is always sad when we are busy, isn’t it?” But he thought it would be angry this time.

“I hear them talking about the Miners’ Union again,” Jessie said. She jumped his checker and snatched it up, and looked up at him with her pale mouth bent into a smile and her eyes alight for an instant. But only for an instant.

“In the end they are going to have to have their union, Jessie,” he said. “They will have to have their union to get out from under the manipulations of a bunch of conniving speculators in San Francisco and New York. And maybe to get out from under — our charity just as much as that.”

“They hate charity, don’t they?” Jessie said, matter-of-factly.

He stared at her. She let the checker in her hand drop to the board. “I am tired of living like this,” she said, with infinite weariness. “What is there here for me?” He saw the sheen of dampness in her eyes. The little muscles at the corners of her lips flexed to form an ashamed smile. Then she whispered, “Do you ever feel you were made for something, David? Made to do something — oh, something fine! But not know—” She stopped and shook her head, and the ringlets danced.

“I think everyone feels that sometimes, Jessie.”

“Oh, no! Oh, I don’t think everyone does. Most of them just live along. But there are a few who can do — I suppose I mean be something. Something that can go on even after them. And shouldn’t those people be trying every moment to be that? I mean, God gave it to them to do or be, and if they didn’t try I should think they would be very afraid of God.”

“It is your move, Jessie,” he said.

She was leaning forward with her hand on the locket that hung at her throat, a vertical frown line creasing her forehead, and her eyes were far removed from him. She said, “How terrible for a person to know what he could have been. How he could have gone on. But instead having to live along being nothing, and know he is just going to die and that’s the end of it.”

She was talking about Blaisedell, and he did not know what to say to her. He removed the checker she had dropped upon the board. Her eyes turned toward the door again; Brunk appeared there, with his cap pulled low upon his forehead and one big hand grasping the door frame. He was grinning, and his face was flushed with liquor.