“Miss Jessie,” he said thickly. “And the good doctor Wagner. Good night.” He said it with a peculiar inflection.

“Oh, good night, Frank!” Jessie said.

“Good night, Brunk.”

“No,” Brunk said, with a solemn shake of his head. “I mean, it is a good night. Mostly, just before payday, it’s not. But this payday—” Brunk grinned again.

“Looking forward to it, are you?” the doctor said grimly.

“Am,” Brunk said. He glanced around with exaggerated caution. “Because you know what?” he whispered. “It is going to go down to three-fifty a day and they are not going to stand for it.” He raised a thick finger to his lips. “Oh, but I won’t tell them! Let them hear it from Mister Mac. Then they will bust!”

“And then we can try to patch the bloody heads they bring here.”

“Bloody heads to you, but men to me!” Brunk said proudly. “For some’ll have to get bloody heads so the others can hold theirs up. It’s what I’ve been waiting for.” He turned to Jessie. “Well, Miss Jessie, maybe Lathrop hadn’t courage enough. But I have. I have!” he said, and hit his fist upon his chest.

“That’s fine, Frank,” Jessie said, in a colorless voice. “But I wish you wouldn’t shout so.”

Brunk stared at Jessie and his face was at once shocked, hurt, and furious. “You don’t think I am good enough, do you, Miss Jessie?”

“Of course I do, Frank!”

“No, you don’t,” Brunk said. He glanced at the mezzotint of Bonnie Prince Charlie on the wall behind Jessie’s head, and his face twisted. “Because I am no gentleman,” he said. “Because I am no — no long-haired, white-handed gunman. Oh, I know I am not good enough and it is only a bunch of dirty miners anyhow.”

The doctor thrust his chair back and rose. “You are drunk,” he said. “Get out of here, you drunken fool!”

“Not so drunken as her fair-haired boy-killer!” Brunk cried. “That is so drunk his high-rolling friend’s got to half carry him away from the French Pal—”

The doctor darted forward and slapped Brunk’s face. Brunk staggered a step back. The doctor slapped him again. “Get out of here!” he cried, in a voice that tore in his throat.

Brunk put his hand to his cheek. He turned slowly away. He moved toward the foot of the stairs, where he leaned against the newel post, a thick, dejected figure in the darkness of the entryway.

Jessie was sitting up very straight, her mouth tightly pursed in her stiff face, her eyes glancing sideways at the checkerboard as though she were considering her next move. Her hand plucked nervously at the locket at her throat.

There was a scuffling sound outside on the stoop, a low cursing. More drunken miners, the doctor thought; he was tired of drunken miners beyond patience. He stepped out toward them just as they came in through the door — two men who were not miners. Clay Blaisedell had come back to the General Peach.

Morgan edged his way inside with an arm around Blaisedell, who was hatless, sagging, stumbling — not wounded in brave battle, merely drunk to helplessness. Brunk had turned and was watching them.

“Come on, Clay boy,” Morgan was saying. “Sort those feet out. Almost home now — where you were bound to go.” He was panting, his white planter’s hat pushed back on his head. “Evening, Doc,” he said. Then Morgan said, “Evening, Miss Marlow,” and the doctor felt Jessie’s fingers grip his arm.

Blaisedell pulled away from Morgan and stood swaying, his boots set apart and his great, fair head hanging as he faced Jessie. Jessie moved a step forward to confront her drunken hero. He had thought she would be shocked and disgusted but she was smiling and looked, he thought, with a painful wrench at his heart, triumphant.

But she did not speak, and after a moment Blaisedell started for the stairs, holding himself very straight. He stopped at the foot, as though realizing his incapacity to mount them, and leaned upon the newel post as Brunk backed away.

Morgan said to Brunk, “You look like you have a strong back, Jack. How about a hand upstairs?”

“Let him lay in the gutter for all of me!” Brunk said. “One that would shoot down a sixteen-year-old boy in—”

“Don’t say that, bullprod!” Morgan said; his voice was like metal scratching metal. Blaisedell clumsily tried to turn, and Morgan caught his arm as he staggered.

“Help you either!” Brunk said. “That would kick a broken-arm fellow’s teeth in!” His voice rose hysterically. “High-rollers and road agents and murdering pimps and worse! Well, I am not afraid to talk out, and there’s things—”

“Stop it!” Morgan snapped, just as the doctor heard Jessie utter the same words, her fingers tightening on his arm again. Brunk stopped and looked from Morgan to Jessie with his tortured red face.

“I have been looking for coyotes howling that tune,” Morgan said, in the metallic voice. His eyes, glinting in the light from Jessie’s room, looked as cold as murder.

“You will have a lot of teeth to kick in then!” Brunk cried.

“I’ll know where to start!”

“Never mind it, Morg,” Blaisedell said. He started up the stairs, and Morgan grasped his arm again and helped him upward, grunting with the effort and glancing back over his shoulder once at Brunk. The two men disappeared into the darkness of the stairwell, laboring and bumping against the railing.

“Frank,” Jessie said. Slowly Brunk turned, his scar of a mouth strained wide, his fists clenched at his sides. “You are to get out of my house.”

“Miss Jessie, can’t you see—”

“Get out of my house!” Jessie said. Her fingers left the doctor’s arm; he heard her go back into her room. Brunk stood gazing after her with dumb pain on his face.

“You had better leave, Frank,” the doctor said, with difficulty. He knew now that he was not the only man who had been jealous of Clay Blaisedell. He followed Jessie into her room, and heard, behind him, Brunk’s slow departing footsteps; above him, shuffling ones.

Jessie was staring up at the ceiling with round eyes. “Are they saying things like that about him?” she whispered.

“I suppose there are a few that—”

“Frank said it,” she broke in. “Oh, the fools! Oh—” She put her hands to her face. “Oh, they are!” she whispered through her hands. “It is Morgan’s fault! It is because of Morgan! Isn’t it, David?”

“I suppose in a way it is,” he said, nodding. He could not say more, and he was sorry now for Brunk, who had tried to.

“It is!” Jessie said, and he heard Morgan coming back down the stairs.

Morgan stopped and looked in the doorway, taking off his hat. His figure was slim and youthful, and his face, too, seemed young, except for his prematurely gray hair, which looked like polished pewter in the light. Slanting hoods of flesh at the corners of his eyes gave his face a half-humorous, half-contemptuous expression.

“I am sorry to bring him home in a state like this, Miss Marlow,” he said, with a mock humility. “But he would come. And sorry for the fuss with the jack.”

The doctor said, “You will have to excuse Brunk, Morgan. Stacey is a friend of his.”

“Stacey?” Morgan said, with a lift of his eyebrows.

“Whose teeth you kicked in, at your place. That was a cruel thing.”

“Was it?” Morgan said, politely.

“Mr. Morgan,” Jessie said in a stiff voice. “Possibly you could tell me what’s the matter with him. I mean, what has happened to him since he came back to Warlock.”

“What’s happened to him is for the best,” Morgan said. “Though I don’t expect you will agree with me.”

“What do you mean?” Jessie said.

Morgan smiled thinly, and said, with the polite and infuriating contempt, “Well, Miss Marlow, he is a man with some good in him. I don’t much like to see him broken down under things. He is better off out of marshaling.”

“Dealing faro in a saloon!” Jessie cried. The doctor was shocked at the venom in her voice, but Morgan only grinned again.