He wondered if he really was; he knew he was against the things that destroyed and maimed them.

Fitzsimmons said quickly, “Well, I guess there is no use talking about it just yet. I guess they are going to have to bust loose this time again, and maybe they will learn from it.” Then he said, “I thought of even going to tell Schroeder they was thinking of firing the Medusa, but I couldn’t do that. That would bust me with them if they ever found out.”

The doctor was surprised at the calculation in Fitzsimmons’ voice; it was a side he hadn’t seen before.

Fitzsimmons gazed back at him boldly, as though aware of what he was thinking. He grinned again, not quite so boyishly. “What’s wrong with that?” he said. “Sometimes if you know better than a bunch what has to be done you have to undercut them a little. You have to be careful, though, for they are hard when they think a man is against them. They will listen to me some day,” he said, and rose. Then he laughed. “And don’t think you are out of it, Doc. I have got plans for you.”

The doctor rose to open the door for Fitzsimmons, who now thanked him for his time and said good night very formally. He went back to the table and took up the bottle of laudanum and held it until his hand warmed the glass. But finally he put it back into his bag, and undressed and went to bed.

In bed he could not sleep, not merely because he had not taken his evening potion, but because always, in the darkness, Jessie’s face hung in his eyes. He saw Blaisedell drunken and sagging, and yet, try as he would, he could not look upon him with contempt. He saw Brunk’s face, with the jealousy as pitiful and hopeless as his own behind the hate. He saw Morgan’s face, full of murder, and yet it was the face of a man much more than the mere unscrupulous and violent gambler he had seemed. He remembered Jessie and Morgan crying at the same instant to Brunk to stop, in their different voices that were as one voice, and remembered them only minutes later facing each other as deadly enemies.

It seemed to him that in this night he had seen many symptoms of the obsession which he had already known in Jessie. He had seen that both Jessie and Morgan accepted the importance of Blaisedell’s name and all that it implied even in their antipathy for one another. He had seen the same obsession, though not for Blaisedell, in possession of Brunk, and even stronger in Jimmy Fitzsimmons. It seemed to him, as he considered it, more than an obsession, a disease of the spirit; and yet he wondered if this disease, this obsession, this struggle to pre-eminence, was not the reason for mankind’s triumph on the earth — the complex brain developed to plot for it, the opposing thumb to grasp at it — if it was not what set mankind apart from the animals. No animal cared what was its name.

He stared out at the bright stars over Warlock, regarding, now, himself, and what Fitzsimmons had said about his leading the miners. He felt no call within himself. He felt no urge to strive to be anything more than what, long ago, he had been content to be. He considered his freedom and his bondage, his own soul’s sickness and his own particular health, and wondered at the will he did not possess.

31. MORGAN USES HIS KNIFE

ACROSS from Morgan at the desk in the office of the Glass Slipper, Clay sat with his fair head canted forward, his lips pouting a little. He looked white and ill, Morgan thought; Clay had had a bellyful of whisky last night, but he looked sicker than that.

“What do you hear from Porphyry City, Morg?” he said. “I hear it is booming some.”

“It is booming right here.”

“Not for me,” Clay said.

“Why, Porphyry City sounds fine, from what I hear. You thinking of going there?”

“I don’t know,” Clay said. “I suppose it wouldn’t be much different.”

Morgan laughed and said, “You were surely bound and determined to go back to the General Peach last night. See the lady today?”

Clay glanced up at him and nodded tersely. Then he leaned back in his chair and said, “I shouldn’t have gone back there.”

He nodded too.

“It is not her, Morg,” Clay said, as though to answer what he, Morgan, had not wanted to ask. “It is everybody. I can feel it walking down the street or anywhere. Even if there is nobody around I can feel it. I can’t do what they want. They don’t even know what they want, and I can’t do anything, for anything I do is either all the way wrong or not right enough.”

“Eat your guts out!” Morgan said, and all at once he was angrier at Clay than he had ever been before. “You are either a peace officer eating your guts up, or you are a faro banker. God damn it, Clay, wherever you go you are going to have to not give a damn what people want of you. You can quit marshaling and make it stick here as well as anywhere.”

“I should have quit before I started.”

“Chew on yourself!”

Clay said, “Abe McQuown is sitting bad on their stomachs and I am supposed to give them a purge. I want no part of it. For it is me that is poisoned every time. Every time now. Who am I to do their killing for them? I just want shut of it, but I can feel them at me all the time. And Jessie—” He did not go on.

“Well, you have quit,” Morgan said. “You did the right thing, Clay.”

Clay’s mustache lifted, as though he were grinning, and his eyes crinkled a little. He said, “There was a time when I thought I could do the right thing.”

Morgan poured himself a quarter of an inch of whisky, and, turning it in his hand, frowned carefully at the flat tilt of the liquor. “You were going to say something about Miss Jessie.”

“What she says,” Clay said heavily. “She says there is a thing a man needs to be—” Morgan saw something uncertain and almost frightened cloud his eyes. “It is hard to say, Morg,” Clay said, and sighed and shook his head.

So it was Miss Jessie pushing Clay; his mind closed down on it like a trap. It was as though in a card game with strangers he had picked on sight the one he must play against as most dangerous, and had seen himself proved right on the first hand.

“But she is wrong,” Clay said. “For it has gone past and the rest is poison.”

“And you have quit.”

Clay nodded; Clay’s clouded eyes met his for a moment. “But it is not so easy here, Morg. With Kate to see every time I turn around. I see she has taken up with Billy Gannon’s brother. Came out with Cletus’s brother, and now she has taken up with Gannon. It is a thing to scare me screaming, isn’t it?”

“Scare you?” Morgan said, and didn’t know if he should laugh at that or not.

“Why, yes. If every man I shot down wrong had a brother, and every one came after me, I would have to die that many times.”

“Hard to do,” he said, and still he did not know. Anxiously he watched Clay’s face. He felt a quickening lift as he saw the rueful smile starting.

“Surely,” Clay said. “But I could do it the way I feel now. Like a cat.”

“Listen to me now,” he said to Clay. “For a change. First thing where you have gone wrong is worrying over what everybody wants of you, or thinks. To hell with them! That is the nugget of it, Clay. And look at it like this — like a hand of cards. It is like throwing in your hand because you made one bad play.”

“No, not one,” Clay said. “Take your card game another way. The stakes are too high now, it has got too big for me. It was jacks to open once, now it is kings.”

Queens, he thought; he felt as though Clay were arguing with Jessie Marlow, through him. “Clay, I don’t know what we are quarreling over,” he said. “You have quit it.”

“That’s so,” Clay said, and sighed again.

A racket was starting up in the Glass Slipper. It was time for the miners to be coming in, but it sounded to Morgan as though every one of them in Warlock were crowding into the Glass Slipper at once. He heard their raised voices and the confused tramp and scuffle of boots on the floor. Clay turned to glance at the door. “What the hell is going on?” Morgan said, and rose just as the door opened.