“I didn’t know him.”

“I guess you have been gone a good while at that.” Carl’s eyes flickered at him, not quite casually, and then away. “Canning come in after Jim Brown got shot.”

He nodded. His brother Billy had shot Jim Brown. The only letter he had had from Billy during the six months he had been in Rincon had been a strange mixture of brag and apology for having shot a deputy. “Dirty-mouth, bull-ragging son of a bitch,” Billy had written. “He had it coming bad. Everybody says he had it coming. Abe says he’d choose him himself if I didn’t choose him out first, Bud.”

“Come on in and sit,” Carl said, turning and moving into the jail. As he followed Carl inside he read the legend neatly lettered on the square of paper fastened to the adobe beside the door:

2ND DEPUTY WANTED

SEE SCHROEDER

The sign above his head creaked in another gust of wind. Judge Holloway was staring up at him from the shadow inside the jail, his sick face darker, thinner, more closely hatched with red veins than ever, on one cheek the wart or mole like a peg driven into the flesh, his bloated body hunched over the battered pine table that was his bench. The crutch that substituted for the leg he had lost at Shiloh leaned against the wall behind him with his hard-hat hung from its armrest. Peter Bacon, the water-wagon driver, sat at the back, beside the alley door, with a knife and a bit of gray wood in his hands.

“Well, Bud Gannon,” Peter said, raising an eyebrow.

“Peter,” he said. “Judge.”

The judge didn’t reply. Peter said, “How’s the telegraphing going, Bud?”

No one had called him “Bud” for a long time now, but the name was as familiar and disagreeable as Warlock’s dust. He felt a silly, apologetic grin cramp his face. “Well, I gave it up,” he said.

“Come back for good, then?” Carl asked, turning toward him. He hitched at his shell belt. “Here or San Pablo, Johnny?” he asked quietly.

Gannon rubbed his hands on the dusty thighs of his store pants. “Why—” he said, and paused as he saw something very hard, very sharp, show for an instant in Carl’s eyes. “Why, San Pablo, I guess. The only thing I know besides telegraphing’s running a branding iron.”

Peter bent to his whittling. The judge stared, darkly brooding, at the line of late sunlight that came a little way into the jail. Carl propped a boot up on the chair beside the cell door. “How come you to give it up, Johnny?” he asked. “Looked like you was going to make something of yourself.”

“Laid off,” he said. He could feel their unspoken questions. Although there was no call to answer them, he said, “Fellow I was apprentice to went and died, and they brought in another had his own apprentice.” And he was pretty sure they had brought in another because it was known he had once run with McQuown, which was what Carl and Peter were surmising. But he had said enough, and he watched them both nod, almost in unison, apparently without interest.

Carl turned away from him to gaze at the wall where former deputies of Warlock had scratched their names brown in the whitewash. Carl’s name had been added at the bottom. Above it was WM. CANNING, above that, in big, crooked letters, JAMES BROWN, above that, B. EGSTROM. Higher on the list was ED. SMITHERS, whom Jack Cade had shot in a cruel fuss at the Lucky Dollar. Gannon had seen that.

“Matt Burbage might be needing some hands,” Peter Bacon said, without looking up from his whittling. “Usually comes in town Saturday nights, too.”

“Thanks,” he said gratefully. “Well, I guess I’ll go have myself a drink of whisky.” No one volunteered to accompany him. The judge’s fingers drummed on the table top.

“Got ourself a marshal now,” Peter said.

“I heard. Did Peach come around to giving Warlock a town patent?”

Carl shook his head. “No, the Citizens’ Committee hired him.”

“Gunman from Fort James,” Peter said. “Name of Clay Blaisedell.”

Gannon nodded. A gunman from Fort James hired against Abe McQuown, against McQuown’s people, against Billy, who was one of them. The town had turned against McQuown. The taste and smell of Warlock was not merely that of its dust, but the taste of apprehension, the smell of fear and anger like a dangerous animal snarling and stinking in its cage. He had come back to it, that had changed only for the worse since he had run from it. And now the town was waiting. He said quietly to Carl, “Trouble?”

“Not yet,” Carl said, quietly too, his hand rising to pick at the dull five-pointed star limply hanging from his vest, his face, in profile as he still stared at the names on the wall, showing clearly anger and fear, determination and dread.

As Gannon started out the judge’s hot, bloodshot eyes with their yellow whites slanted up to meet his own. No one spoke behind him. Outside, in the sun that came in under the arcade, his bootheels resounded on the planks as he started down toward the central block.

He would look up Matt Burbage tonight, he thought, doggedly. He knew it was useless. He had been one of McQuown’s, and he would have to go back to McQuown, in San Pablo. Once he had thought he was quit of them.

3. THE JAIL

THE sun, misshapen and red, was resting on the jagged spine of the Dinosaurs when Pike Skinner turned into the jail. Halting in the thick arch of the doorway, he cleared his throat and said, “I guess McQuown’s coming in tonight.”

Inside were Judge Holloway and Peter Bacon, Carl Schroeder, leaning back in the chair beside the cell door, with a hand grasping one of the bars to balance himself, and old Owen Parsons, the wheelwright at Kennon’s Livery Stable, squatting against the wall at the back.

Schroeder nodded once, gently let his chair down, and stretched one leg out with a slow, careful motion. “Heard about it,” he said. Then he said, “Bound to come in some time.”

Peter Bacon said, “We was just saying it was none of Carl’s worry.” He bent down to sweep his whittlings into a neat pile between his boots.

“It’s sure none of your put-in, Carl,” Skinner said quickly.

No one looked at Schroeder. At a sound of hoofs and wheels in the street Parsons spat. The spittoon rang deeply. Bacon glanced up at the door, and Skinner turned to watch a buggy roll by in the street, its yellow and red striped wheels bright with motion in the last of the sun.

Skinner hooked his thumbs into the sweat-stained shell belt that hung over his broad hips, and teetered on his bootheels. He was a tall, heavy, slope-shouldered man and he filled the doorway. The others watched him remove his hat and slap it once against his leg. He scowled sideways at the square of paper tacked to the wall before he turned back inside. He had a clean-shaven, red, ugly face, and great protruding ears.

“Blaisedell buggy-riding Miss Jessie again,” he said.

Peter Bacon nodded. “Fine-looking man.”

“Him and Morgan is friendly,” Old Owen Parsons said disapprovingly. “Heard they are partners in the Glass Slipper, and was before in a place in Fort James.”

“Signifies what, if they are?” said Skinner, who was a member of the Citizens’ Committee, scowling.

He stood aside as Arnold Mosbie, the freight-line mule skinner, came in. Mosbie’s handsome, blackly sunburnt face was marred by a great scar running down his right cheek.

“Heard Dechine was in town saying McQuown and them was maybe coming in tonight,” he said, to no one in particular.

Schroeder said nothing. The judge raised his eyes to the round, dented bowl of the lamp suspended above his head. Peter Bacon sighed and said, “What Owen here was saying.”

“Abe’s been a while making up his mind to come,” Mosbie said.

Skinner said to Parsons, “What’s it to you if Blaisedell is friendly with Morgan, old man?”

Parsons spat, rang the spittoon, and jerked his fingers through his tobacco-stained beard. “Morgan is a damned high-rolling son of a bitch.”