“Well, that’s fine of you, Abe.”

“So long, Curley,” the old man said. “You take care of yourself, hear?”

Curley hurried down the steps. “So long, Dad McQuown!” he called back over his shoulder. At the cook shack he shook hands around with the boys who hadn’t gone with MacDonald, and told them to say so long for him to the rest when they got back from Warlock. He sent the breed to Abe, and got some bread and bacon and a canteen of water from Cookie. Hurrying, he went on out to the horse corral, where Abe had saddled a long-legged, big-barreled, steady-standing gray he had not seen before. “He’ll take you in a hurry,” Abe said, and slapped the gray on the shoulder. Curley swung into the saddle, and Abe reached up to wring his hand.

“Curley,” he said.

“So long, boy, Suerte.”

“Suerte,” Abe said, grinning, but not quite meeting his eyes. Something had gone wrong again, but now Curley was only in a hurry to get out. He swung the big gray out of the corral on the hard-packed red earth. He could see the dust the breed was making, heading south. The big gray moved powerfully; he drew up as Abe yelled something after him, and cupped a hand to his ear.

“I say!” Abe yelled. “They catch you all you do is see you get to Bright’s City for trial all in one piece. No worry then!”

Curley waved and spurred on again. When he had crossed the river that was the border of the ranch, he had never felt so free. He reached for his mouth organ. But he had left it on the porch rail.

His mood was not affected; he began to sing to himself. The gray loped steadily along. The land stretched board-flat away to Welltown, the gray-brown desert marbled with brush. The sun burned higher in the sky. He glanced back from time to time — at first he thought it was only a dust-devil.

Then he whistled. “We had better stop loafing, boy,” he said. “Look at them come!” But he was not worried, for the big gray was strong and fresh, and the posse must have been riding hard from Warlock. The gray broke into a long, swinging stride that ate up the ground, and he laughed to see the dust cloud fading behind him.

Then the gray grunted and went lame.

He dismounted to examine the hoof; carefully he looked over the leg for something wrong, but he could see nothing. The gray stood with the lame leg held off the ground, looking at him with unconcerned brown eyes. “Boy, why would you do such a thing?” he complained, and remounted and dug his spurs in. The gray limped along, grunting, more and more slowly; he bucked half-heartedly at the spurs.

Curley looked back at the oncoming dust. It was a big posse. The gray stopped and would go no more, and he sighed and dismounted, shot the horse through the head, and sat down on the slack, warm haunch to wait in the sun. “Boy,” he said again, “why would you do such a thing?” His hand fumbled once more after his mouth organ which he had left behind him.

36. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE

April 10, 1881

IT IS impossible to watch these things happening and feel nothing. Each of us is involved to some degree, inwardly or outwardly. Nerves are scraped raw by courses of events, passions are aroused and rearoused in partisanships that, even in myself, transcend rationality.

It must be a wracking experience to stand before a mob as Schroeder and Gannon did last night; to do it not once, but twice, and to be trampled at the last by men no more than crazed beasts. I write this trying to understand Carl Schroeder, as well as in memoriam to him. I see now that his office had served to ennoble him, as it had done with Canning before him. We gave him not enough credit while he lived, and I think we did not because he was too much one of us. God bless his soul; he deserves some small and humble bit of heaven, which is all he would have asked for himself.

He was an equable and friendly man. Perhaps he was inadequate to his position here. Yet who would have been wholly adequate except, perhaps, Blaisedell himself? I think a part of Schroeder’s increasing strength (has it not been a part of all our increasing strength?) was Blaisedell’s presence and example here. I think he must have been badly shaken by Blaisedell’s decline from Grace. As he drew his strength from Blaisedell, so must he have been all too rawly aware of the cruel vicissitudes of error, or rumored error, or of mere foul lies, to which such dispensers of rough-and-ready law as Blaisedell, and himself, were prey.

Poor Schroeder, to die not only in an undignified street scrape, but in one of the multitudinous arguments over Blaisedell and McQuown. Buck Slavin heard the quarrel, and saw it at the end; he says it seems to him that Carl was as much at fault in it as Curley Burne. He says there was a deeper grudge there than the mere quarrel, but I think of my own feelings of that time last night, and know it would have taken little to rouse me to a deadly rage.

Buck was present at the General Peach almost until Schroeder’s death, and says that Schroeder chided himself bitterly for being tricked with what is called the “road agent’s spin.” This is a device whereby the pistol is proffered butt foremost, and then spun rapidly upon the trigger finger and discharged when the muzzle is level. It is a foul trick. Curley Burne has had more friends in this town by far than any other creature of McQuown’s. He has only sworn enemies now.

Gannon did not accompany the posse that went out after Burne, perhaps, as Buck suggests, because Curley has been an especial friend of his, or perhaps, as the doctor says, because Carl expressed a wish that Gannon remain with him in his final hour. The miners set fire to the Glass Slipper shortly after Schroeder’s death and Gannon has been much occupied in putting out the fire. The feeling is that he was too much occupied with it, and that his proper business lay with the posse. It is to be hoped that his office will be as ennobling to Gannon as it has been to his last two predecessors.

I think that Carl Schroeder would have been pleased to know that his death has taken men’s minds away from Blaisedell’s failure before the jail, and concentrated hate upon one man. I fervently hope that the posse will catch Curley Burne and hang him to the nearest tree.

I burn the midnight oil, I bleed myself upon this page in inky blots and scratchings. How can I know men’s hearts without knowing my own? I peel back the layers one by one, like an onion, and find only more layers, smaller and meaner each than the last. What dissemblers we are, how we seek to conceal from our innermost beings our motives, to call the meanest of them virtue, to label that which in another we can plainly see as devilish, in ourselves angelic, what in another is greed, in ourselves righteousness, etc. Observe. The Glass Slipper is burned, gutted to char and stink, and the pharmacy beside it saved by a miracle. The fire was set by the miners; they have got back at Morgan. They are devils, I say, to so endanger a town as tinder-dry as this. But is that it? No, they have endangered my property. I will forgive being shamed, discountenanced, and insulted; threaten my property and I will never forgive. Take everything from me but my money. With money I can buy back what I need, the rest is worthless.

Poor devils, I suppose they had to destroy something. Men rise to the heights of courage and ingenuity when they avenge their slights or frustrations. It has always been so. It is comforting to some to see men work together with a good will against catastrophe. Humanity at its best, they say. Yet against, as I have written. When will humanity work with all its strength, its courage and ingenuity, and all its heart, for?

Morgan is burnt out. Will he rebuild, or accept this as earnest of the widespread sentiment against him here and depart our valley of Concord and Happiness? And in that case what of Blaisedell, who has been banking faro for him? Will he go too, or will he undertake the position of Marshal here again? I am sure the Citizens’ Committee intends to ask, or beg, him to reassume his office, next time it meets.