“Blaisedell.” Someone said it quite loudly, or else many whispered it in chorus. Blaisedell debouched from Grant Street into Main. He waited there a moment, almost uncertainly, with his shadow lying long and narrow before him. He wore black broadcloth with white linen, a string tie; beneath his open coat the broad buckle of his belt was visible, his weapons were not. With almost a twinge of fear I watched him start forward. He carried his arms most casually at his sides, walked slowly but with long, steady strides. Dust plumed about his feet and whitened his boots and his trouser bottoms. Morgan nodded to him as he passed, but I saw no answering nod.

“He’ll just have a little walk and then we’ll go home,” someone near me whispered.

Blaisedell crossed the intersection of Broadway, and from all around I heard a concerted sigh of relief. Perhaps I sighed myself, with the surety that Curley Burne was not going to appear after all. Hate can burn itself out in the first light of day as readily as love can. I could see Blaisedell’s face now very clearly, his broad mouth framed in the curve of his mustache, one of his eyebrows cocked up almost humorously, as though he, too, felt he would only have a little walk and then go home.

The sun had separated itself from the peaks of the Bucksaws by now; it glinted brilliantly upon the brass kick-plate on the hotel door. I saw Morgan, slouched in his rocking chair, raise his hand to take the cheroot from his mouth, then hold cigar and hand arrested. He leaned forward intently, and I heard a swift intake of breath from all around me, and knew that Curley Burne had appeared. I was reluctant to turn and see that this was so.

He was a hundred yards or so down Main Street. I saw Gannon, without changing his position, turn with that same slow reluctance I had felt in myself, to watch him. I found in myself, too, a grudging admiration for Burne, that he managed even now to accomplish that saunter of his we in Warlock knew so well. His shoulders were thrown back at a jaunty angle, his sombrero hung, familiarly, down his back, his flannel shirt was unbuttoned halfway to his cartridge belt as though in contempt of the morning chill, his striped pants were thrust into his boot tops. He looked very much a Cowboy. He was grinning, but even from where I was I could see his struggle to maintain that grin; it was exhausting to see it. I had to remind myself that he had murdered Carl Schroeder by a filthy trick, that he was a rustler, road agent, henchman of McQuown’s. “Dirty son of a b--!” growled one of my companions, and summed up what I had to feel, then, for Curley Burne.

He and Blaisedell were not a block apart when there was another gasp around me, as Burne broke stride. He halted, and cried out, “I have got as much right to walk this street as you, Blaisedell!” I felt ashamed for him, and, all at once, pity. Blaisedell did not stop. I saw Burne raise a hand to his shirt and wrench it open further, so that his chest and belly were exposed.

“What color?” he cried out. “What color is it?” He glanced up and around at us, the watchers, with quick, proud movements of his head. The skull-like grin never left his face. Then he started forward toward Blaisedell again. He sauntered no longer, and his hand was poised above the butt of his six-shooter. My eyes were held in awful fascination to that hand, knowing that Blaisedell would give him first draw.

It flashed down, incredibly swift; his six-shooter spat flame and smoke and my ears were shocked by the blast despite my anticipation of it — three shots in such rapid succession they were almost one report, and Burne and his weapon were obscured in smoke. Blaisedell’s own hand seemed very slow, in its turn. He fired only once.

Burne was flung back into the dust and did not move again. He had a depthless look as he lay there, as though he were now only a facsimile of himself laid like a painted cloth upon the uneven surface of the street. Blood stained his bare chest, his right arm was flung out, his smoking Colt still in his hand.

Blaisedell turned away, and as he retraced his steps I watched that marble face for — what? Some sign, I do not even know what. I saw his cheek twitch convulsively, I noticed that he had to thrust twice for his holster before he was able to reseat his Colt there. I could not see whether it was gold-handled or not.

The doctor appeared in the street, to walk through the dust to where Burne lay, carrying his black bag. A short, stocky, bowed figure in his black suit, he looked sad and weary. Gannon did not move from his position in the jail doorway. His eyes, from where I watched, looked like burnt holes in his head. Other men were coming out along the far boardwalk, and there was no longer silence.

“Center-shotted the b— as neat as you please,” a man near me said, as he got to his feet and spat tobacco juice over the parapet.

“Give him three shots,” said another. “Couldn’t give a man any more than that. I call that fair.”

“Give him all the time in the world,” agreed a third.

But I could feel in their voices what I myself felt, and feel more strongly now. For all that Blaisedell had given Burne three shots, for all he had given him all the time in the world, we knew we had not witnessed a gunfight but an execution. I leaned upon the parapet and looked down upon the men who had surrounded the mortal remains of Curley Burne, and I saw, when one of them moved aside, a little patch of bloody flesh. I thought of that gesture he had made, opening his shirt and confronting us with the color of his belly; showing us, more than Blaisedell.

It had been an execution, and at our order. Perhaps we had changed our mind at the last moment, but there was no reprieve, no way, before the end, to turn our thumbs up instead of down, and save the gladiator. And I think we felt cheated. There should have been some catharsis, for Carl Schroeder had been avenged, and an evil man had received his just deserts. There was no catharsis, there was only revulsion and each man afraid, suddenly, to look into the face of the one next to him. And there was the realization that Curley Burne had not been an evil man, the remembrance that we had once, all of us, liked and enjoyed him to some degree; and there was the cancerous suspicion spreading among us that Gannon might not, after all, have been lying.

I feel drained by an over-violent purge to my emotions, that has taken from me part of my manhood, or my humanity. I feel scraped raw in some inner and most precious part. The earth is an ugly place, senseless, brutal, cruel, and ruthlessly bent only upon the destruction of men’s souls. The God of the Old Testament rules a world not worth His trouble, and He is more violent, more jealous, more terrible with the years. We are only those poor, bare, forked animals Lear saw upon his dismal heath, in pursuit of death, pursued by death.

I am ashamed not only of this execution I myself have in part ordered, but of being a man. I think the climax to my shame for all of us came when Blaisedell was walking back up the street, dragging his arrow-thin, arrow-long shadow behind him, and Morgan came down from the veranda of the Western Star to put a hand on his shoulder, no doubt to congratulate his friend. At that moment I heard someone near me on my rooftop whisper — I did not see who, but if I believed in devils I would have been sure it was the voice of one come to yet more hideously corrupt our souls than we have ourselves corrupted them this day — whisper, “There is the dirty dog he ought to kill.”

37. GANNON ANSWERS A QUESTION

“COME IN, Deputy,” Kate said. She was tall in her white shirt with a velvet band around the collar, and her thickly pleated black skirt. Her hair hung loose around her head, softening the angular lines of her face. She looked neither pleased nor displeased to see him. “Haven’t left town yet?” she said.