His voice sounded very flat when he spoke. “Clay, do you think it is just McQuown coming in? It is all San Pablo.”

“It is between McQuown and me.”

“Surely. The rest will faint at the sight of those gold-handles.”

He heard the paper rustle behind him. “I won’t need help this time, Morg,” Clay said.

Damned fool, he thought, not even angrily; damned fool. But there was no use in calling Clay a damned fool, no use arguing. He saw what he must do. He had told Kate he would not throw Clay down, but he must throw him down this time.

“Are you moving on, Morg?” Clay asked, in an expressionless voice.

Thank you, but no thanks, and why don’t you move on while you are at it? It must be Miss Jessie Marlow speaking. You used to be yourself, Clay Blaisedell, he thought bitterly, staring out at the moonlight pale as milk in Warlock. Now they have talked you into being Clay Blaisedell instead. “You don’t mind if I stay and watch, do you?” he said. “Buy you a drink of whisky after, to settle your nerves. Or pall-bear.”

“You understand about it, don’t you, Morg?”

“Surely. I can’t hurt you if I’m not in it, and I have hurt you enough here.”

Clay made a disgusted sound. “That’s foolishness. Don’t pretend you don’t understand about this. This is on me alone.”

Morgan did not turn from the window. The stars were lost in the moonlight; he could make out only a few dull specks of them. “Well, you won’t mind if I don’t move on right away, will you?” he said. “I have got business here still.”

“What’s that, Morg?”

He did not know why he should feel so ugly now. He turned to face Clay, and grinned and said, “It wasn’t jacks that burnt the Lucky Dollar, you know.”

“It wasn’t?”

“Haven’t you noticed Taliaferro lately? He has got that pistolero from the French Palace tied on his heels like a shadow.”

Clay nodded almost imperceptibly. “Did you shoot that dealer of his, Morg?”

“You mean Wax? That beat my Professor’s head in for him?”

Clay picked up his hat and held it in his lap while he dented the crown with blows from the heel of his hand, crosswise and then back to front, continuing it with a kind of abstracted attention as though there were nothing else in the world to do. But at last he said, without looking up, “I have never asked you a thing like this before.”

“Like what?”

“Leave it alone about Taliaferro.”

“All right.”

“For a favor,” Clay said. He got to his feet and put his hat on. He held the paper in his hand, and glanced toward the others on the bureau. “That’s a silly thing,” he said. “For me to be putting those up against myself. Do you know anybody you can get to do it?”

“I’ll get Basine.”

“Might as well get it over with,” Clay said. He moved toward the door.

“For a favor?”

Clay stopped. “Don’t go sour, Morg. This is nothing between you and me. I thought you would understand that.”

“Why, I suppose I do,” he said. He went to the bureau and took up the whisky bottle again. Standing with his back to Clay he poured whisky into his glass in a slow trickle until he heard the door close and Clay’s footsteps departing.

He stepped to the window then, and, in the darkness, watched the tall figure appear below him. He raised his glass and whispered, “How?” and drank deeply. “Why, Clay, I understand well enough,” he said. “But I won’t let you do it. Or McQuown.”

Abruptly he sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why, you damned sanctimonious school marm virgin bitch!” he said, to Miss Jessie Marlow. It was time he had a talk with her, and he addressed himself to her and to the whisky in his glass.

You, he said; you put Curley Burne on that list to crucify him, and I suppose you would let him stand alone against that pack of cowboys because he would look so fine? Don’t you know that McQuown has been sitting down there as patient and tricky as a hostile waiting for the right time to move? You handed him Curley Burne to move on.

“How you must hate yourself, Miss Jessie Marlow,” he mimicked, aloud. “Do you think they will curl up and die at the sight of him because he is so fine? He would curl up and die, they would blast him loose from his boots, backshot, sideshot, and frontshot too.

“Well, you saved my life, and with damned bad grace. And you wish I was gone, don’t you, and you have told him so, haven’t you? Are you satisfied with what you are making of him? You have got him so he doesn’t know himself any more. And I am the ugly toad whose life you saved because there wasn’t any way you could get out of it, and I will save his from McQuown. I suppose it would turn you to screaming to think of me doing it, and how, wouldn’t it? But what do you say, Miss Jessie Marlow?”

He laughed at her horrified face in his mind’s eye.

But damn you to hell, can you let him be, afterward? Can you ever let him be? You will have him alive. “Can you let him deal faro in a saloon?” he said aloud, mimicking her scorn again. Let be, Miss Jessie Marlow, before you have killed him dead trying to make him into a damned marble statue!

43. JOURNALS OF HENRY HOLMES GOODPASTURE

April 17, 1881

WE HAVE returned this night to a Warlock seething with surmise. Posters appeared mysteriously this morning in several places about the town — one of them upon my wall! — to the effect that Blaisedell is condemned to death for foul murder, his victims listed as Curley Burne and Billy Gannon, and the posters signed by Abraham McQuown as Chief of Regulators!

I did not see any of these, for they have been torn down, but there are tack holes in the adobe to the right of my door, and Kennon says he saw the one upon the Feed and Grain Barn. Dechine, a small rancher and neighbor of McQuown’s, was seen in town last night, and it is presumed that he was the one who affixed the posters. It is not known who tore them down, possibly they were merely wanted for keepsakes; it is variously rumored, though, that either Morgan is responsible for their disappearance, or the lamed miner who works for Miss Jessie, or Blaisedell himself.

The name of McQuown, springing to everyone’s lips again, is like the reappearance of a ghost long thought laid. Many think it is all only a practical joke, perpetrated by some townsmen, but for most of us the phrase “Chief of Regulators” rings most ominously. If it is a joke, it is a cruel one; it strikes too close to our fears, the names of Billy Gannon and Curley Burne are too aptly chosen.

There has been talk of nothing else since we returned early this evening. The town is crowded; somehow news of this nature is disseminated instantaneously throughout the valley. We, the delegation, returned full of defense and explanation of our defeat in Bright’s City; what happened to us there is of no interest to anyone.

The feeling among the more intelligent here is that these posters are probably more than a joke, but less than an open declaration of war — that it may be a gambit, a bluff, a theatrical gesture of righteousness. They have certainly done their work in arousing and confirming suspicions over the Curley Burne tragedy. The seeds they may have been intended to broadcast have fallen on rich soil. On the other hand can McQuown afford to make such a bluff if it is to be an empty one? Or is this an attempt to rouse Warlock against Blaisedell so that we ourselves will run him out, thus saving McQuown the trouble and the danger? If so, McQuown has woefully misjudged our tempers.

The miners, I understand, feel this is some trick of MacDonald’s, since MacDonald was the proprietor of the original Regulators. They feel that McQuown may have been won over by MacDonald, but that they, the Medusa strikers, are the actual quarry, and Blaisedell only a ruse.