“Christ!” Pike said.

It had not been as slow as all that, Gannon thought. He had never been fast, but he could shoot well enough. He felt very strange; he remembered feeling like this when he had had the typhoid and had waked finally with the fever broken. Then, too, all the outer things had seemed removed and unimportant, and as though slowed somehow, so there was much time to examine all that went on around him, and especially any movement seen in its entirety, component by component. Then, as now, there had been a very close connection between the willed act, and the arm, and hand and fingers that were the objects of the will; so that, too, his life and breathing had become conscious acts, and he could almost feel the shape of his beating heart, and watch the slow expansion and collapse of his lungs.

The judge drank, spluttered, and went into a coughing fit. Pike pounded him upon the back until he stopped. “They must be about through burying by now,” Pike said, scowling.

Gannon nodded.

“You just sit, son,” the judge said, in a choked voice. His eyes were watering, and he drank again and wiped his mouth. “You just let them go on out if they see fit, now, you hear?” he said feebly. “There is nothing gained anywhere if you are shot dead.”

“You let us handle them if they are calky,” Pike said. In a placating tone he said, “No, now, not vigilantes either, Johnny. There is Blaisedell down there and no reason for him not to be, and just some of the rest of us around. Now you hear, Johnny?”

“Why, I’m not going to hide in here,” Gannon said, and felt the necessity to grin, and, after it, the grin itself. He looked at the judge, whose face sagged in dark, ugly, bloated lines. “Nothing is gained if I sit it out in here, either.”

“You don’t have to prove anything,” Pike said. “You leave it to us, now. There is some of us got to stand now like we never did for Bill Canning. You leave us that.”

Gannon didn’t answer, for there was no point in arguing it further. Pike said, “They ought to be about through out there. I am going down.” He hitched at his shell belt, loosened his Colt in its holster, gave Gannon another of his confused and accusing glances, and disappeared.

When Pike was gone Gannon took out his own Colt again, and began to replace the heavy, vicious, pleasingly shaped cartridges in the cylinder.

“Blaisedell was right,” the judge said. “He said I would put too much on you and I have done it.”

“You put nothing on me, Judge. There is just a time and a place for a show. You know that.”

“But what place, and what time? Who is to know that?” The judge swung a hand clumsily to try to capture a fly that planed past his head. He contemplated his empty hand with bloodshot eyes, and made a contemptuous sound. “I saw you draw just now, son. Time you got that piece out, Jack Cade or either of the Haggins or any fumble-handed plowboy would have shot you through like a colander and had a drink to celebrate and rode halfway back to San Pablo.” He sighed heavily and said, “I thank you for saying I didn’t put it on you. Are you scared?”

Gannon shrugged. He felt not so much fright as a curious, flat anxiety. He was only afraid that it would be Jack Cade.

“I’m scared for you,” the judge said. “I don’t think you have got a Chinaman’s chance unless you let Pike and the marshal and those give you a chance. You too proud for that?”

“Proud’s nothing to do with it,” he said. It touched him that the judge felt responsible for this. “Well, maybe a little,” he said. “But if a deputy is going to be worth anything he can’t hole up when there is trouble.”

“All men are the same in the end,” the judge said. “Afraider to be thought a coward than afraid to die.”

Gannon rubbed his itching palm on the thigh of his pants, grimacing at the almost pleasant pain. The judge held the bottle up before him and squinted at it.

“Some men drink to warm themselves,” he said. “I drink to cool the brain. I drink to get the people out of it. You are nothing to me, boy. You are only a badge and an office, is all you are. Get yourself killed, it is nothing to me.”

“All right,” he said.

The judge nodded. “Just a process,” he said. “That’s all you are. What are men to me?” He rubbed his hand over his face as though he were trying to scrape his features off. “I told them they had put Blaisedell there, and put him there for the rest of us. I talk, and it makes me puke to hear myself talking. For Blaisedell is a man too. I wish to God I didn’t feel for him, or you, or any man. But do you know what whoever it was that shot down McQuown took away from Blaisedell? Who was it, do you suppose?”

Gannon shook his head.

“What they took away from him,” the judge went on. “Ah, I can’t stand to see what they will make of him. They will turn him into a mad dog in the end. And I can’t stand to see what they will do to you now, just when you—” He drank again. “Whisky used to take the people out of it,” he said, after a long time.

Footsteps came along the planks outside. Buck Slavin appeared in the doorway, carrying a shotgun. Kate entered a step behind him. “They are coming,” Kate said.

Gannon heard it now, the dry, protesting creak of a wagon wheel and the muffled pad of many hoofs in the dust. He got to his feet, and as he did, Buck raised the shotgun and pointed it at him.

“Now, you are not going out there, Deputy,” Buck said patronizingly. “There are people to deal with this. You just sit.”

“What the devil is this?” the judge cried.

Gannon began to shake with rage; for they had thought he would be glad of an excuse, and Kate had begged it and Buck furnished it. Kate stood there staring at him with her hands clutched together at her waist.

He started forward. “Get out of my way, Buck Slavin!”

Buck thrust the shotgun muzzle at him. “You will just camp in that cell awhile, Deputy!”

Gannon caught hold of the muzzle with both hands and shoved it back so that the butt slammed into Buck’s groin. Buck yelled with pain and Gannon wrenched the shotgun away and reversed it. Buck was bent over with his hands to his crotch.

“You march in there!” he said hoarsely. He grasped Buck’s shoulder and propelled him into the cell, locked the door, and tossed the key ring onto the peg. He leaned the shotgun against the wall. He didn’t look at Kate. The hoofs and the squealing wagon wheel sounded more loudly in the street.

“Now see here, Gannon!” Buck said in an agonized voice.

“Shut up!”

“Oh, you are brave!” Kate cried. “Oh, you will show the world you are as brave as Blaisedell, won’t you? I thought you had more sense than the rest behind that ugly, beak-nosed face. But go ahead and die!”

“That was a fool trick, Buck!” the judge said. “Interfering with an officer in the performance of his duty. And you ought to be jailed with him, ma’am, only it wouldn’t be decent!”

“Shut up, you drunken old fraud!” Kate said. Her eyes caught Gannon’s at last, and he saw that she had come to save him, almost as she had once saved Morgan; he felt awed and strangely ashamed for her, and for himself. He started out.

“We’ll send flowers,” Buck said.

“Why?” Kate whispered, as Gannon passed her. “Why?”

“Because if a deputy can’t walk around this town when he wants, then nobody can.”

Outside, the sun was warm and painfully bright in his eyes as he gazed up at the new sign hanging motionless above his head. The sound of the wagon had ceased. He remembered to compose his face into the mask of wooden fearlessness, that was the proper mask, before he turned to the east.

The wagon had stopped before the gunshop in the central block. The San Pablo men had dismounted and there was a cluster of them around the wagon, and a few were entering the Lucky Dollar. Faces turned toward him. Some of the men, who had been moving toward the saloon, stopped, others moved quickly away from the wagon; they glanced his way and then across Main Street.