“But who is to stand in front of him?” she said, just as Pike Skinner ran in.

Pike leaped on Gannon, laughing and yelling and hugging him; then the others came until the jail was filled with them, all of them talking at once and coming up to slap his shoulder or shake his good hand, to examine and exclaim over the bullet scar on his belt, and ask what Chet had had to say. He didn’t see Kate leave, he was just aware suddenly that she was gone, and the judge gone. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and was passing it around, and others were singing, “Good-by! Good-by! Good-by, Regulators, Good-by!…”

He thanked Pike, and thanked the others one by one as they came up to him. “Surely, Horse, surely,” Peter Bacon said. “It was a pleasure to see you and worth more than just standing there holding my boots down with a Winchester for ballast.” The whisky bottle was forced upon him time and again. Someone had let Buck out of the cell. He thought, with a sinking twisting at his heart, that there had not been such jollity and merriment as this in Warlock for a long time now.

He heard someone ask where Blaisedell was and French replied that he had not come up with them. He had wanted to thank Blaisedell.

He flinched as someone slapped him on the shoulder, and in the process brushed against his hand. Hap Peters stuck a finger through the hole in his shell belt. “Drink!” Mosbie was shouting, waving the bottle at him. “Drink to the rootingest-tootingest-shootingest-beatingest deputy this side of Timbuctoo!”

Mosbie forced the bottle on him, but he gagged on the sour whisky. Suddenly he could not stand it any more, and he made his way outside, and almost ran along the boardwalk to his room in Birch’s roominghouse.

BOOK THREE: THE ANTAGONISTS

49. GANNON WALKS ON THE RIGHT

GANNON was alone in the jail when Blaisedell appeared in the doorway, blotting out the late sun for a moment. “Evening, Deputy,” he said.

“Marshal,” he said, rising. He had had little occasion to speak to Blaisedell this last week. He had thanked him for his help, and Blaisedell had made acknowledgment in that uncommunicative and not quite arrogant way he had. Since then he had seen the Marshal only at a distance, usually under the arcade before the Billiard Parlor; and one night in the Lucky Dollar when there had been a quarrel between two of the Medusa strikers, which Blaisedell had already settled when he arrived.

“Mind if I sit?” Blaisedell asked.

Gannon indicated the chair beside the cell door, and pivoted his own around to face it. Blaisedell seated himself, tipped the chair back against the wall, and grasped one of the bars of the cell door to balance himself. “Quiet lately,” he said.

“Been some rustling. Blaikie’s lost a few head.”

“I meant in town.”

“Oh; yes.”

Blaisedell frowned and said, “I wanted to ask you about Haggin’s brother.”

“Chet? Well, he came in that day to say he didn’t hold it against — anyone,” Gannon said, and wondered if that was what Blaisedell had meant.

“But Cade means to take it on himself?”

“He said so.” Gannon licked his lips.

“A mean-looking one,” Blaisedell said, and Gannon felt the full force of his blue eyes. “Backshooter,” Blaisedell went on. “Worried about him?”

“I guess you can’t worry about every man that’s down on you.”

“Some can.” Blaisedell’s lips bent into a stiff, almost shy grin. “Maybe you are just not the worrying kind.”

“Why, I can worry with the best of them, Marshal.” He forced a laugh, and Blaisedell chuckled too. It occurred to him all at once that Blaisedell was trying to make contact with him in some way, and immediately what he had hoped was going to be an easy conversation for him grew taut with strain.

“Go home and puke afterwards?” Blaisedell asked. He did not ask it humorously; it was a question of consequence.

“Not till night.”

Blaisedell nodded as though satisfied. “About Cade,” he said. “If he has taken it on against you I guess the Citizens’ Committee would want to post him. If—” He stopped as Gannon shook his head.

“I guess not, Marshal,” he said.

“No?” Blaisedell said, and now his voice had an edge to it. “Standing on your own feet now, is it?”

“It is not that so much,” he said with difficulty, looking down at his bandaged hand. “It is posting I am starting to balk at. It seemed it worked for a while and it was all we had here. But something happened — I don’t know what happened. I guess I don’t know how to say this very well, Marshal.”

“Just say it,” Blaisedell said.

He felt the strain again, and he grimaced down at his hand. “I don’t say it is the killing that’s so bad in itself,” he went on. “I mean, when people wear guns like they do, they are going to use them. But it is that after some point the killing makes people turn against what was supposed to be done for them in the first place. It is hard, and it is unfair, but it is so. I guess I mean you, Marshal. You have stood for law and order here, so if they turn against you, they—”

“I know all that,” Blaisedell said. It seemed a rebuke, and it angered Gannon that this thought, so hard to put into words, should be brushed aside. He glanced up to see a bitterness in Blaisedell’s face that shocked him; but instantly it was gone, so that he could not be sure he had really seen it.

“Go on, Deputy,” Blaisedell said easily. “I guess there is more.”

“It would be a poor thing if this town was to turn against you,” he said. “Because Warlock is a safer place since you came here. And there is more to it than that, for people have got some starch into them to stand up to things. Like Carl. Why, like the other day! There was others than you that let me make that play, and come out of it. But those others wouldn’t have been standing by if you hadn’t done what you’ve done in this town.

“But there is that point, Marshal,” he went on. He managed to meet the impassive blue stare. “It is like a kid with a big brother to run the bad kids off him. Some time the big brother is going to have to let the kid fight for himself. I mean even if he gets whipped—”

“That is you you are talking about,” Blaisedell broke in.

“No, it is the deputy here. Which only happens to be me.”

“Do you think you are ready to take it on, Deputy?”

He almost groaned, for it was the question. He shook his head tiredly and said, “I don’t know.”

“I don’t think you are ready yet,” Blaisedell said. “But then I didn’t think you were before the Regulators came in, either.”

He saw Blaisedell smile a little, and he supposed it had been a compliment. “I think I will stay on awhile,” Blaisedell said. “It is not time yet.” He said it with a certain inflection and Gannon thought he might be talking of himself now.

He remembered Blaisedell’s telling the judge that he would know when it was time to go, but now he wondered what time Blaisedell had meant, Warlock’s or his own. “Surely,” he said quickly. “I don’t think it is time yet, either. But I have got to be ready sometime. I couldn’t ever have been ready at all if you hadn’t been here.”

Blaisedell blinked. After a long time he said, “I see you have taken up with Kate Dollar.”

Gannon felt himself blushing, and Blaisedell continued, still gazing at the names on the wall. “She is a fine woman. I knew her back awhile.”

“She said.”

“Down on me,” Blaisedell said. “I killed a friend of hers in Fort James.”

She said; this time he did not say it aloud.

“It was shoot or get shot,” Blaisedell said. “Or I thought it was. I had been edgy about things.” He was silent for a time, and Gannon remembered what Kate had told him about it. He had thought she must be telling the truth because she had sounded so certain; but now he wondered about it just because Blaisedell sounded so uncertain.