He did not think he would do more today than test the water with his foot, to see how cold it was.
The pattern of light was broken again; he glanced up and nodded to Buck Slavin, who had come in. Slavin nodded back, hostilely. Look out, he thought, with contempt; I will turn you to stone. “Afternoon,” Slavin said, and went on down the bar. Look out, I will corrupt you if you even speak to me. He could see the faces of the men along the bar watching him in the glass; he could feel the hate like dust itching beneath his collar. From time to time Taliaferro would appear from his office — to see if he had begun to ride the faro game yet, and Haskins, the half-breed pistolero from the French Palace, watched him from the bar, in profile to him, with his thin mustache and the scar across his brown chin like a shoemaker’s seam, his Colt thrust into his belt.
He nodded with exaggerated courtesy to Haskins, poured a little more whisky in his glass, and sipped it as he watched the patterns of light. He heard the rumble of hoofs and wheels in the street as a freighter rolled by, the whip-cracks and shouts. The sun strips showed milky with dust.
Clay came in and his bowels turned coldly upon themselves. He pushed out the chair beside him with a foot and Clay sat down. The bartender came around the end of the bar in a hurry with another glass. Morgan poured whisky into Clay’s glass and lifted his own, watching Clay’s face, which was grave. “How?” he said.
“How,” Clay said, and nodded and drank. Clay grinned a little, as though he thought it was the thing to do, and then glanced around the Lucky Dollar. Morgan saw the faces in the mirror turn away. He listened to the quiet, multiple click of chips. “It is quiet these days,” Clay said.
Morgan nodded and said, “Dull with McQuown dead.” He supposed Clay knew, although there was no way of telling. Clay was turning his glass in his hands; the bottom made a small scraping sound on the table top.
“Yes,” Clay said, and did not look at him.
“Look at scarface over there,” he said. “Lew can’t make up his mind whether to throw him at me or not.”
Clay looked, and Haskins saw him looking. His brown face turned red.
“Before I go after Lew,” Morgan said.
“I asked you to leave that alone, Morg.”
He sighed. “Well, it is hard when a son of a bitch burns your place down. And hard to see the jacks so pleased because they think one of them did it.”
Clay chuckled.
Well, he had backed off that, he thought. He said, “I saw Kate last night. She is gone on that deputy — Kate and her damned puppy-dogs. This one kind of reminds me of Cletus, too.”
“I don’t see it,” Clay said.
“Just the way it sets up, I guess it is.”
Clay’s face darkened. “I guess I don’t know what you mean, Morg. It seems like a lot lately I don’t know what you are talking about. What’s the matter, Morg?”
I have got a belly ache, he observed to himself, and my feet are freezing off besides. He did not think that he could do it now. “Why, I get to thinking back on things that have happened,” he said. “Sitting around without much to do. I guess I talk about things without letting the other fellow in on what I’ve been thinking.”
He leaned back easily. “For instance, I was just remembering way back about that old Tejano in Fort James I skinned in a poker game. Won all his clothes, and there he was, stamping around town in his lousy, dirty long-handles with his shell belt and his boots on — he wouldn’t put those in the pot. Remember that? I forget his name.”
“Hurst,” Clay said.
“Hurst. The sheriff got on him about going around that way. ‘Indecent!’ he yelled. ‘Why, shurf, I’ve been sewed inside these old long-johns for three years now and I’m not even sure I have got any skin underneath. Or I’d had them in the pot too, and then where’d we be?’
“Remember that?” he said, and laughed, and it hurt him to see Clay laughing with him. “Remember that?” he said again. “I was thinking about that. And how people get sewed up into things even lousier and dirtier than those long-handles of Hurst’s.”
He went on hurriedly, before Clay could speak. “And I was remembering back of that to that time in Grand Fork when those stranglers had me. They had me in a hotel room with a guard while they were trying to catch George Diamond and hang him with me. Kate splashed a can of kerosene around in the back and lit up, and came running upstairs yelling fire and got everybody milling and running down to see, and then she laid a little derringer of hers on the vigilante watching me. She got me out of that one. Like you did here, you and Jessie Marlow. I have never liked the idea of getting hung, and I owe Kate one, and you and Miss Jessie one.”
“What is this talk of owing?” Clay said roughly. He poured himself more whisky. “You can take it the other way too, Morg — that time Hynes and those got the drop on me. But I hadn’t thought there was any owing between us.”
No? he thought. It would have pleased him once to know that there was no owing between them; it did not please him now, for debts could be canceled, but if there were no debts then nothing could be canceled at all.
“Why, there are things owed,” he said slowly. And then he said, “I mean to Kate.”
Clay’s cheeks turned hectically red. Clay said in an uncertain voice, “Morg, I used to feel like I knew you. But I don’t know you now. What—”
“I meant about the deputy,” he said. He could not do it. “She is scared,” he said, and despised himself. “She is scared you and the deputy are going to come to it.”
“Is that what you have been working around to asking me?”
“I’m not asking you. I’m just telling you what Kate asked me.”
“There is going to be no trouble between the deputy and me,” Clay said stiffly. “You can tell Kate that.”
“I already told her that.”
Clay nodded; the color faded from his cheeks. The flat line of his mouth bent a little. “Foolishness,” he said.
“Foolishness,” Morgan agreed. “My, I have a time saying anything straight out, don’t I?”
Clay’s face relaxed. He finished the whisky in his glass. Then he said abruptly, “Jessie and me are getting married, Morg. If you are staying maybe you would stand up for me?”
It seemed to him it had been a long time coming, what he knew was coming. But he would not stand up for Clay this time. “When?” he said.
“Why, in about a week, she said. I have to get a preacher down from Bright’s City.”
“I guess I won’t be staying that long.”
“Won’t you?” Clay said, and he sounded disappointed.
He could not stay and stand up for Clay, and give the proper wedding gift to him and to his bride; not both. “No, I guess I can’t wait,” he said. “You will be married half a dozen times before you are through — a wonder like you. I will stand up for you at one of the others. Besides, there’s an old saying — gain a wife and lose your friend. What a man I used to travel with said. He said he had been married twice and it was the same both times. First wife ran off with his partner, and number two got him worked into a fuss with another one — shot him and had to make tracks himself.”
Clay was looking the other way. “I know she is not your kind of woman, Morg. But I’ll ask you to like her because I do.”
“I admire the lady!” he protested. “It is not every man that gets a crack at a real angel. It’s fine, Clay,” he said. “She is quite a lady.”
“She is a lady. I guess I have never known one like her before.”