“Not many like her. She is one to make the most of a man.”
“I’m sorry you can’t stay to stand for me.”
“Not in Warlock,” he said. “I’m sorry too, Clay.” He wondered what Clay thought he wanted, married to Miss Jessie Marlow — to be some kind of solid citizen, with all the marshaling and killing behind him and his guns locked away in a trunk? He wondered if Clay knew Miss Jessie would not allow it, or, if she would, that the others would not. And what was he, Clay’s friend, going to do? I will put you far enough ahead of the game, Clay, so you can quit, he thought. I can do that, and I will do it yet.
“Morg,” Clay said, looking at him and frowning. “What got into you just now?”
Morgan picked up his glass with almost frantic hurry. “How!” he said loudly, and grinned like an idiot at his friend. “We had better drink to love and marriage, Clay. I almost forgot.”
Grief gnawed behind his eyes and clawed in his throat as he watched Clay’s face turned reserved and sad. Clay nodded in acceptance and grasped his own glass. “How, Morg,” he said.
III
When he returned to his room at the hotel it was like walking into a furnace. He threw the window up and opened the door to try to get a breeze to blow the heat out. He had started to strip off his coat when Ben Gough, the clerk, appeared.
“Some miner just brought this by and wanted to know was you here.” Gough handed him a small envelope and departed. The envelope smelled of sachet, and was addressed in a thin, spidery script: Mr. Thomas Morgan. He tore open the flap and read the note inside.
June 1, 1881
Dear Mr. Morgan,
Will you please meet me as soon as possible in the little corral in back of “The General Peach,” to discuss a matter of great importance.
Jessie Marlow
He put his coat back on, and the note in his pocket. He was pleased that she had sent for him — the Angel of Warlock summoning the Black Rattlesnake of Warlock. Probably she would tell him that what she wanted for a wedding present was his departure.
He went outside, across Main Street, and down Broadway. The sun burned his shoulders through his coat. It was the hottest day yet, and it showed no signs of cooling off now in the late afternoon. There were a number of puffy, ragged-edged clouds to the east over the Bucksaws, some with gray bottoms. When he reached the corner of Medusa Street he saw that one was fastened to the brown slopes by a gray membrane. It was rain, he thought, in amazement. He walked on down past the carpintería and turned in the rutted tracks that led to the rear of the General Peach.
There was a small corral there, roofed with red tile. He entered, removing his hat and striking a cobweb aside with it. There was a loud, metallic drone of flies. The June-bride-to-be was sitting on a bale of straw, wearing a black skirt, a white schoolgirl’s blouse, and a black neckerchief. She sat primly, with her hands in her lap and her feet close together, her pale, big-eyed, triangular face shining with perspiration.
“It was good of you to come, Mr. Morgan.”
“I was pleased to be summoned, Miss Marlow.” He moved toward her and propped a boot on the bale upon which she sat; she was a little afraid he would get too close, he saw. “What can I do for you, ma’am?”
“For Clay.”
“For Clay,” he said, and nodded. “My, it is hot, isn’t it? The kind of day where you think what is there to stop it from just getting hotter and hotter? Till we start stewing in our own blood and end up like burnt bacon.” He fanned himself with his hat, and saw the ends of her hair moving in the breeze he had created. “Clay has told me you are being married,” he said. “I certainly wish you every happiness, Miss Marlow.”
“Thank you, Mr. Morgan.” She smiled at him, but severely, as though he were to be pardoned for changing the subject since he was observing the amenities. Each time he talked to her she seemed to him a slightly different person; this time she reminded him of his Aunt Eleanor, who had been strict about manners among gentlefolk.
“Mr. Morgan, I am very disturbed by some talk that I have heard.”
“What can that be, Miss Marlow?”
“You are suspected of murdering McQuown,” she said, staring at him with her great, deep-set eyes. He saw in them how she had steeled herself to this.
“Am I?” he said.
He watched her maiden-aunt pose shatter. “Don’t—” she said shakily. “Don’t you see how terrible that is for Clay?”
“There is always talk going around Warlock.”
“Oh, you must see!” she cried. “Don’t you see that it is bad enough that people should think he had something to do with your going down there and — and — Well, and even worse, that—”
“Why, I don’t know about that, Miss Marlow. I am inclined to think that whoever killed McQuown did Clay a favor. And you.”
“That is a terrible thing to say!”
“Is it? Well, Clay might be terrible dead otherwise.”
She opened her mouth as though to cry out again, but she did not. She closed it like a fish with a mouthful to mull on. He nodded to her. “McQuown was coming in here with everything Clay would have had a hard time turning a hand against. I don’t mean a bunch of cowboys dressed up to be Regulators, either. I mean Billy Gannon and most of all I mean Curley Burne.”
“They were dead,” she whispered, but she flinched back as he stared at her and he knew he had been right about Curley Burne.
“Dead pure as driven snow,” he said. “Curley Burne, that is, and Billy Gannon not quite so pure but maybe pure enough because of the talk going around Warlock. McQuown was coming in with that and he could have come alone, only he didn’t know enough to see it. Clay would have been running yet. But since he wasn’t coming alone Clay didn’t have to run, and he may be the greatest nonesuch wonder gunman of all time but he wouldn’t have lasted the front end of a minute against that crew. The man who shot McQuown did him a favor. And you.”
He heard her draw a deep breath. “Then you did kill McQuown,” she said, and now she was severe again, as though she had gotten back on track.
He shrugged. Sweat stung in his eyes.
“Well, that is past,” she said, in a stilted, girlishly high voice. “It cannot be undone. But I hope I can persuade you—” Her voice ran down and stopped; it was as though she had memorized what she was going to say to him in advance, and now she realized it did not follow properly.
“What do you want, Miss Marlow?”
She didn’t answer.
“What do you want of him?” he said. “I think you want to make a stone statue of him.”
She looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. “You cannot think me strange if I want everyone to think as highly of him as I do.”
It was fair enough, he thought. It was more than that. She had cut the ground right out from beneath him with the first genuine thing she had said. She smiled up at him. “We are on the same side, aren’t we, Mr. Morgan?”
“I don’t know.”
“We are!” Still she smiled, and her eyes looked alight. She was not so plain as he had thought, but she was a curious piece, with her face not so young as the dress she affected and the style of her hair. But her eyes were young. Maybe he could understand why Clay was taken with her.
“What if we are?”
“Mr. Morgan, you must know what people think of you. Whether it is just or not. And don’t you see—”
He broke in. “People don’t think as highly of him as they should. Because of me.”
“Yes,” she said firmly, as though at last they had come to terms and understood one another. “And everyone is too ready to criticize him,” she went on. “Condemn him, I mean. For men are jealous of him. Too many of them see him as what they should be. I don’t mean bad men — I–I mean little men. Like the deputy. Ugly, weak, cowardly little men — they have to see all their own weaknesses when they see him, and they are jealous — and spiteful.” She was breathing rapidly, staring down at her clasped hands. Then she said, “Maybe I understand what you meant when you implied he would have been helpless against McQuown, Mr. Morgan. But he is helpless against the deputy, too, because you killed McQuown for him, and the deputy is in the right pursuing it.”