“Kate,” he said in a voice he could hardly recognize. “That is not so. You know well enough I have loved—”
“Don’t say that!” she broke in fiercely. Her face looked very red in the lamplight, and her black eyes glittered. “I have never heard you lie before and don’t start for me. I know you haven’t been to the French Palace,” she said, “because I asked.” She said it cruelly. “I wanted to know if you were waiting for a little country virgin or not. And I—”
“That’s not so, Kate!” he cried in anguish.
Slowly the lines of her face relaxed until it was as gentle and full of pity as that of the little madonna in her room. He had never seen it this way before. “No,” she said gently. “No, I guess it isn’t. I guess you thought going to a whore wasn’t right. And I guess you thought that about me, too.”
“Kate — I guess I knew you felt — kindly toward me. I kind of presumed you did. I’m not a fool. But Kate—” he said, and couldn’t go on.
“But Kate?” she said.
“Well, this is where I live.”
He waited for a long time, but she did not speak. When he looked up he saw the harsh lines around her mouth again. He heard the rustle of her garments as she moved; she clasped her hands before her, staring down at him, her eyes in shadow.
“Another thing,” he said. “You have been in the jail and seen those names scratched on the wall there.” He took a deep breath. “There was something Carl used to say,” he went on. “That there wasn’t a man with his name on there that didn’t either run or get killed. And Carl used to say who was he to think he was any different? And that he wouldn’t run. I think he even knew who was going to kill him.”
“I’ve got money, Deputy,” Kate said. “Do you want to come with me? Deputy, this town is going to die and there is no reason for anybody to die with it. I am asking you to take the stage to Bright’s City with me tomorrow. Out of here, out of the territory.”
“Kate—” he groaned.
“Do you want to, or not?”
“Yes, but Kate — I can’t, now.”
“Killed or run!” she cried. “Deputy, you can run with me. I have got six thousand dollars in the bank in Denver. We can—” She stopped, and her face twisted in anger and contempt, or grief. “What kind of a fool am I?” she said, more quietly. “To beg you. Deputy, you can’t give me anything I haven’t had a thousand times and better. I can give you what you’ve never had. But you will lie down and die instead. Do you want to die more?”
“I don’t want to die at all. I only have to stay here.” He beat his bandaged hand upon his knee. “Anyway till there is a proper sheriff down here, and all that.”
“Why?” she cried at him “Why? To show you are a man? I can show you you are more a man than that.”
“No.” He got to his feet; he rubbed his sweating hands on his jeans. “No, Kate, a man is not just a man that way. I—”
“Because you killed a Mexican once,” she broke in. Her tear-shining eyes were fastened to him. “Is that why?”
“No, not that either any more. Kate, I have set out to do a thing.” He did not know how to say it any better. “Well, I guess I have been lucky. That’s part of it, surely. But I have made something of the deputy in this town, and I can’t leave it go back down again. Not till things are — better. I didn’t drop it a while back when I was afraid, and, Kate, I can’t now because I would rather go off with you”—he groped helplessly for a phrase—“than anything else in the world.”
He wet his dry lips. “Maybe to you Warlock is not worth anything. But it is, and I am deputy here and it is something I am proud of. There are things to do here yet that I think I can do. Kate, I can’t quit till it is done.”
He saw her nod once, her face caught halfway between cruel contempt and pity. He moved toward her and put out a hand to touch her.
“Don’t touch me!” she said. “I am tired of dead men!” She stepped to the door and jerked it open. The bottom of her skirt flipped around the door as she disappeared, pulling it half closed behind her.
He took up the lamp and followed her, stopping in the hallway and holding the lamp high to give her a little light as she hurried down the stairs away from him, and, when she was gone, stared steadily at the faces that peered out at him from the other doorways until the faces were drawn back and the doors closed to leave him alone.
59. MORGAN SHOWS HIS HAND
MORGAN stood at the open window with his tongue mourning after a lost tooth and the night wind blowing cool on his bruised face. The night was a soft, purplish black, like the back of an old fireplace, the stars like jewels embedded in the soot. He stood tensely waiting until he saw the dark figure outlined against the dust of the street, crossing toward the hotel. Then he cursed and flung his aching body down into the chair, and took out a cigar. His hand shook with the match and he felt his face twisting with a kind of rhythmic tic as he listened to the footsteps coming up the stairs, coming along the hall. Knuckles cracked against the panel of his door. “Morg.”
He waited until Clay rapped again. Then he said, “Come on in.”
Clay entered, taking off his hat and bowing his head as he passed through the doorway. There was a strip of court plaster on his cheek, and his face was knuckle-marked enough. Morgan looked straight into his eyes and said, “You damned fool!”
“What was I supposed to do?” Clay said, closing the door behind him. “Post you out because you were going anyhow?”
The blue, violent stare pierced him, and his own eyes were forced down before it. “Why not?”
“Would you kill two men to serve a trick like that, Morg?”
“Why not?” he said again. His tongue probed and poked at the torn, pulpy socket. “One,” he said. “I had to take scarface first and Lew crawled for it.” With an effort he looked back to meet the blue gaze. “I told you I couldn’t let a man get away with burning me out!”
“I asked you to leave that alone.”
“Post me then, damn you!”
Clay moved over to sit on the edge of the bed, with his shoulders slumped and his face sagging in spare, flat planes. He shook his head. “I couldn’t anyhow. I am not marshall any more.”
“Well, I will back a play I have made. I don’t go unless you post me.”
Clay shrugged.
“What would it cost you? It might win you something.”
“No.”
“What does Miss Jessie Marlow say?”
Clay frowned a little. He said in a level voice, “What would you try to do this for, Morg?”
Because I never liked to look a fool, he thought. He had never hated it so much as he did now. “God damn it, Clay! A whole town full of clodhopping idiots aching for you to play the plaster hero for them one time again, and post out the Black Rattlesnake of Warlock. Which is me. And why not? It would have pleased every damned person I know of here except maybe you. Maybe you are yellow, though — a damned hollow, yellow Yankee. I hate to see you show it for these here!”
“They can have it that way if they want it. I have quit.”
“You could have posted me and quit after the big pot when I’d run.”
“It wasn’t a game to cheat and make a fraud of,” Clay said. His face looked pasty pale beneath the bruises. He shrugged again, tiredly. “Or maybe it was and it took a thing like this to show me. And maybe if it could be that, it is time and past time to quit.”