“I served you up!” Morgan cried. He could feel the sweat on his face. “Hollow!” he cried. “Hollow as a damned plaster statue.”
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Clay said. “If it hadn’t been Bob Cletus dead to teach me a lesson, it would have been another. I learned that day a man could be too fast. I thought I had learned it,” he said.
“Damn you, Clay!” he whispered. All at once there was nothing in the world to hold to except this one thing. “Damn you! I will have my way!”
Clay shook his head almost absently. “Do you know what I wish?” he said. “I wish I was some measly deputy in some measly town a thousand miles away. I wish I was not Clay Blaisedell. Morg, you have killed men for my sake — Pat Cletus and McQuown that I know of. But I can’t thank you for it. It is the worst thing you have done to me, because it was for me, and I am more of a fraud of a thing than I knew. Morg — we think different ways, I guess.” He took up his hat; he turned his face away. When he went out he pulled the door quietly but firmly closed behind him.
“Don’t you have the dirty rotten gall to forgive me, damn you to hell!” Morgan whispered, as though Clay were still present. “You didn’t take that away too, did you? You didn’t take that!” He put his hands to his face; his mouth felt stretched like a knife wound. A burst of laughter caught and froze in his bowels like a cramp. “Well, I am sorry, Miss Jessie Marlow,” he said aloud. “But he was iron-mouthed beyond me.” You took me to the last chip, Clay, and won my pants and shirt too, and my longjohns are riveted on and too foul to bear. He shook his head in his hands. He would rather Clay had shot him through the liver than say what he had said, as he had said it, meaning what he had meant by it: We think different ways, I guess.
He pressed his hands harder to his aching face, suffocating in the sour, dead stench of himself. It was a long time before he remembered that he was lucky by trade, and that no one had ever beaten him.
60. GANNON SITS IT OUT
THE sun was standing above the Bucksaws in the first pale green light of morning as Gannon came like a sleepwalker along the echoing planks of the boardwalk, along the empty white street. The inside of the jail was like an icehouse, and he sat at the table shivering and massaging his unwashed, beard-stubbled face. He felt sluggish and unrested, and his blood as slow and cold in the morning chill of the adobe as a lizard’s blood.
He sat staring out through the doorway at the thin sunlight in the street, waiting for the sounds of Warlock waking and going about its Sunday business, and waiting especially for the sound of the early stage leaving town. Today, like every other day, the sun would traverse its turquoise and copper arch of sky; a particular sun for a particular place, it seemed to him, this sun for this place bounded by the Bucksaws and the Dinosaurs, illuminating indiscriminately the righteous and the unrighteous, the just and the unjust, the wise and the foolish. Shivering in the cold he waited for Warlock to waken, and for Kate Dollar to leave, examining the righteousness that both moved and paralyzed him, the injustice he had performed upon himself because of his love of justice. He called himself a fool and prayed for wisdom, and saw only that he could not change his mind, for nothing was changed. He felt as though he were a monk bound to this barren cell by some vow he had never even formulated to himself. He thought of the end of the vow that Carl had known, and accepted. Maybe the only thing changed now was that that end was so much harder to accept.
The first sound he heard was a horn blowing a military call. It was faint, but clear and precise in the thin air — as out of place and improbable as though a forest with stream, moss, and ferns had showed itself suddenly in the white dust of the street. He did not move, holding his breath, as though he had mistaken the sound of his breathing for that other sound. After a while it came again, a bugle call signifying what, rallying or commanding what, he did not know. The brassy notes hung in the air after the call had ended. He rose and moved to the doorway. A Mexican woman with a black rebozo over her head came down Southend Street, and Goodpasture’s mozo appeared, broom in hand, to speak to her as she passed, and then turned and leaned on the broom and stared east up Main Street.
He went back inside the jail and sat down again. Once he thought he heard the sound of hoofbeats, but it was faint, and, when he listened for it, inaudible, as though it had only been some kind of ghostly reverberation along his nerves. He began to think he had heard the bugle only in a half-dream, too. Immediately the brassy, shivering call came again, close now, a different call this time, and now when he hurried out the door there were many people up and down the street, all staring east.
Back of the Western Star he could see the cloud of tan dust rising, and he could hear the hoofs clearly as the dust rolled nearer. Preceding it, riders wheeled into Main Street on the road from Bright’s City. There were ten or twelve of them, in dusty blue and forage caps, one with the fork-tailed pennon on a staff. They came down Main Street at a pounding trot, looking neither right nor left as men hurried out of the street before them, the leader with three yellow Vs on the sleeve of his dark blue shirt, and a dusty-dark, mustachioed face beneath the vicious-looking, flat-vizored cap; the second man holding the pennon staff, and, next to him, the bugler with rows of braid upon his chest. He watched them pass him, and another group appeared, far up the street. The first group trotted to the end of town, wheeled about, and halted. The second turned south down Broadway. A third did not come into Main Street at all, but trotted dustily on past it. Another bugle sounded and more cavalry appeared, this time a much larger body and a mixed one, for there were civilian riders in it. Frozen into his eye for an instant was the image of a huge, uniformed man in a wide, flat hat with one side pinned up, and a white beard blown back against his chest.
Pike Skinner came running across Main Street toward him, shoving his shirttails down into his pants. “What the hell is this, Johnny?”
He could only shake his head. The main body came slowly down Main Street, to halt before the burnt shell of the Glass Slipper. One of the civilians rode on toward him; it was Sheriff Keller. He reined up and dismounted, heavily, and dropped his reins in the dust. Grunting, he mounted the boardwalk, and with a sideways glance at Gannon stamped on into the dimness of the jail. There he slumped down into the chair at the table as Gannon followed him inside. The sheriff wiped his face and the back of his neck with a blue handkerchief and squinted at Pike, who stood in the doorway.
“Glad to’ve seen you, hombre,” he said blandly, and made a slight movement with his head.
Pike started to speak, but changed his mind and went out. Down the street someone was yelling in a brass voice that was drowned in another sudden pad of hoofs.
Gannon felt a sudden wild and rising hope that this was to be some kind of ceremony investing a new county. “What’s the cavalry down here for, Sheriff?”
The sheriff rubbed his coarse-veined red nose. The plating was worn from his sheriff’s star and the brass showed through. “What we forget,” he said slowly, staring at Gannon with his flat eyes. “We get to thinking the general runs things. But there is people to run him too.”