“Don’t call me son, Judge,” Blaisedell said, very quietly. A vein began to beat in his temple.
The judge said in a blurred voice, “Marshal, if you understand me and go your way anyhow, God help you. You will be killing men out of pride. You will be doing foul murder before the law, and you will stand trial in Bright’s City for it or these deputies here ought to throw their badges in the river. For you will be an illegal black criminal and outlaw and murderer with the blood fresh on you as bad as any of McQuown’s and worse, and every man’s hand should be against you. Murder for pride, Marshal; it is an ancient and awful crime to go to book for.”
Blaisedell backed up a step, to stand in the patch of sunlight just inside the door. He put his hat back on and tapped it once, and glanced around the jail again. This time no one met his eyes.
Blaisedell said gravely, “Maybe somebody will get killed, Judge. But that is between them and me, for who else is hurt by it?”
“Every man is,” the judge whispered.
Blaisedell flushed, and the arrogant, masklike expression came over his face again. But his voice remained pleasant. “You have been going on about pride like it was a bad thing, and I disagree with you. A man’s pride is about the only thing he has that’s worth having, and is what sets him apart from the pack. We have argued this before, Judge, and I guess I will say this time that a man that doesn’t have it is a pretty poor specimen and apt to take to whisky for the lack. For all whisky is, is pride you can pour in your belly.”
The judge flushed too, as Bates snickered and Schroeder grinned. “That was a mean thing you said, Marshal,” the judge said. “But I won’t say it isn’t so, so maybe I am honester than you. And I don’t have to be scared of you, either, Marshal.”
Skinner said disgustedly, “You a poor, one-legged, loud-mouthed old—”
The judge raised a finger toward Blaisedell’s face. “Being decent like you are — and I didn’t say you wasn’t! — I think you can brace no man that has got right on you; I think you know that. It is what I am warning you. What you are working toward in your pride is some day meeting a man that has got to kill you or you him, only he is righter and you know it. Because you have gone wrong. And what are you going to do then?” His voice sank until it was almost inaudible. “That is the box, Clay Blaisedell. What are you going to do then?”
There was a taut silence. Blaisedell’s face had paled, except for the spots of color on his cheeks. “Judge Holloway,” he said, in his deep voice. “I think you haven’t only been drinking.” He paused ominously. “I think you have been drinking out in the hot sun.”
Everyone laughed explosively in the sudden release of tension, and Blaisedell himself grinned. “Well, I guess I will go have a glass of whisky for my bruised-up pride,” he said, and turned to go out.
“Marshal,” Pike Skinner said. “I just want to say—” His angular, ugly face reddened furiously. “I just wanted to say the judge wasn’t speaking for me just now, and I know he wasn’t speaking for Carl Schroeder. I expect he wasn’t speaking for anybody but Taliaferro’s bad whisky.”
“That’s right, Marshal,” Schroeder said.
“That goes for me, Marshal,” Hasty said, and got to his feet.
Peter Bacon said nothing. His brown, lined face was sad. The marshal glanced at him. Then he nodded silently to the others and went on outside.
The judge rubbed his hands over his face. Then he turned to Schroeder; his dark face was drawn and puckered around the wart on his cheek. “You mark what I have said, Carl Schroeder. He is going to kill men and it will be on you to arrest him for it. Hear?”
“I don’t hear,” Schroeder said. “You are acting like a damned virgin, Judge. Like you have never known a man to be shot down before. It’ll be a day when I try to arrest Blaisedell.”
The judge bent, grunting, to recover his crutch, and then, red-faced with effort, thrust himself upright and hooked the crutch under his armpit. He set his hat, which was too small for him, on his head. He said contemptuously, “Maybe you will see, some day, how if you are bound to arrest some of McQuown’s people for a thing, you are bound to arrest another man the same. So if Blaisedell goes out and murders—”
“Great God, Judge!” Schroeder cried. “You are getting it all switched around who is murderers here!”
The judge hobbled toward the door, his crutch tip racketing. Pike Skinner glared at him. At the door the judge turned again, the hat slipping forward over one eye. “We all are, boys,” he said. He swung on outside on his crutch and his one good leg.
20. GANNON HAS A NIGHTMARE
IT IS a dream, he told himself; it is only a dream. Sweating, naked, daubed with mud, he crouched behind a crag upon the canyon wall and watched against the curtain of his memory the sandy river bottom of Rattlesnake Canyon, listening in the waiting silence to the pad of hoof irons in the sand and the sharper, urgent sound as a hoof struck stone, and, nearer, the musical clink of harness, and nearer still, voices soft-mouthed with Spanish; his heart turning over on itself as the first one came around the far bend upon a narrow-faced white horse, looking very tall at first in his high, peaked sombrero, but small, compact, brown, watchful-eyed, with pointed mustachios, behind him another and another, some with striped serapes hung over their shoulders and all with rifles carried underarm; seven, eight, and more and more, until there were seventeen in all, and Abe’s Colt crashed the signal. The echo was instantaneous and continuous. Smoke drifted up from all around the canyon where the other mud-daubed figures were concealed, and it was as though an invisible flash flood had in that instant swept down the canyon: horses reared and screamed, swept backward in the flood, and died; men were thrown tumbling, a rifle flung up in a wide arc turning end over end with weird slowness, and there were gobbling Apache cries mixed with the screams of dying men. There was the white horse lying on the reddening sand, there was the leader in his high, silver-chased hat crawling in the stream; then the hat gone, then a part of his head gone, and he lay still in the channel with his jacket shiny and bloated in the water that ran red over him. And now the half-naked, muddy Apache figures stood all around the canyon, yelling as they fired into the mass of dying men and horses below them, the faces magnified and slowly revolving before his eyes — Abe, and Pony and Calhoun and Wash and Chet, and on the far side Billy and Jack Cade, Whitby and Friendly, Mitchell, Harrison, and Hennessey.
And at the end there came the Mexican running and scrambling up the steep bank toward him, hatless, screaming hoarsely, brown eyes huge and rimmed with white like those of a terrified stallion, and the long gleam of the six-shooter in his hand, slipping and sliding but coming with unbelievable rapidity up the canyonside toward him, John Gannon. He changed as he came. Now he came more slowly; now it was a tall, black-hatted figure walking toward him through the dust, slow-striding with the massive and ponderous dignity not of retribution but of justice, with great eyes fixed on him, John Gannon, like ropes securing him, as he cried out and snatched in helpless weakness at his sides, and died screaming mercy, screaming acceptance, screaming protest in the clamorous and horrible silence.
It is only a dream, he told himself, calmly; it is only the dream. But there was another reverberating clap of a shot still. He died again, in peace, and waked with a jolt, as though he had fallen. There was another knock in the darkness of his room.