[2] Sheriff Keller of Bright’s County.
[3] General G. O. Peach, the military governor in Bright’s City.
[4] Warlock’s situation was much as Goodpasture has described it. General Peach was a notoriously inept administrator, sulking because he felt his fame and services to the nation justified a more exalted position than military governor of the territory. Despite repeated pleas and demands, no town patent had been issued Warlock, which had a population almost as large as that of Bright’s City, both the county seat and territorial capitol; and the rumor was so strong that the western half of Bright’s County was to be formed into a new county, that Sheriff Keller was able to ignore almost completely, and evidently thankfully, the Warlock and San Pablo Valley area. There was, however, provision for a deputy sheriff in Warlock.
[5] The town took its name from the Warlock mine, which was inoperative by this time. One story of the naming of the Warlock mine is as follows: Richelin, who made the silver strike, had been prospecting in the Bucksaws under exceedingly dangerous conditions. The inhabitants of Bright’s City, to which he returned from time to time for supplies and with specimens for assay, viewed him as mad, and his continued existence, in close proximity to Espirato’s band of marauding Apaches, as miraculous. On the occasion of his actual strike, he had, on his journey into Bright’s City, an encounter with some Apaches in which his burro was killed. He managed to reach town, however, and, when news of his escape was heard, someone remarked to him that he must have flown back, riding the handle of his shovel like a witch. Richelin is supposed to have made an obscene gesture in reply to this, and cried, “Warlock, damn you!” Be that as it may, he named his first mine the Warlock, his second the Medusa. The Warlock, after producing over a million dollars’ worth of ore, played out, and was closed down in 1878, shortly after the Porphyrion & Western Mining Company had purchased Richelin’s holdings.
2. GANNON COMES BACK
WARLOCK lay on a flat, white alkali step, half encirled by the Bucksaw Mountains to the east, beneath a metallic sky. With the afternoon sun slanting down on it from over the distant peaks of the Dinosaurs, the adobe and weathered plank-and-batten, false-fronted buildings were smoothly glazed with yellow light, and sharp-cut black shadows lay like pits in the angles out of the sun.
The heat of the sun was like a blanket; it had dimension and weight. The town was dust- and heat-hazed, blurred out of focus. A water wagon with a round, rust-red tank moved slowly along Main Street, spraying water in a narrow, shining strip behind it. But Warlock’s dust was laid only briefly. Soon again it was churned as light as air by iron-bound wheels, by hoofs and bootheels. The dust rose and hung in the air and drifted down in a continuous fall, onto the jail and Goodpasture’s General Store, onto the Lucky Dollar and the Glass Slipper and the smaller saloons, onto the Billiard Parlor, the Western Star Hotel, the Boston Café and the Warlock and Western Bank, onto the houses in the Row, the cribs along Peach Street, Kennon’s Livery Stable and the freight yard, onto Buck Slavin’s stage yard and the Skinner Brothers Acme Corral in Southend Street, onto the Feed and Grain Barn and the General Peach boardinghouse in Grant Street, onto the tarpaper shacks of the miners and the wagons and the riders passing through and the men in the street. It got into men’s eyes and irritated their dry throats, it dusted them all over with a whitish sheen, and turned to mud in the sweat of their faces.
Trails, and stage and wagon roads, led into the town like twisted spokes to a dusty hub — from the silver mines in the nearer Bucksaws: the Medusa, Sister Fan, Thetis, Pig’s Eye, and Redgold: from the hamlet of Redgold and the stamp mill there; from the more distant hamlet of San Pablo in the valley and on the river of that name; from Welltown to the northwest, where the railroad was; from Bright’s City, the territorial capitol.
Dust rose, too, where there were travelers along the roads: a prospector with his burro; a group of riders coming in from San Pablo; great, high-wheeled, heavy-laden ore wagons descending from the mines; loads of lagging timbers for the stopes being hauled from the forests in the northern Bucksaws; a stage inbound from Bright’s City; and, close in on the Welltown road, a single horseman slowly making his way up through the huge, strewn boulders toward Warlock’s rim.
John Gannon rode bent tiredly forward against the slope, his hand on the dusty, sweated shoulder of the gray he had bought in Welltown, urging her up this last hill out of the malpais and over the rim, where she increased her gait at the sight of town. He glanced down the rutted trail to his right that led out to the cemetery called Boot Hill, and to the dump, where he could see the sun glinting on whisky bottles and a skirl of papers blown up by a wind gust.
The mare plodded heavy-footed past the miners’ shacks on the edge of town. Beyond, and looming above them, was the tall, narrow-windowed rear of the French Palace. A woman waved a hand at him from one of the windows and called something lost in the wind. He looked quickly straight ahead of him, and laid his hand on the mare’s shoulder once more. At Main Street he swung to the left and the mare’s hoofs sucked and plopped in thicker dust.
The sign over the jail swung and creaked in a gust of wind as he passed it. The sign was barely legible; weathered, thick with dust, dotted with clusters of perforations, it humbly located the law in Warlock:
DEP. SHERIFF
JAIL
Gannon reined left into Southend Street and turned at last into the Acme Corral. Nate Bush, the Skinner brothers’ hostler, came out to meet him. Bush took the reins as he dismounted, spat sideways, wiped his mustache, and, without looking at Gannon directly, said, “Back, huh?”
“Back,” he said.
“McQuown pulling them back in from all around, I guess,” Bush said, in a flat, hostile voice, and immediately turned away and led the mare clop-hoofing toward the water trough.
Gannon stood looking after him. He felt heavy and tired after a day in the murderous sun, heavy and tired with coming back to the valley as he watched Nate Bush’s back carefully held toward him. He had tried to hope he was not coming back to trouble, but he had heard in Rincon that Warlock had hired Clay Blaisedell as town marshal, had known without hearing it that the Fort James man had been hired against Abe McQuown; and he knew Abe McQuown. He had ridden for McQuown — even in Rincon they had known it — and in Warlock they would never forget it. Billy, his brother, rode for McQuown still.
He spat into his bandanna and closed his eyes as he tried to scrub some of the dust from his face. Then he walked slowly up to Main Street, stopping on the corner before Goodpasture’s store as a wagon rolled by in the street, dust rising beneath the mules’ hoofs in clouds and streaming from the wheels like liquid. He turned his face away and blew his breath out against Warlock’s dust, remembering its smell and prickly taste; as it settled behind the wagon he saw a thin figure appear and lean against the arcade post before the jail. It was Carl Schroeder; in his depression at the hostler’s greeting he had forgotten that there were a few men in Warlock he would be glad to see. He started catercornered across the street as Carl stared, and then raised a hand.
“Well, Johnny Gee!” Carl said, as Gannon came down toward him along the boardwalk. Carl’s lean, hard-calloused hand wrung his. “How’s the trains running over in Rincon, Johnny?”
“Coming and going. What’s that on your vest there, Carl?”
Carl Schroeder glanced down and thumbed the star out where he could see it. He did not smile. His plain, sad-mustached face was older than Gannon had remembered it, tired and strained. He said, “Bill Canning got run out and I kind of fell into the hole he left. You knew Bill, didn’t you?”