“Well, it was self-defense clear enough, when you come down to it. They’d come in to kill him. Billy told me that.”
Kate drank her coffee. Her eyelashes made delicate shadows upon her white cheeks. He finished his own coffee, disappointed and ill at ease in this silence. Finally he said, “Well, I had better be going now, Miss Dollar.”
“Kate,” she said. “No, don’t go yet. There might be somebody coming by and I think I had better have a man here.”
“Who?”
“The jack I rented this house from. I thought he might be planning on paying a call.”
He nodded, and he felt better. She poured another cup of coffee, and he said, “You said you knew Blaisedell in Fort James?”
“I knew Tom Morgan. If you knew him you knew Blaisedell.”
“What did they think of Blaisedell in Fort James, Kate?”
She didn’t answer right away, and he saw the tightening in her face. She said, “About the same as they do here. The way they feel about a badman anywhere. Some like him because they think if they show they like him he’ll like them. Others don’t like him and stay out of his way. People are the same most places.”
Her black eyes met his expressionlessly as she went on. “He dealt faro for Morgan and people knew he was a gunman from the start. Though nobody knew anything about him. Then one day a man named Ben Nicholson came in. A real bad rattlesnake of a man. He was shooting things up. Drunk and cursing everybody and trying to get a fight. He was trying to get the marshal to fight. So Blaisedell went to the marshal and said he’d brace Nicholson, and the mayor heard him and fired the marshal and made Blaisedell marshal. So Blaisedell went out in the street and told Nicholson to get out of town. Nicholson drew on him so Blaisedell killed him.”
She stopped, but it didn’t sound as though she was finished, and he waited for her to go on.
“So he was marshal but he still worked for Morgan,” she said. “Morgan had given him a quarter interest in the place he had there.”
“A lot of marshals do that.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bust in.”
“That’s all I was going to say. He killed four or five others — bad-men mostly. That writer came and gave him those gold-handled guns. I guess you’ve seen them. I was gone by then. I left pretty soon after he killed — Nicholson. Fort James was dying off by then and everybody was beginning to move on.”
“What did you mean,” he said slowly, “that the four or five others was badmen mostly?”
She said, in a voice so thick he could hardly understand her, “I am sick and tired of talking about Clay Blaisedell and who he killed.”
“I’m sorry. I guess it’s not a thing women are interested in much.” He tried desperately to think of something to say that would interest her, but it seemed to him that he didn’t know anything that would interest anybody. He wondered why she had gotten so angry.
“I’ve heard people saying you’d come out here to start up a dance hall,” he said, tentatively. “Seems like it would be a good tiling.”
She shrugged. Then she sighed and said, “I don’t know. Maybe I am waiting to see if this town is dying off too.” Something in the way she said it made him think it was a kind of apology for her anger, and after that it was almost all right again. They discussed the rumors that wages were going to be dropped at the mines, and she told him of the strike she had seen at Silver Mountain. She regarded him brightly now when he spoke, and so he found himself not so tongue-tied, although he marveled at how much more she knew, and had seen, than he. It was almost like talking to a man, and almost he could forget he was having supper with Kate Dollar in her house and alone, and that they were man and woman. But he would be brought back to it sharply from time to time, by something she said, or by some movement, and it was a very intense thing to him, except that it always made him begin to wonder again what had brought her to Warlock, who she was and what she was; but now he did not want to know. And he marveled too at how fine-looking she was in the lamplight, and at how soft her sharp black eyes could be sometimes, and the crooked way her mouth twisted when she smiled the smile he liked. He could not keep his eyes from the soft shadows her lashes made upon her cheeks.
Then she asked about McQuown. “What sort is he? I’ve heard a lot about him since I’ve been here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in town.”
“He and Curley are in tonight. I guess on their way up to Bright’s for the trial.” He paused, to see if she was really interested; she was watching him intently. “Well, he is a rustler, mostly,” he went on. “I know him pretty well. He took Billy and me on to work for him after our father died — the Apaches’d run off all our stock.”
“How bad is he?”
He laughed shakily and said, “Why, Kate, I guess I don’t like to talk about him sort of the way you don’t about Blaisedell.”
She touched a finger to the corner of her mouth. She looked wary, suddenly. “I see,” she said. “You are against McQuown. So you are for Blaisedell.”
“No, that’s not so. Not like Carl is; not—” He stopped and looked down at his hands. “Maybe I am in a way,” he said. “For Abe is bad. Worse than he ought to be, and worse all the time, it seems like. I used to think pretty high of him.”
“But you left,” she said. “You left and your brother stayed on there.”
He stared down at his hands. He was going to tell her; it surprised him that he was. It seemed to him that Kate was gathering information not because she was interested in him, but for some purpose of her own that he had no way of deciphering. Yet, he thought, he would tell her, and only waited to get it calm and in proportion in his mind, so that he could tell it correctly.
“It was eight or ten months ago,” he said. “Maybe you’ve heard about it. Some Mexicans that was supposed to have been shot by Apaches in Rattlesnake Canyon. Peach came down with the cavalry. I guess everybody thought it was Apaches.”
“I’ve heard about it. Somebody said it was McQuown’s men dressed like Apaches.”
He nodded, and wet his lips. “We’d rustled more than a thousand head down at Hacienda Puerto,” he said. “But Abe wasn’t along. Abe always ran things like that pretty well, but he wasn’t along that time. He was sick, I guess it was, and Curley and Dad McQuown was running it, but there was nobody so clever as Abe. Anyway, they just about caught us, and Hank Miller was shot dead, and Dad McQuown shot and crippled. We lost all the stock, and they trailed us pretty close all the way.
“We got across the border all right, but then we found out they were coming right on after us. Abe was there by then, for Curley had rode the old man back to San Pablo. So a bunch of us stripped down and smeared ourselves with mud and boxed those Mexicans of Don Ignacio’s in Rattlesnake Canyon. We killed them all. I guess maybe one or two got away down the south end, but all the others. Seventeen of them.”
He picked up his coffee cup; his hand was steady. The coffee was cold, and he set the cup down again.
“That’s when you left?” Kate said; she didn’t sound shocked.
“I had some money and I went up to Rincon and paid a telegrapher to apprentice me. I thought it would be a good trade. But he died and I got laid off. So I came back here.”
It struck him that he had been able to tell her all there was to know about him in a few minutes. He shifted his position in his chair and his scabbarded Colt thumped noisily against the wood. He went on. “I can’t say I didn’t know what Abe aimed to do there in Rattlesnake Canyon. I knew, and I was against it, but everybody else was for it and I was afraid to go against them. I guess because I was afraid they’d think I was yellow. Curley wouldn’t go, though; he wouldn’t do it. There was some others that didn’t like it. I know Chet Haggin didn’t. And Billy was sick — to his stomach, afterwards. But he stuck down there. I guess he figured it out some way inside himself so it was all right, afterwards. But I couldn’t.”