“Brady?”
He turned slowly.
“Clark is going through because I’m going to see that he gets through, and when
he’s gone, I’m coming back.”
“So?” He put his big hands on the edge of the bar. “What does that mean?”
“It means that if we have any trouble at all, I’m going to come back here and
either run you out of town or bury you.”
Somebody gasped and Martin Brady’s face turned a kind of sick white, he was that
mad. “It sounds like you’re calling me a thief.” He kept both hands in plain
sight. “You’d have to prove that.”
“Prove it? Who to? Everybody knows what killing and robbery there has been was
engineered by you. There’s no court here but a six-shooter court and I’m
presiding.”
So nothing happened. It was like I figured and it was out in the open now, and
Martin Brady had to have me killed, but he didn’t dare do it right then. We put
Clark on the stage and started back to our own claims.
We were almost to bedrock now and we wanted to clean up and get out. We were
getting the itch to go back to Santa Fe and back to Mora. Besides, I kept
thinking of Dursilla.
Bob Wells was sitting on our claim with a rifle across his knees when we came
in. “I was gettin’ spooked,” he said, “it don’t seem like Brady to take this
layin’ down.”
Dickey came over from his claim and several others, two of whom I remembered
from the Rose-Marie Saloon the night I told off Martin Brady.
“We been talking it around,” Dickey said, “and we figure you should be marshal.”
“No.”
“Can you name anybody else?” Wells asked reasonably. “This gold strike is going
to play out, but a few of the mines will continue to work, and I plan to stay on
here. I want to open a business, and I want this to be a clean town.”
The others all pitched in, and finally Dickey said, “Sackett, with all respect,
I believe it’s your public duty.”
Now I was beginning to see where reading can make a man trouble. Reading Locke,
Hume, Jefferson, and Madison, had made me begin to think mighty high of a man’s
public duty.
Violence is an evil thing, but when the guns are all in the hands of the men
without respect for human rights, then men are really in trouble.
It was all right for folks back east to give reasons why trouble should be
handled without violence. Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones
who are first to call a policeman, and usually they are sure there’s one handy.
“All right,” I said, “on two conditions: first, that somebody else takes over
when the town is cleaned up. Second, that you raise money enough to buy out
Martin Brady.”
“Buy him out? I say, run him out!”
Who it was yelled, I don’t know, but I spoke right up in meeting. “All right,
whoever you are. You run him out.”
There was a silence then, and when they had gathered the fact that the speaker
wasn’t going to offer I said, “We run him out and we’re no better than he is.”
“All right,” Wells agreed, “buy him out.”
“Well, now,” I said, “we can be too hasty. I didn’t say we should buy him out,
what I say is we should offer. We make him a cash offer and whatever he does
then is up to him.”
Next day in town I got down from my horse in front of the store. Wind blew dust
along the street and skittered dry leaves along the boardwalk. It gave me a
lonesome feeling. Looking down the street I had a feeling the town would die.
No matter what happened here, what I was going to do was important. Maybe not
for this town, but for men everywhere, for there must be right. Strength never
made right, and it is an indecency when it is allowed to breed corruption. The
west was changing. One time they would have organized vigilantes and had some
necktie parties, but now they were hiring a marshal, and the next step would be
a town meeting and a judge or a mayor.
Martin Brady saw me come in. His two men standing at the bar saw me too, and one
of them moved a mite so his gun could be right under his hand and not under the
edge of the bar.
There was nothing jumpy inside me, just a slow, measured, waiting feeling.
Around me everything seemed clearer, sharper in detail, the shadows and lights,
the grain of wood on the bar, the stains left by the glasses, a slight tic on
the cheek of one of Brady’s men, and he was forty feet away.
“Brady, this country is growing up. Folks are moving in and they want schools,
churches, and quiet towns where they can walk in the streets of an evening.”
He never took his eyes from me, and I had a feeling he knew what was coming.
Right then I felt sorry for Martin Brady, although his kind would outlast my
kind because people have a greater tolerance for evil than for violence. If
crooked gambling, thieving, and robbing are covered over, folks will tolerate it
longer than outright violence, even when the violence may be cleansing.
Folks had much to say about the evil of those years, yet it took hard men to
live the life, and their pleasures were apt to be rough and violent. They came
from the world around, the younger sons of fine families, the ne’er-do-wells,
the soldiers of fortune, the drifters, the always-broke, the promoters, the con
men, the thieves. The frontier asked no questions and gave its rewards to the
strong.
Maybe it needed men like Martin Brady, even the kind who lived on murder and
robbery, to plant a town here at such a jumping-off place to nowhere. An odd
thought occurred to me. Why had he called the saloon and the town Rose-Marie?
“Like I said, the country is growing up, Martin. You’ve been selling people
rot-gut liquor, you’ve been cheating them out of hide an’ hair, you’ve been
robbing and murdering them. Murdering them was going too far, Martin, because
when you start killing men, they fight back.”
“What are you gettin’ at, Sackett?”
“They elected me marshal.”
“So?”
“You sell out, Martin Brady, they’ll pay you a fair price. You sell out, and you
get out.”
He took the cigar from his teeth with his left hand and rested that hand on the
bar. “And if I don’t want to sell?”
“You have no choice.”
He smiled and leaned toward me as if to say something in a low tone and when he
did he touched that burning cigar to my hand.
My hand jerked and I realized the trick too late and those gunmen down the bar,
who had evidently seen it done before, shot me full of holes.
My hand jerked and then guns were hammering. A slug hit me and turned me away
from the bar, and two more bullets grooved the edge of the bar where I’d been
standing.
Another slug hit me and I started to fall but my gun was out and I rolled over
on the floor with bullets kicking splinters at my eyes and shot the big one with
the dark eyes.
He was coming up to me for a finishing shot and I put a bullet into his brisket
and saw him stop dead still, turn half around and fall.
Then I was rolling over and on my feet and out of the corner of my eye I saw
Martin Brady standing with both hands on the bar and his cigar in his teeth,
watching me. My shirt was smoldering where it had caught fire from that black
powder, but I shot the other man, taking my time, and my second bullet drove
teeth back into his mouth and I saw the blood dribble from the corner of his
mouth.
They were both down and they weren’t getting up and I looked at Martin Brady and
I said, “You haven’t a choice, Martin.”
His face turned strange and shapeless and I felt myself falling and remembered
Ma asking me about Long Higgins.
There were cracks in the ceiling. It seemed I lay there staring at them for a
dozen years, and remembered that it had been a long time since I’d been in a
house and wondered if I was delirious.
Cap Rountree came into the room and I turned my head and looked at him. “If this
here is hell, they sure picked the right people for it.”
“Never knew a man to find so many excuses to get out of his work,” Cap grumbled.
“How much longer do I do the work in this shebang?”
“You’re an old pirate,” I said, “who never did an honest day’s work in his