This time Abe glanced back at him, and Curley turned in his spurs in order to draw up even.
“Abe,” he said. “Anything where you stand to win, you have got to be able to stand to lose, too. For that’s the way things go. Abe,” he said. “Maybe I know how you feel some. But say you kept on being the biggest man in the San Pablo valley and Warlock too. You still wouldn’t be the biggest man in the territory by a damn sight. And say you called out old Peach and the cavalry, and massacreed them and took Peach’s scalp — where’d you go then? What’d you have to be the biggest of then?”
It sounded as though Abe laughed, and his spirits rose.
“Why, Curley,” Abe said. “The last time I saw that scalp of Peach’s there wasn’t a hell of a lot of hair to take. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why Espirato took his Paches out of here — when he saw old Time had beat him to Peach’s hair.”
He laughed too. It sounded like the old Abe.
“Bud Gannon coming along with the others?” Abe asked.
“He stayed in town.”
“He did?” Abe said. When he spoke again his voice had turned somber. “I know there is some that’s turned against me.”
“That’s not so, Abe!” he protested.
“It’s so. Like Bud. And Chet — you see how he has been staying clear. And I felt it hard in Warlock tonight. But you can’t back off.”
“Nothing ever stopped me from it.” Curley tried to say it lightly. “I surely backed tonight, and glad to.”
“I couldn’t have done that,” Abe said. “I guess you know that’s why I let you take it.”
He nodded sickly. He thought again of Cade, and he thought of how it had been worked when they had run Canning; he had tried to shut that from his mind, but it had been as clear as this tonight. He felt sick for Abe. “Surely I knew it,” he said. “But what the hell? Abe — I am damned if I think poor of myself for backing off tonight. Or why you—”
“There gets a time when it don’t matter what you think of yourself,” Abe broke in. “That’s it, you see. Maybe it is what everybody else thinks instead.” The black cantered on ahead again. “Let’s get on in,” Abe called back to him.
Curley spurred Spot to a half-trot, but he stayed behind Abe all the way.
As they walked up from the horse corral, the dogs barked and jumped around their legs. Curley sighed as he looked up at the squat ranch house, where a little light showed in a window. Behind it soared the monolith of the chimney of the old house, which had burned down. The lonely chimney seemed incredibly high and narrow against the night sky, pointing its stone and crumbling mortar height at the stars. He wondered if that chimney would not fall some day, despite the poles that propped it up, and mash them all to smithereens.
He said to Abe, “Well, I’ll be going over to the bunkhouse.”
“Come inside and take a glass of whisky,” Abe said. His voice was bleak. One of the dogs sprawled away in front of him, yelping. They mounted the slanting steps to the porch, and Abe jerked on the latch-string and shouldered the door open. “What the hell are you doing out here, Daddy?” he said.
Following him in, Curley saw the old man on his pallet on the floor. He was raised on one elbow, his skinny neck corded with strain. There was a Winchester across his legs, a jug and lamp on the floor beside him. His beard was thick, pure-white wool in the lamplight, and his mouth was round and pink as a kitten’s button.
“Didn’t stay long, did you?” Dad McQuown said. “Think I’m going to stay in that bedroom and burn?”
“Burn?” Abe said. He picked up the lamp and set it atop the potbelly stove. With the lamplight on it the stovepipe looked red. “You’re not dead yet. Burn?”
“Burn is what I said,” the old man said. “Don Ignacio is going to hear some time you have left me all alone. You think he won’t send some of his dirty, murdering greasers up here to burn me in my bed?”
It was strange, Curley thought, that those Mexicans, killed six months ago in Rattlesnake Canyon, had turned almost every man of them into a greaser-hater — afterward. It was a strange thing.
“There’s three men out in the bunkhouse,” Abe said. He picked up the jug, hooked it to his mouth, and took a long draught. He handed it to Curley and went to sit on the old buggy-seat sofa against the wall.
“Burn them too,” the old man said. “Sneakier than Paches. Those sons of bitches out in the bunkhouse’d sleep through a stampede coming over them anyhow.” His eyes glittered at Curley. “What happened up there?”
From the buggy seat Curley heard a clack and metallic singing. He turned to see Abe bend to pull his bowie knife loose, where it was stuck in the floor. Abe spun it down again, the blade shining fiery in the light.
“Let me tell you,” Curley said to the old man. “Bold as brass I went in there against him. In the Glass Slipper, that was packed with guns to back the bastard up. ‘Let’s see the color of your belly, Marshal!’ I said to him.”
The old man said, “Son, how come you let Curley—”
“Hush now, Dad McQuown. I am telling this. How come he let me? Why, he knows I am the coolest head in San Pablo, and that saloon stacked hard against us.” Feeling a fool, he bent his knees into a crouch and heard Abe spin the knife into the floor again. The old man stared as Curley jerked out his Colt and took a bead on the potbelly stove. “I don’t mind saying that was the fastest draw human eye ever did see,” he said. “Fast, and—” He stopped, straightened, sighed, and holstered his Colt.
“Kill him clean off?” the old man demanded.
“He was way ahead of me,” he said, and glanced toward the buggy seat. He had hoped for a laugh from Abe, to clear things a little; he knew what Abe was going to have to take from the old man. But Abe only flung the knife down again. This time the point didn’t stick and it clattered across the floor and rang against a leg of the stove. Abe made no move to retrieve it.
“Run you out of town,” the old man breathed.
“He surely did.”
The old man lay back on his pallet, and sucked noisily at his teeth. “Son of mine running,” he said.
“Yep,” Abe said, tightly.
“That all you can say?” the old man yelled.
“Yep,” Abe said.
“Go in myself,” the old man said. “See anybody run me out.”
“Walk in,” Abe said.
“I will drag in, by God!” Dad McQuown said, straining his head up again. “See anybody run me out. I have been through Warlock when it wasn’t but a place in the road where me and Blaikie and old man Gannon used to meet and go into Bright’s together. Went together because of Paches in the Bucksaws, thick as fleas. Many’s the time we fought them off, too, before Peach was ever heard of. Took my son with me sometimes that I thought was going to amount to something, and not get run out of—”
“Say, now, speaking of Gannons,” Curley broke in. “Bud’s come back from Rincon. We saw him in town.”
“Bud Gannon,” the old man said, lying back again, “never was worth nothing at all. Billy, now; there is a boy any man’d be glad for a son. Proud.”
“Well, Dad McQuown, he run with the rest of us. Maybe not so fast as me, but he run all right.”
“How fast did my boy run?” the old man whispered, and Abe cursed him.
Curley took a long pull on the jug, watching the old man’s fingers plucking at the Winchester while Abe cursed him, harshly and at length.
“You will answer to the Lord for that cussing some day, boy,” Dad McQuown said, at last. “Cussing your daddy when he is crippled so he can’t beat your teeth down your throat for it. Well, it is sire and dam in a man like a horse, and no way to get yourself a boy without there is half woman in him.”