“You will chew dust, you stringy, washed-up old bastard!” Pony yelled. His face disappeared. Immediately it returned. “And that gold-handled, muckering, God-damned long-haired son too!” Pony shouted. “He has threw his weight around for the last time, the last God-damned rotten time. We give him his chance and now he’ll eat dust, too. You hear I said it, you kiss-boot sons of bitches!”
He retreated into the cell, and the cot creaked.
“Quieted down,” Carl commented. “Sounds like somebody set a cat after those rats.” There was a triumphant flush to his face, but Gannon saw the flicker of fear in it, and was embarrassed to see it there. He went to lean in the doorway and stare out into the street.
“No reason to bother the judge, I guess,” Carl said, behind him. “Judge was taking on freight heavy this afternoon, and he would need a lot of sobering up by now. We’ll just leave this one wait the night, and sweep him out with the cockroaches in the morning.”
Gannon watched Billy coming down the boardwalk. “Billy,” he said.
“Bud,” Billy said, casually. Gannon stepped back inside and Billy followed him in. Pony’s face reappeared between the bars.
“Some day you will get just too feisty,” Billy said to Pony. He would not look at Gannon. He said to Carl, “What’s the fine, Schroeder? I guess I can make it up.”
“Judge hasn’t been in,” Carl said. “I’m holding him for disturbing the peace till he comes, or morning, one.”
“He wasn’t disturbing it that much,” Billy said. “Let him out and we’ll settle when the judge shows.”
“I guess not, son.”
“Kiss-boot bastards!” Pony cried, and kicked the door. Gannon stood watching his brother’s face. It was sullen and hard, with only the shadowy mustache to show the youth in it.
“Let him out,” Billy said to Carl. He dropped his hands to his shell belt, as though to hitch at it; in an instant his Colt was in his hand, and trained on Carl behind the table.
Gannon heard Carl’s sudden ragged breathing, and Pony’s laugh, but he stared still at Billy’s face. Those cut-steel eyes might have been Jack Cade’s, and they were eyes that had looked at Deputy Jim Brown with the same expression in the San Pablo saloon, just before Billy had shot him dead for making too much fun of his youth and his claim to being the best marksman in San Pablo.
But it was a copy of Abe McQuown’s shy grin that twisted the corners of Billy’s mouth, and a copy of Curley Burne’s bantering tone in which he said, “Por favor, Carl. Por favor.”
“Go to hell,” Carl whispered.
“Listen to the rats squeaking now!” Pony crowed. “Squeaking awful quiet, seems like.”
Billy said, “Get the keys, Bud.”
Gannon stepped between Billy and Carl, as though he were going for the key. He stopped there, blocking Billy’s Colt. Billy started to jump sideways and Pony yelled, “Watch the shotgun!”
Gannon stepped out of the way. Pony was cursing again.
“Buckshot,” Carl said.
“Birdshot,” Billy said, and again there was a reflection of Curley Burne in his tone. He grinned slightly. “I know what you carry in that piece.”
“Buckshot,” Carl said. “On Saturday nights.” His voice was stronger. “Son,” he said. “Buckshot beats a Colt’s just like a full house does a pair.”
Billy slipped his Colt back into its scabbard. He gave Gannon a blank look, not so much of anger as appraisal.
“You threw me, Bud,” he said. “And took kind of a chance too.”
“You wasn’t going to go to shooting. Whoever it was.”
“Maybe I wasn’t, but it wasn’t a bluff you had to call. I had you and Carl covered fair enough.”
“Get out of here,” Carl said. “Before I decide to chuck you in there with Mister Squeaky.”
Billy said, “The marshal doesn’t run this town.”
“Looks like he does tonight,” Carl said.
“Nah, he doesn’t. Just some cowardy-cats in it.” Billy inclined his head almost imperceptibly at Gannon, and went out.
Pony yelled, “You, Mister throw-your-brother! I guess maybe next time he won’t be so quick to take big Jack off you!”
Carl slammed the barrel of the shotgun against the wooden bars, just as Pony leaped back away from the door.
Gannon cleared his throat. “Well, I guess I will take a walk around town, Carl.”
“Feel easy,” Carl said, grinning at him hugely. “It is a quiet night after all.”
Gannon went out along the boardwalk. Billy was a lean shadow slanted against the wall just around the corner on Southend Street. “We had better talk some, Bud,” Billy said.
He stepped down off the boardwalk into the dust. Up the street behind Billy were the lighted windows of the French Palace, and there were men passing on the far side of the street, laughing and talking. He heard Pony’s name, and Blaisedell’s.
Billy had turned to face the adobe wall beside him; he kicked a boot against it. “What’s gone and got into you, Bud? Went off to Rincon to be a telegrapher and then come back, only not going back to Pablo, you said. Warlock is no kind of place to come back to. And deputying. What’s got into you, Bud?”
Gannon shrugged.
Billy kicked the wall again. “Well, maybe I know why you lit out. But what the hell, Bud! What would you have done else, let them shoot us down and run that stock back?”
“I guess if you steal stock you have got to shoot to keep it sometimes. But not the way it was done, Billy.”
“You’ve stole before that.”
“I never saw it run all the way through like that before, though.”
“So you come back and went to deputying to stop it, huh?” Billy sneered. “Well, you have changed, Bud. Got religion or something.”
“I guess you have changed, too, Billy, since you made your score. People change.”
“Ah, Christ, Bud!” Billy said, and now for the first time in the darkness it sounded like his brother again, and not some awkward and snarling boy-man out of San Pablo. “Well, I wanted to say I didn’t blame you for what you did just now, which was slick, and— Hell, I knew it was what you had to do in there! But this is the bad thing, this God-damned marshal that thinks he is Lord God of Creation here. Where does he think he gets off, posting Nat out like that and running Pony into jail?”
“I don’t know what Pony was doing, Billy,” he said. “I didn’t see what happened. But I know Pony — so do you.”
“Christ, you have sure gone over, haven’t you?” Billy said. He leaned back against the wall. “Like Blaisedell pretty good now, do you? Think he is pretty fine?”
“I don’t know him, except to say hello to.”
“Well, sometime when you get real good sucked up to him, ask him something for me! Ask him who the hell he thinks he is. Lording it over everybody. Running everybody around and telling them when they can come and go and all. This is a free country, isn’t it? God damn it!”
“Billy,” he said. “It’s been free the way you mean, maybe, but it is going to have to be free the other way. So people are free to live peaceable, and free of being hurrahed and their property busted up, and their stock run off, and stages robbed. And killed for no more—”
“Who’s the killer?” Billy broke in. “It is him! He got those gold-handled guns for the grand turkey-shoot prize for killing, didn’t he?”
“I guess he is what we have to have here, then. For people like I am afraid you have got to be.”
He had meant to say the people Billy has got to be like, but he didn’t try to correct himself, and Billy whispered, “Jesus!” A group of horsemen turned into Southend Street and rode up toward the Row. They were laughing, and without even listening to what they were saying he knew they were laughing about Pony Benner.