Morgan is certainly roundly hated here, with good reason and bad. I might venture to say that unanimity of opinion comes closest to obtaining in Warlock as regards dislike of him. Personally, I think I would choose him over his competitor, Taliaferro, and I am sure that Taliaferro relieves his customers of their earnings no less rapidly or crookedly than Morgan. Yet Morgan does it with a completely unconcealed disdain of his victims and their manner of play. His contempt of his fellows is always visible, and his habitual expression is that of one who has seen all the world and found none of it worth while, least of all its inhabitants. He has evidently acted viciously enough upon occasion too. There was the instance of a Cowboy who worked for Quaintance, a handsome and well-liked young fellow named Newman, who, unfortunately, had larcenous tendencies. He stole three hundred dollars from his employer, which he promptly lost over Morgan’s faro layout. Quaintance learned of this and applied to Morgan for the return of the money. Morgan did return it, possibly under pressure from Blaisedell, but dispatched one of his hirelings, a fellow named Murch, after young Newman. Murch caught him in Bright’s City and, following Morgan’s instructions, beat the boy half to death.
Like others of prominence here Morgan has been the object of many foul, and, I am sure, untrue tales. Unlike others, he seems pleased and flattered by this attention (I suppose this furnishes further evidence to him in support of his opinions of his fellow man), and has even sometimes hinted that the most incredible accusations of him may be true.
Because of all this, however, Blaisedell, in his fast friendship with Morgan, is rendered most vulnerable. I hope Morgan does not become the Marshal’s Achilles’ heel.
18. THE DOCTOR ARRANGES MATTERS
THE doctor hurried panting up the steps of the General Peach and into the thicker darkness of the entryway. He rapped on Jessie’s door; his knuckles stung. “Jessie!”
He heard her steps. Her face appeared, pale with the light on it, framed in curls. “What’s the matter, David?” she said as she opened the door wider for him. He moved in past her. A book lay open on the table, a blue ribbon across the page for a bookmark. “What’s the matter?” she said again.
“They have instructed him to post five men out,” he said, and sat down abruptly in the chair beside the door. He held up his hand, spread-fingered, and watched it shake with the sickening rage in him. “Benner, Billy Gannon, Calhoun, and Friendly. And he is to post Frank Brunk.”
She cried out, “Oh, they have not done that!”
“They have indeed.”
She looked frightened. He watched her close the book over the blue ribbon. She stood beside the table with her head bent forward and her ringleted hair sliding forward along her cheeks. Then she sank down onto the sofa opposite him.
“I have talked myself dry to the bone,” he said. “It did no good. It was not even a close vote. Henry and Will Hart and myself — and Taliaferro, of course, who would not want to offend the miners’ trade. The judge had already left in a rage.”
“But it is a mistake, David!”
“They did it very well,” he went on. “I will admit myself that Brunk is a troublemaker. His activities could easily lead to bloodshed. Lathrop’s did. Brunk has been posted to protect the miners from themselves — that is the way Godbold put it. And to protect Warlock from another mob of crazed muckers running wild and smashing everything — that is the way Slavin put it. What if they fired the Medusa stope? Or all the stopes, for that matter? I think the only thing Charlie MacDonald had to say in the matter was what would happen to Warlock if the miners, led by Brunk, succeeded in closing all the mines out of spite? Evidently they are thought entirely capable of it.”
He beat his fist down on the arm of the chair. And so we fell into the trap we had set for ourselves when we brought Blaisedell here, he thought. “It was so well done!” he cried. “But Jessie, if you had been at the meeting, they could not have done it.”
“Posting men from Warlock is nothing I can—”
“You should have gone!”
“I will go to see every one of them now.”
“It will do no good. Each one will lay it on the rest.” He slumped back in the chair; he told himself firmly that he would not hate Godbold, Buck Slavin, Jared Robinson, Kennon, or any of the others; he would only try to understand their fears. What angered him most was the knowledge that they were, in part, right about Frank Brunk. But he knew, too, that he himself was now inescapably on the side of the miners. Heaven knew that a blundering, stupid leader such as Brunk was no good to them; but Brunk was all, at present, that they had. It was as though he had, at last, come face to face with himself, and, at the same moment, saw that the man who was his own mortal enemy was Charles MacDonald of the Medusa mine.
“Poor Clay,” he heard Jessie whisper.
“Poor Clay! Not poor Frank? Not those poor fellows—” He stopped. She had said it was a mistake, and he saw now what she meant. The miners’ angel had become the guardian of Blaisedell’s reputation. All at once he could regard her more coldly than he had ever done before.
“Yes,” he said. “It is a terrible mistake. Do you think you can persuade Blaisedell that he must do no such a thing?”
“I must try,” she said, nodding as though Clay Blaisedell were the object of both their concerns.
“Yes,” he said. “For if he does this to Brunk, how is he any better than Jack Cade, who was hired to do it to Lathrop? And you know what Frank is like as well as I do. I think he would not go if ordered to, and how would Clay deal with him then? Frank is no gunman.”
He glanced at her from under his brows. She was sitting very stiffly, with her hands clasped white in her lap. Her great eyes seemed to fill the frail triangle of her face. “Oh, no,” she said, with a start, as though she had not been listening but knew some reply was called for. “No, he can’t be allowed to do it. Of course he can’t. It would be terribly wrong.”
“I’m glad we agree, Jessie.”
She frowned severely. “But if I can’t persuade him to — to disobey the Citizens’ Committee, then Frank will have to go. That’s all there is to it. He will go if I ask him to, won’t he, David?”
He did not know, and said so. She announced decisively that she wished to speak with Brunk first, and he left her to find him. In the entryway, with her door closed behind him, he stood with a hand to his chest and his eyes blind in the solid dark. He had thought she was in love with a man, but now he saw, with almost a pity for Blaisedell, that she was in love merely with a name, like a silly schoolgirl.
The doctor moved slowly along the tunnel of darkness toward the lighted hospital room. The faces in the cots turned toward him as he entered. Four men were playing cards on Buell’s cot — Buell, Dill, MacGinty, and Ben Tittle. The boy Fitzsimmons stood watching them, with the thick wads of his bandaged hands crossed over his chest.
There was a chorus of greetings. “What about the road agents, Doc?” someone called to him.
“Did Blaisedell post those cowboys yet?”
He nodded curtly, and asked if anyone had seen Brunk.