by Stephen King
“Susan—”
“No,” she said. “Please.”
He stood back. Somehow.
“This is our secret,” she said. “Yes?”
“Aye.”
She smiled at that . . . but it was a sad smile. “Stay away from me from now on, Will. Please. And I’ll stay away from you.”
He thought about it. “If we can.”
“We must, Will. We must.”
She rode away fast. Roland stood beside Rusher’s stirrup, watching her go. And when she was out of sight over the horizon, still he watched.
10
Sheriff Avery, Deputy Dave, and Deputy George Riggins were sitting on the porch in front of the Sheriff’s office and jail when Mr. Stockworth and Mr. Heath (the latter with that idiotic bird’s skull still mounted on the horn of his saddle) went past at a steady walk. The bell o’ noon had rung fifteen minutes before, and Sheriff Avery reckoned they were on their way to lunch, perhaps at The Millbank, or perhaps at the Rest, which put on a fair noon meal. Popkins and such. Avery liked something a little more filling; half a chicken or a haunch of beef suited him just fine.
Mr. Heath gave them a wave and a grin. “Good day, gents! Long life! Gentle breezes! Happy siestas!”
They waved and smiled back. When they were out of sight, Dave said: “They spent all mornin down there on the piers, countin nets. Nets! Do you believe it?”
“Yessir,” Sheriff Avery said, lifting one massive cheek a bit out of his rocker and letting off a noisy pre-luncheon fart. “Yessir, I do. Aye.”
George said: “If not for them facing off Jonas’s boys the way they done, I’d think they was a pack of fools.”
“Nor would they likely mind,” Avery said. He looked at Dave, who was twirling his monocle on the end of its ribbon and looking off in the direction the boys had taken. There were folks in town who had begun calling the Affiliation brats Little Coffin Hunters. Avery wasn’t sure what to make of that. He’d soothed it down between them and Thorin’s hard boys, and had gotten both a commendation and a piece of gold from Rimer for his efforts, but still . . . what to make of them?
“The day they came in,” he said to Dave, “ye thought they were soft. How do ye say now?”
“Now?” Dave twirled his monocle a final time, then popped it in his eye and stared at the Sheriff through it. “Now I think they might have been a little harder than I thought, after all.”
Yes indeed, Avery thought. But hard don’t mean smart, thank the gods. Aye, thank the gods for that.
“I’m hungry as a bull, so I am,” he said, getting up. He bent, put his hands on his knees, and ripped off another loud fart. Dave and George looked at each other. George fanned a hand in front of his face. Sheriff Herkimer Avery, Barony Sheriff, straightened up, looking both relieved and anticipatory. “More room out than there is in,” he said. “Come on, boys. Let’s go downstreet and tuck into a little.”
11
Not even sunset could do much to improve the view from the porch of the Bar K bunkhouse. The building—except for the cook-shack and the stable, the only one still standing on what had been the home acre—was L-shaped, and the porch was built on the inside of the short arm. Left for them on it had been just the right number of seats: two splintery rockers and a wooden crate to which an unstable board back had been nailed.
On this evening, Alain sat in one of the rockers and Cuthbert sat on the box-seat, which he seemed to fancy. On the rail, peering across the beaten dirt of the dooryard and toward the burned-out hulk of the Garber home place, was the lookout.
Alain was bone-tired, and although both of them had bathed in the stream near the west end of the home acre, he thought he still smelled fish and seaweed on himself. They had spent the day counting nets. He was not averse to hard work, even when it was monotonous, but he didn’t like pointless work. Which this was. Hambry came in two parts: the fishers and the horse-breeders. There was nothing for them among the fishers, and after three weeks all three of them knew it. Their answers were out on the Drop, at which they had so far done no more than look. At Roland’s order.
The wind gusted, and for a moment they could hear the low, grumbling, squealing sound of the thinny.
“I hate that sound,” Alain said.
Cuthbert, unusually silent and introspective tonight, nodded and said only “Aye.” They were all saying that now, not to mention So you do and So I am and So it is. Alain suspected the three of them would have Hambry on their tongues long after they had wiped its dust from their boots.
From behind them, inside the bunkhouse door, came a less unpleasant sound—the cooing of pigeons. And then, from around the side of the bunkhouse, a third, for which he and Cuthbert had unconsciously been listening as they sat watching the sun go down: horse’s hoofs. Rusher’s.
Roland came around the corner, riding easy, and as he did, something happened that struck Alain as oddly portentous . . . a kind of omen. There was a flurry-flutter of wings, a dark shape in the air, and suddenly a bird was roosting on Roland’s shoulder.
He didn’t jump; barely looked around. He rode up to the hitching rail and sat there, holding out his hand. “Hile,” he said softly, and the pigeon stepped into his palm. Bound to one of its legs was a capsule. Roland removed it, opened it, and took out a tiny strip of paper, which had been rolled tight. In his other hand he held the pigeon out.
“Hile,” Alain said, holding out his own hand. The pigeon flew to it. As Roland dismounted, Alain took the pigeon into the bunkhouse, where the cages had been placed beneath an open window. He ungated the center one and held out his hand. The pigeon which had just arrived hopped in; the pigeon in the cage hopped out and into his palm. Alain shut the cage door, latched it, crossed the room, and turned up the pillow of Bert’s bunk. Beneath it was a linen envelope containing a number of blank paper strips and a tiny storage-pen. He took one of the strips and the pen, which held its own small reservoir of ink and did not have to be dipped. He went back out on the porch. Roland and Cuthbert were studying the unrolled strip of paper the pigeon had delivered from Gilead. On it was a line of tiny geometric shapes:
“What does it say?” Alain asked. The code was simple enough, but he could not get it by heart or read it on sight, as Roland and Bert had been able to, almost immediately. Alain’s talents—his ability to track, his easy access to the touch—lay in other directions.
“ ‘Farson moves east,’ ” Cuthbert read. “ ‘Forces split, one big, one small. Do you see anything unusual.’ ” He looked at Roland, almost offended. “Anything unusual, what does that mean?”
Roland shook his head. He didn’t know. He doubted if the men who had sent the message—of whom his own father was almost surely one—did, either.
Alain handed Cuthbert the strip and the pen. With one finger Bert stroked the head of the softly cooing pigeon. It ruffled its wings as if already anxious to be off to the west.
“What shall I write?” Cuthbert asked. “The same?”
Roland nodded.
“But we have seen things that are unusual!” Alain said. “And we know things are wrong here! The horses . . . and at that small ranch way south . . . I can’t remember the name . . .”
Cuthbert could. “The Rocking H.”
“Aye, the Rocking H. There are oxen there. Oxen! My gods, I’ve never seen them, except for pictures in a book!”
Roland looked alarmed. “Does anyone know you saw?”
Alain shrugged impatiently. “I don’t think so. There were drovers about—three, maybe four—”
“Four, aye,” Cuthbert said quietly.
“—but they paid no attention to us. Even when we see things, they think we don’t.”
“And that’s the way it must stay.” Roland’s eyes swept them, but there was a kind of absence in his face, as if his thoughts were far away. He turned to look toward the sunset, and Alain saw something on the collar of his shirt. He plucked it, a move made so quickly and nimbly that not even Roland felt it. Bert couldn
’t have done that, Alain thought with some pride.
“Aye, but—”
“Same message,” Roland said. He sat down on the top step and looked off toward the evening redness in the west. “Patience, Mr. Richard Stockworth and Mr. Arthur Heath. We know certain things and we believe certain other things. But would John Farson come all this way simply to resupply horses? I don’t think so. I’m not sure, horses are valuable, aye, so they are . . . but I’m not sure. So we wait.”
“All right, all right, same message.” Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to Hambry. “Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time.”
The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon’s leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. “Hile!”
It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark shape against the deepening sky.
Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.
“Roland?”
“Hmmm?” Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.
“I’ll unsaddle him, if you want.” He nodded at Rusher. “And rub him down.”
No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, “No. I’ll do it. In a minute or two.” And went back to looking at the sunset.
Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.
Alain passed over what he had plucked from Roland’s collar. Although it was almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert’s eyes were gunslinger’s eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.
It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert’s face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, they’d met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys’ eyes met. In Bert’s Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.
Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the trigger.
Alain nodded.
Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying sunset with dreaming eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
BENEATH THE PEDDLER’S MOON
1
The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler’s Moon—called Late-summer’s Moon by some—came full, and left it a day later.
Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile & Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.
Ritzy was like an ugly lowered head between a pair of huge shrugged shoulders—the foothills. Above town to the south were the clapped-out shacks where the Company housed its miners; each puff of breeze brought the stench of their unlimed communal privies. To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit.
Once there had been freehold mines up there, but they were all gone, regulated out by the Vi Castis Company. Depape knew all about it, because the Big Coffin Hunters had been a part of that little spin and raree. Just after he’d hooked up with Jonas and Reynolds, that had been. Why, they had gotten those coffins tattooed on their hands not fifty miles from here, in the town of Wind, a mudpen even less ritzy than Ritzy. How long ago? He couldn’t rightly say, although it seemed to him that he should be able to. But when it came to reckoning times past, Depape often felt lost. It was hard even to remember how old he was. Because the world had moved on, and time was different, now. Softer.
One thing he had no trouble remembering at all—his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl’s paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.
Depape rode out the sunrise end of Ritzy’s only street, trotted his horse up the flank of the first hill, and paused at the top for a single look back. Last night, when he’d been talking to the old bastard behind Hattigan’s, Ritzy had been roaring. This morning at seven, it looked as ghostly as the Peddler’s Moon, which still hung in the sky above the rim of the plundered hills. He could hear the mines tink-tonking away, though. You bet. Those babies tink-tonked away seven days a week. No rest for the wicked . . . and he supposed that included him. He dragged his horse’s head around with his usual unthinking and ham-handed force, booted its flanks, and headed east, thinking of the old bastard as he went. He had treated the old bastard passing fair, he reckoned. A reward had been promised, and had been paid for information given.
“Yar,” Depape said, his glasses flashing in the new sun (it was a rare morning when he had no hangover, and he felt quite cheerful), “I reckon the old bugger can’t complain.”
Depape had had no trouble following the young culls’ backtrail; they had come east on the Great Road the whole way from New Canaan, it appeared, and at every town where they had stopped, they had been marked. In most they were marked if they did no more than pass through. And why not? Young men on good horses, no scars on their faces, no regulator tattoos on their hands, good clothes on their backs, expensive hats on their heads. They were remembered especially well at the inns and saloons, where they had stopped to refresh themselves but had drunk no hard liquor. No beer or graf, either, for that matter. Yes, they were remembered. Boys on the road, boys that seemed almost to shine. As if they had come from an earlier, better time.
Piss in their faces, Depape thought as he rode. One by one. Mr. Arthur “Ha-Ha” Heath last. I’ll save enough so it’d drown you, were you not already at the end of the path and into the clearing.
They had been noticed, all right, but that wasn’t good enough—if he went back to Hambry with no more than that, Jonas would likely shoot his nose off. And he would deserve it. They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.
He had hit two other saloons, sipping watered beer in each, before rolling into Hattigan’s. He ordered yet another watered beer, and prepared to engage the bartender in conversation. Before he even began to shake the tree, however, the apple he wanted fell off and dropped into his hand, neat as you please.
It was an old man’s voice (an old bastard’s voice), speaking with the shrill, head
-hurting intensity which is the sole province of old bastards in their cups. He was talking about the old days, as old bastards always did, and about how the world had moved on, and how things had been ever so much better when he was a boy. Then he had said something which caused Depape’s ears to prick up: something about how the old days might be coming again, for hadn’t he seen three young lords not two months a-gone, mayhap less, and even bought one of them a drink, even if ’twas only sasparilly soda?
“You wouldn’t know a young lord from a young turd,” said a miss who appeared to have all of four teeth left in her charming young head.
There was general laughter at this. The old bastard looked around, offended. “I know, all right,” he said. “I’ve forgot more than you’ll ever learn, so I have. One of them at least came from the Eld line, for I saw his father in his face . . . just as clear as I see your saggy tits, Jolene.” And then the old bastard had done something Depape rather admired—yanked out the front of the saloon-whore’s blouse and poured the remainder of his beer down it. Even the roars of laughter and heavy applause which greeted this couldn’t entirely drown the girl’s caw of rage, or the old man’s cries when she began to slap and punch him about the head and shoulders. These latter cries were only indignant at first, but when the girl grabbed the old bastard’s own beer-stein and shattered it against the side of his head, they became screams of pain. Blood—mixed with a few watery dregs of beer—began to run down the old bastard’s face.
“Get out of here!” she yelled, and gave him a shove toward the door. Several healthy kicks from the miners in attendance (who had changed sides as easily as the wind changes directions) helped him along. “And don’t come back! I can smell the weed on your breath, you old cocksucker! Get out and take your gods-cussed stories of old days and young lords with you!”
