by Stephen King
“Ye want me to deal him another ’un?” Jake White asked. He had an old pistol in his hand, reversed so the butt was forward. “I can, you know; my arm is feeling wery limber for this early in the day.”
“No!” Cuthbert was twitching with horror and something like grief. Ranged behind him were three armed men, looking on with nervous avidity.
“Then be a good boy an’ get yer hands behind yer.”
Cuthbert, still fighting tears, did as he was told. Esposas were put on him by Deputy Bridger. The other two men yanked Alain to his feet. He reeled a little, then stood firm as he was handcuffed. His eyes met Roland’s, and Al tried to smile. In some ways it was the worst moment of that terrible ambush morning. Roland nodded back and made himself a promise: he would never be taken like this again, not if he lived to be a thousand years old.
Lengyll was wearing a trailscarf instead of a string tie this morning, but Roland thought he was inside the same box-tail coat he’d worn to the Mayor’s welcoming party, all those weeks ago. Standing beside him, puffing with excitement, anxiety, and self-importance, was Sheriff Avery.
“Boys,” the Sheriff said, “ye’re arrested for transgressing the Barony. The specific charges are treason and murder.”
“Who did we murder?” Alain asked mildly, and one of the posse uttered a laugh either shocked or cynical, Roland couldn’t tell which.
“The Mayor and his Chancellor, as ye know quite well,” Avery said. “Now—”
“How can you do this?” Roland asked curiously. It was Lengyll to whom he spoke. “Mejis is your home place; I’ve seen the line of your fathers in the town cemetery. How can you do this to your home place, sai Lengyll?”
“I’ve no intention of standing out here and making palaver with ye,” Lengyll said. He glanced over Roland’s shoulder. “Alvarez! Get his horse! Boys as trig as this bunch should have no problem riding with their hands behind their—”
“No, tell me,” Roland interposed. “Don’t hold back, sai Lengyll—these are your friends you’ve come with, and not a one who isn’t inside your circle. How can you do it? Would you rape your own mother if you came upon her sleeping with her dress up?”
Lengyll’s mouth twitched—not with shame or embarrassment but momentary prudish distaste, and then the old rancher looked at Avery. “They teach em to talk pretty in Gilead, don’t they?”
Avery had a rifle. Now he stepped toward the handcuffed gunslinger with the butt raised. “I’ll teach ’im how to talk proper to a man of the gentry, so I will! Knock the teef straight out of his head, if you say aye, Fran!”
Lengyll held him back, looking tired. “Don’t be a fool. I don’t want to bring him back laying over a saddle unless he’s dead.”
Avery lowered his gun. Lengyll turned to Roland.
“Ye’re not going to live long enough to profit from advice, Dearborn,” he said, “but I’ll give’ee some, anyway: stick with the winners in this world. And know how the wind blows, so ye can tell when it changes direction.”
“You’ve forgotten the face of your father, you scurrying little maggot,” Cuthbert said clearly.
This got to Lengyll in a way Roland’s remark about his mother had not—it showed in the sudden bloom of color in his weathered cheeks.
“Get em mounted!” he said. “I want em locked up tight within the hour!”
5
Roland was boosted into Rusher’s saddle so hard he almost flew off on the other side—would have, if Dave Hollis had not been there to steady him and then to wedge Roland’s boot into the stirrup. Dave offered the gunslinger a nervous, half-embarrassed smile.
“I’m sorry to see you here,” Roland said gravely.
“It’s sorry I am to be here,” the deputy said. “If murder was your business, I wish you’d gotten to it sooner. And your friend shouldn’t have been so arrogant as to leave his calling-card.” He nodded toward Cuthbert.
Roland hadn’t the slightest idea what Deputy Dave was referring to, but it didn’t matter. It was just part of the frame, and none of these men believed much of it, Dave likely included. Although, Roland supposed, they would come to believe it in later years and tell it to their children and grandchildren as gospel. The glorious day they’d ridden with the posse and taken down the traitors.
The gunslinger used his knees to turn Rusher . . . and there, standing by the gate between the Bar K’s dooryard and the lane leading to the Great Road, was Jonas himself. He sat astride a deep-chested bay, wearing a green felt drover’s hat and an old gray duster. There was a rifle in the scabbard beside his right knee. The left side of the duster was pulled back to expose the butt of his revolver. Jonas’s white hair, untied today, lay over his shoulders.
He doffed his hat and held it out to Roland in courtly greeting. “A good game,” he said. “You played very well for someone who was taking his milk out of a tit not so long ago.”
“Old man,” Roland said, “you’ve lived too long.”
Jonas smiled. “You’d remedy that if you could, wouldn’t you? Yar, I reckon.” He flicked his eyes at Lengyll. “Get their toys, Fran. Look specially sharp for knives. They’ve got guns, but not with em. Yet I know a bit more about those shooting irons than they might think. And funny boy’s slingshot. Don’t forget that, for gods’ sake. He like to take Roy’s head off with it not so long ago.”
“Are you talking about the carrot-top?” Cuthbert asked. His horse was dancing under him; Bert swayed back and forth and from side to side like a circus rider to keep from tumbling off. “He never would have missed his head. His balls, maybe, but not his head.”
“Probably true,” Jonas agreed, watching as the spears and Roland’s shortbow were taken into custody. The slingshot was on the back of Cuthbert’s belt, tucked into a holster he had made for it himself. It was very well for Roy Depape that he hadn’t tried Bert, Roland knew—Bert could take a bird on the wing at sixty yards. A pouch holding steel shot hung at the boy’s left side. Bridger took it, as well.
While this was going on, Jonas fixed Roland with an amiable smile. “What’s your real name, brat? Fess up—no harm in telling now; you’re going to ride the handsome, and we both know it.”
Roland said nothing. Lengyll looked at Jonas, eyebrows raised. Jonas shrugged, then jerked his head in the direction of town. Lengyll nodded and poked Roland with one hard, chapped finger. “Come on, boy. Let’s ride.”
Roland squeezed Rusher’s sides; the horse trotted toward Jonas. And suddenly Roland knew something. As with all his best and truest intuitions, it came from nowhere and everywhere—absent at one second, all there and fully dressed at the next.
“Who sent you west, maggot?” he asked as he passed Jonas. “Couldn’t have been Cort—you’re too old. Was it his father?”
The look of slightly bored amusement left Jonas’s face—flew from his face, as if slapped away. For one amazing moment the man with the white hair was a child again: shocked, shamed, and hurt.
“Yes, Cort’s da—I see it in your eyes. And now you’re here, on the Clean Sea . . . except you’re really in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.”
Jonas’s gun was out and cocked in his hand with such speed that only Roland’s extraordinary eyes were capable of marking the movement. There was a murmur from the men behind them—partly shock, mostly awe.
“Jonas, don’t be a fool!” Lengyll snarled. “You ain’t killin em after we took the time and risk to hood em and tie their hooks, are ye?”
Jonas seemed to take no notice. His eyes were wide; the corners of his seamed mouth were trembling. “Watch your words, Will Dearborn,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “You want to watch em ever so close. I got two pounds of pressure on a three-pound trigger right this second.”
“Fine, shoot me,” Roland said. He lifted his head and looked down at Jonas. “Shoot, exile. Shoot, worm. Shoot, you failure. You’ll still live in exile and die as you lived.”
For a moment he was sure Jonas would shoot,
and in that moment Roland felt death would be enough, an acceptable end after the shame of being caught so easily. In that moment Susan was absent from his mind. Nothing breathed in that moment, nothing called, nothing moved. The shadows of the men watching this confrontation, both on foot and on horseback, were printed depthless on the dirt.
Then Jonas dropped the hammer of his gun and slipped it back into its holster.
“Take em to town and jug em,” he said to Lengyll. “And when I show up, I don’t want to see one hair harmed on one head. If I could keep from killing this one, you can keep from hurting the rest. Now go on.”
“Move,” Lengyll said. His voice had lost some of its bluff authority. It was now the voice of a man who realizes (too late) that he has bought chips in a game where the stakes are likely much too high.
They rode. As they did, Roland turned one last time. The contempt Jonas saw in those cool young eyes stung him worse than the whips that had scarred his back in Garlan years ago.
6
When they were out of sight, Jonas went into the bunkhouse, pulled up the board which concealed their little armory, and found only two guns. The matched set of six-shooters with the dark handles—Dearborn’s guns, surely—were gone.
You’re in the west. The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west. You’ll live in exile and die as you lived.
Jonas’s hands went to work, disassembling the revolvers Cuthbert and Alain had brought west. Alain’s had never even been worn, save on the practice-range. Outside, Jonas threw the pieces, scattering them every whichway. He threw as hard as he could, trying to rid himself of that cool blue gaze and the shock of hearing what he’d believed no man had known. Roy and Clay suspected, but even they hadn’t known for sure.
Before the sun went down, everyone in Mejis would know that Eldred Jonas, the white-haired regulator with the tattooed coffin on his hand, was nothing but a failed gunslinger.
You’ll live in exile and die as you lived.
“P’raps,” he said, looking at the burned-out ranch house without really seeing it. “But I’ll live longer than you, young Dearborn, and die long after your bones are rusting in the ground.”
He mounted up and swung his horse around, sawing viciously at the reins. He rode for Citgo, where Roy and Clay would be waiting, and he rode hard, but Roland’s eyes rode with him.
7
“Wake up! Wake up, sai! Wake up! Wake up!”
At first the words seemed to be coming from far away, drifting down by some magical means to the dark place where she lay. Even when the voice was joined by a rudely shaking hand and Susan knew she must wake up, it was a long, hard struggle.
It had been weeks since she’d gotten a decent night’s sleep, and she had expected more of the same last night . . . especially last night. She had lain awake in her luxurious bedchamber at Seafront, tossing from side to side, possibilities—none good—crowding her mind. The nightgown she wore crept up to her hips and bunched at the small of her back. When she got up to use the commode, she took the hateful thing off, hurled it into a corner, and crawled back into bed naked.
Being out of the heavy silk nightgown had done the trick. She dropped off almost at once . . . and in this case, dropped off was exactly right: it was less like falling asleep than falling into some thoughtless, dreamless crack in the earth.
Now this intruding voice. This intruding arm, shaking her so hard that her head rolled from side to side on the pillow. Susan tried to slide away from it, pulling her knees up to her chest and mouthing fuzzy protests, but the arm followed. The shaking recommenced; the nagging, calling voice never stopped.
“Wake up, sai! Wake up! In the name of the Turtle and the Bear, wake up!”
Maria’s voice. Susan hadn’t recognized it at first because Maria was so upset. Susan had never heard her so, or expected to. Yet it was so; the maid sounded on the verge of hysteria.
Susan sat up. For a moment so much input—all of it wrong—crashed in on her that she was incapable of moving. The duvet beneath which she had slept tumbled into her lap, exposing her breasts, and she could do no more than pluck weakly at it with the tips of her fingers.
The first wrong thing was the light. It flooded through the windows more strongly than it ever had before . . . because, she realized, she had never been in this room so late before. Gods, it had to be ten o’ the clock, perhaps later.
The second wrong thing was the sounds from below. Mayor’s House was ordinarily a peaceful place in the morning; until noon one heard little but casa vaqueros leading the horses out for their morning exercise, the whicker-whicker-whick of Miguel sweeping the courtyard, and the constant boom and shush of the waves. This morning there were shouts, curses, galloping horses, the occasional burst of strange, jagged laughter. Somewhere outside her room—perhaps not in this wing, but close—Susan heard the running thud of booted feet.
The wrongest thing of all was Maria herself, cheeks ashy beneath her olive skin-tone, and her usually neat hair tangled and unbound. Susan would have guessed only an earthquake could make her look so, if that.
“Maria, what is it?”
“You have to go, sai. Seafront maybe not safe for you just now. Your own house maybe better. When I don’t see you earlier, I think you gone there already. You chose a bad day to sleep late.”
“Go?” Susan asked. Slowly, she pulled the duvet all the way up to her nose and stared at Maria over it with wide, puffy eyes. “What do you mean, go?”
“Out the back.” Maria plucked the duvet from Susan’s sleep-numbed hands again and this time stripped it all the way down to her ankles. “Like you did before. Now, missy, now! Dress and go! Those boys put away, aye, but what if they have friends? What if they come back, kill you, too?”
Susan had been getting up. Now all the strength ran out of her legs and she sat back down on the bed again. “Boys?” she whispered. “Boys kill who? Boys kill who?”
This was a good distance from grammatical, but Maria took her meaning.
“Dearborn and his pinboys,” she said.
“Who are they supposed to have killed?”
“The Mayor and the Chancellor.” She looked at Susan with a kind of distracted sympathy. “Now get up, I tell you. And get gone. This place gone loco.”
“They didn’t do any such thing,” Susan said, and only just restrained herself from adding, It wasn’t in the plan.
“Sai Thorin and sai Rimer jus’ as dead, whoever did it.” There were more shouts below, and a sharp little explosion that didn’t sound like a firecracker. Maria looked in that direction, then began to throw Susan her clothes. “The Mayor’s eyes, they gouged right out of his head.”
“They couldn’t have! Maria, I know them—”
“Me, I don’t know nothing about them and care less—but I care about you. Get dressed and get out, I tell you. Quick as you can.”
“What’s happened to them?” A terrible thought came to Susan and she leaped to her feet, clothes falling all around her. She seized Maria by the shoulders. “They haven’t been killed?” Susan shook her. “Say they haven’t been killed!”
“I don’t think so. There’s been a t’ousan’ shouts and ten t’ousan’ rumors go the rounds, but I think jus’ jailed. Only . . .”
There was no need for her to finish; her eyes slipped from Susan’s, and that involuntary shift (along with the confused shouts from below) told all the rest. Not killed yet, but Hart Thorin had been greatly liked, and from an old family. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain were strangers.
Not killed yet . . . but tomorrow was Reaping, and tomorrow night was Reaping Bonfire.
Susan began to dress as fast as she could.
8
Reynolds, who had been with Jonas longer than Depape, took one look at the figure cantering toward them through the skeletal oil derricks, and turned to his partner. “Don’t ask him any questions—he’s not in any mood for silly questions this morning.”
“How do you know?”
“Never mind. Just keep your ever-fucking gob shut.”
Jonas reined up before them. He sat slumped in his saddle, pale and thoughtful. His look prompted one question from Roy Depape in spite of Reynolds’s caution. “Eldred, are you all right?”
“Is anyone?” Jonas responded, then fell silent again. Behind them, Citgo’s few remaining pumpers squalled tiredly.
At last Jonas roused himself and sat a little straighter in the saddle. “The cubs’ll be stored supplies by now. I told Lengyll and Avery to fire a double set of pistol-shots if anything went wrong, and there hasn’t been any shooting like that.”
“We didn’t hear none, either, Eldred,” Depape said eagerly. “Nothing atall like that.”
Jonas grimaced. “You wouldn’t, would you? Not out in this noise. Fool!”
Depape bit his lip, saw something in the neighborhood of his left stirrup that needed adjusting, and bent to it.
“Were you boys seen at your business?” Jonas asked. “This morning, I mean, when you sent Rimer and Thorin off. Even a chance either of you was seen?”
Reynolds shook his head for both of them. “ ’Twas clean as could be.”
Jonas nodded as if the subject had been of only passing interest to him, then turned to regard the oilpatch and the rusty derricks. “Mayhap folks are right,” he said in a voice almost too low to hear. “Mayhap the Old People were devils.” He turned back to them. “Well, we’re the devils now. Ain’t we, Clay?”
“Whatever you think, Eldred,” Reynolds said.
“I said what I think. We’re the devils now, and by God, that’s how we’ll behave. What about Quint and that lot down there?” He cocked his head toward the forested slope where the ambush had been laid.
“Still there, pending your word,” Reynolds said.
“No need of em now.” He favored Reynolds with a dark look. “That Dearborn’s a coozey brat. I wish I was going to be in Hambry tomorrow night just so I could lay a torch between his feet. I almost left him cold and dead at the Bar K. Would’ve if not for Lengyll. Coozey little brat is what he is.”
