by Stephen King
Jamie turned to me, wide-eyed. I put my finger to my lips, and drew one of my revolvers. Jamie did likewise, and we moved toward the shed. I waved him around to the far side. He nodded and split off to the left.
I stood outside the open doors, gun held up, giving Jamie time to get to the other end of the building. I heard nothing. When I judged my pard must be in place, I bent down, picked up a good-size stone with my free hand, and tossed it inside. It thumped, then rolled across wood. There was still nothing else to hear. I swung inside, crouched low, gun at the ready.
The place seemed empty, but there were so many shadows it was at first hard to tell for sure. It was already warm, and by noonday would be an oven. I saw a pair of empty stalls on either side, a little smithy-stove next to drawers full of rusty shoes and equally rusty shoe-nails, dust-covered jugs of liniment and stinkum, branding irons in a tin sleeve, and a large pile of old tack that needed either to be mended or thrown out. Above a couple of benches hung a fair assortment of tools on pegs. Most were as rusty as the shoes and nails. There were a few wooden hitching hooks and a pedestal pump over a cement trough. The water in the trough hadn’t been changed for a while; as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I could see bits of straw floating on the surface. I kenned that this had once been more than a tack shed. It had also been a kind of hostelry where the ranch’s working stock was seen to. Likely a jackleg veterinary, as well. Horses could be led in at one end, dealt with, and led out the other. But it looked in disrepair, abandoned.
The tracks of the thing that had by then been human led up the center aisle to other doors, also open, at the far end. I followed them. “Jamie? It’s me. Don’t shoot me, for your father’s sake.”
I stepped outside. Jamie had holstered his gun, and now pointed at a large heap of horseapples. “He knows what he is, Roland.”
“You know this from a pile of horseshit?”
“As happens, I do.”
He didn’t tell me how, but after a few seconds I saw it for myself. The hostelry had been abandoned, probably in favor of one built closer in to the main house, but the horseapples were fresh. “If he came a-horseback, he came as a man.”
“Aye. And left as one.”
I squatted on my hunkers and thought about this. Jamie rolled a smoke and let me. When I looked up, he was smiling a little.
“Do you see what it means, Roland?”
“Two hundred salties, give or take,” I said. I’ve ever been slow, but in the end I usually get there.
“Aye.”
“Salties, mind, not pokies or proddies. Diggers, not riders. As a rule.”
“As you say.”
“How many of em up there have horses, do you suppose? How many even know how to ride?”
His smile broadened. “There might be twenty or thirty, I suppose.”
“It’s better than two hundred,” I said. “Better by a long stride. We’ll go up as soon as—”
I never finished what I was going to say, because that’s when the moaning started. It was coming from the tack shed I’d dismissed as empty. How glad I was at that moment Cort wasn’t there. He would have cuffed my ear and sent me sprawling. At least in his prime, he would have.
Jamie and I looked into each other’s startled eyes, then ran back inside. The moaning continued, but the place looked as empty as before. Then that big heap of old tack—busted hames, bridles, cinch straps and reins—started to heave up and down, as if it were breathing. The tangled bunches of leather began to tumble away to either side and from them a boy was born. His white-blond hair was sticking up in all directions. He wore jeans and an old shirt that hung open and unbuttoned. He didn’t look hurt, but in the shadows it was hard to tell.
“Is it gone?” he asked in a trembling voice. “Please, sais, say it is. Say it’s gone.”
“It is,” I said.
He started to wade his way out of the pile, but a strip of leather had gotten wound around one of his legs and he fell forward. I caught him and saw a pair of eyes, bright blue and utterly terrified, looking up into my face.
Then he passed out.
* * *
I carried him to the trough. Jamie pulled off his bandanna, dipped it in the water, and began to wipe the boy’s dirt-streaked face with it. He might have been eleven; he might have been a year or two younger. He was so thin it was hard to tell. After a bit his eyes fluttered open. He looked from me to Jamie and then back to me again. “Who are you?” he asked. “You don’t b’long to the ranch.”
“We’re friends of the ranch,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Bill Streeter,” he said. “The proddies call me Young Bill.”
“Aye, do they? And is your father Old Bill?”
He sat up, took Jamie’s bandanna, dipped it in the trough, and squeezed it out so the water ran down his thin chest. “No, Old Bill’s my granther, went into the clearing two years ago. My da’, he’s just plain Bill.” Something about speaking his father’s name made his eyes widen. He grasped my arm. “He ain’t dead, is he? Say he ain’t, sai!”
Jamie and I exchanged another look, and that scared him worse than ever.
“Say he ain’t! Please say my daddy ain’t dead!” He started to cry.
“Hush and go easy now,” I said. “What is he, your da’? A proddie?”
“Nay, no, he’s the cook. Say he ain’t dead!”
But the boy knew he was. I saw it in his eyes as clearly I’d seen the bunkhouse cook with his bloodstained apron thrown over his face.
* * *
There was a willa-tree on one side of the big house, and that was where we questioned Young Bill Streeter—just me, Jamie, and Sheriff Peavy. The others we sent back to wait in the shade of the bunkhouse, thinking that to have too many folks around him would only upset the boy more. As it happened, he could tell us very little of what we needed to know.
“My da’ said to me that it was going to be a warm night and I should go up to the graze t’other side of the corral and sleep under the stars,” Young Bill told us. “He said it’d be cooler and I’d sleep better. But I knew why. Elrod’d got a bottle somewhere—again—and he was in drink.”
“That’d be Elrod Nutter?” Sheriff Peavy asked.
“Aye, him. Foreman of the boys, he is.”
“I know him well,” Peavy said to us. “Ain’t I had him locked up half a dozen times and more? Jefferson keeps him on because he’s a helluva rider and roper, but he’s one mean whoredog when he’s in drink. Ain’t he, Young Bill?”
Young Bill nodded earnestly and brushed his long hair, still all dusty from the tack he’d hidden in, out of his eyes. “Yessir, and he had a way of takin after me. Which my father knew.”
“Cook’s apprentice, were ye?” Peavy asked. I knew he was trying to be kind, but I wished he’d mind his mouth and stop talking in the way that says once, but no more.
But the boy didn’t seem to notice. “Bunkhouse boy. Not cook’s boy.” He turned to Jamie and me. “I make the bunks, coil the rope, cinch the bedrolls, polish the saddles, set the gates at the end of the day after the horses is turned in. Tiny Braddock taught me how to make a lasso, and I throw it pretty. Roscoe’s teaching me the bow. Freddy Two-Step says he’ll show me how to brand, come fall.”
“Do well,” I said, and tapped my throat.
That made him smile. “They’re good fellas, mostly.” The smile went away as fast as it had come, like the sun going behind a cloud. “Except for Elrod. He’s just grouchy when he’s sober, but when he’s in drink, he likes to tease. Mean teasing, if you do ken it.”
“Ken it well,” I said.
“Aye, and if you don’t laugh and act like it’s all a joke—even if it’s twisting on your hand or yanking you around on the bunkhouse floor by your hair—he gets uglier still. So when my da’ told me to sleep out, I took my blanket and my shaddie and I went. A word to the wise is sufficient, my da’ says.”
“What’s a shaddie?” Jamie asked the sheriff.
“Bit o’
canvas,” Peavy said. “Won’t keep off rain, but it’ll keep you from getting damp after dewfall.”
“Where did you roll in?” I asked the boy.
He pointed beyond the corral, where the horses were still skitty from the rising wind. Above us and around us, the willa sighed and danced. Pretty to hear, prettier still to look at. “I guess my blanket n shaddie must still be there.”
I looked from where he had pointed, to the tack-shed hostelry where we’d found him, then to the bunkhouse. The three places made the corners of a triangle probably a quarter-mile on each side, with the corral in the middle.
“How did you get from where you slept to hiding under that pile of tack, Bill?” Sheriff Peavy asked.
The boy looked at him for a long time without speaking. Then the tears began to fall again. He covered them with his fingers so we wouldn’t see them. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember nuffink.” He didn’t exactly lower his hands; they seemed to drop into his lap, as if they’d grown too heavy for him to hold up. “I want my da’.”
Jamie got up and walked away, with his hands stuffed deep in his back pockets. I tried to say what needed saying, and couldn’t. You have to remember that although Jamie and I wore guns, they weren’t yet the big guns of our fathers. I’d never again be so young as before I met Susan Delgado, and loved her, and lost her, but I was still too young to tell this boy that his father had been torn to pieces by a monster. So I looked to Sheriff Peavy. I looked to the grownup.
Peavy took off his hat and laid it aside on the grass. Then he took the boy’s hands. “Son,” he said, “I’ve got some very hard news for you. I want you to pull in a deep breath and be a man about it.”
But Young Bill Streeter had only nine or ten summers behind him, eleven at most, and he couldn’t be a man about anything. He began to wail. When he did it, I saw my mother’s pale dead face as clear as if she had been lying next to me under that willa, and I couldn’t stand it. I felt like a coward, but that didn’t stop me from getting up and walking away.
* * *
The lad either cried himself to sleep or into unconsciousness. Jamie carried him into the big house and put him in one of the beds upstairs. He was just the son of a bunkhouse cook, but there was no one else to sleep in them, not now. Sheriff Peavy used the jing-jang to call his office where one of the not-so-good deputies had been ordered to wait for his ring. Soon enough, Debaria’s undertaker—if there was one—would organize a little convoy of wagons to come and pick up the dead.
Sheriff Peavy went into sai Jefferson’s little office and plunked himself down in a chair on rollers. “What’s next, boys?” he asked. “The salties, I reckon . . . and I suppose you’ll want to get up there before this wind blows into a simoom. Which it certainly means t’do.” He sighed. “The boy’s no good to ye, that’s certain. Whatever he saw was evil enough to scrub his mind clean.”
Jamie began, “Roland has a way of—”
“I’m not sure what’s next,” I said. “I’d like to talk it over a little with my pard. We might take a little pasear back up to that tack shed.”
“Tracks’ll be blown away by now,” Peavy said, “but have at it and may it do ya well.” He shook his head. “Telling that boy was hard. Very hard.”
“You did it the right way,” I said.
“Do ya think so? Aye? Well, thankya. Poor little cullie. Reckon he can stay with me n the wife for a while. Until we figure what comes next for him. You boys go on and palaver, if it suits you. I think I’ll just sit here and try to get back even wi’ myself. No hurry about anything now; that damned thing ate well enough last night. It’ll be a good while before it needs to go hunting again.”
* * *
Jamie and I walked two circuits around the shed and corral while we talked, the strengthening wind rippling our pantlegs and blowing back our hair.
“Is it all truly erased from his mind, Roland?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Because ‘Is it gone?’ was the first thing he asked.”
“And he knew his father was dead. Even when he asked us, it was in his eyes.”
Jamie walked without replying for a while, his head down.
We’d tied our bandannas over our mouths and noses because
of the blowing grit. Jamie’s was still wet from the trough. Finally he said, “When I started to tell the sheriff you have a way of getting at things that are buried—buried in people’s minds—you cut me off.”
“He doesn’t need to know, because it doesn’t always work.”
It had with Susan Delgado, in Mejis, but part of Susan had wanted badly to tell me what the witch, Rhea, had tried to hide from Susan’s front-mind, where we hear our own thoughts very clearly. She’d wanted to tell me because we were in love.
“But will you try? You will, won’t you?”
I didn’t answer him until we had started our second circuit of the corral. I was still putting my thoughts in order. As I may have said, that has always been slow work for me.
“The salties don’t live in the mines anymore; they have their own encampment a few wheels west of Little Debaria. Kellin Frye told me about it on the ride out here. I want you to go up there with Peavy and the Fryes. Canfield, too, if he’ll go. I think he will. Those two pokies—Canfield’s trailmates—can stay here and wait for the undertaker.”
“You mean to take the boy back to town?”
“Yes. Alone. But I’m not sending you up there just to get you and the others away. If you travel fast enough, and they have a remuda, you may still be able to spot a horse that’s been rode hard.”
Under the bandanna, he might have smiled. “I doubt it.”
I did, too. It would have been more likely but for the wind—what Peavy had called the simoom. It would dry the sweat on a horse, even one that had been ridden hard, in short order. Jamie might spot one that was dustier than the rest, one with burdocks and bits of jugweed in its tail, but if we were right about the skin-man knowing what he was, he would have given his mount a complete rubdown and curry, from hooves to mane, as soon as he got back.
“Someone may have seen him ride in.”
“Yes . . . unless he went to Little Debaria first, cleaned up, and came back to the saltie encampment from there. A clever man might do that.”
“Even so, you and the sheriff should be able to find out how many of them own horses.”
“And how many of them can ride, even if they don’t own,” Jamie said. “Aye, we can do that.”
“Round that bunch up,” I told him, “or as many of them as you can, and bring them back to town. Any who protests, remind them that they’ll be helping to catch the monster that’s been terrorizing Debaria . . . Little Debaria . . . the whole Barony. You won’t have to tell them that any who still refuse will be looked at with extra suspicion; even the dumbest of them will know.”
Jamie nodded, then grabbed the fencerail as an especially strong gust of wind blasted us. I turned to face him.
“And one other thing. You’re going to pull a cosy, and Kellin’s son, Vikka, will be your cat’s-paw. They’ll believe a kid might run off at the mouth, even if he’s been told not to. Especially if he’s been told not to.”
Jamie waited, but I felt sure he knew what I was going to say, for his eyes were troubled. It was a thing he’d never have done himself, even if he thought of it. Which was why my father had put me in charge. Not because I’d done well in Mejis—I hadn’t, not really—and not because I was his son, either. Although in a way, I suppose that was it. My mind was like his: cold.
“You’ll tell the salties who know about horses that there was a witness to the murders at the ranch. You’ll say you can’t tell them who it was—naturally—but that he saw the skin-man in his human form.”
“You don’t know that Young Bill actually saw him, Roland. And even if he did, he might not have seen the face. He was hiding in a pile of tack, for your father’s sake.”
; “That’s true, but the skin-man won’t know it’s true. All the skin-man will know is that it might be true, because he was human when he left the ranch.”
I began to walk again, and Jamie walked beside me.
“Now here’s where Vikka comes in. He’ll get separated from you and the others a bit and whisper to someone—another kid, one his own age, would be best—that the survivor was the cook’s boy. Bill Streeter by name.”
“The boy just lost his father and you want to use him as bait.”
“It may not come to that. If the story gets to the right ears, the one we’re looking for may bolt on the way to town. Then you’ll know. And none of it matters if we’re wrong about the skin-man being a saltie. We could be, you know.”
“What if we’re right, and the fellow decides to face it out?”
“Bring them all to the jail. I’ll have the boy in a cell—a locked one, you ken—and you can walk the horsemen past, one by one. I’ll tell Young Bill to say nothing, one way or the other, until they’re gone. You’re right, he may not be able to pick our man out, even if I can help him remember some of what happened last night. But our man won’t know that, either.”
“It’s risky,” said Jamie. “Risky for the kid.”
“Small risk,” I said. “It’ll be daylight, with the skin-man in his human shape. And Jamie . . .” I grasped his arm. “I’ll be in the cell, too. The bastard will have to go through me if he wants to get to the boy.”
* * *
Peavy liked my plan better than Jamie had. I wasn’t a bit surprised. It was his town, after all. And what was Young Bill to him? Only the son of a dead cook. Not much in the great scheme of things.
Once the little expedition to Saltie Town was on its way, I woke the boy and told him we were going to Debaria. He agreed without asking questions. He was distant and dazed. Every now and then he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. As we walked out to the corral, he asked me again if I was sure his da’ was dead. I told him I was. He fetched a deep sigh, lowered his head, and put his hands on his knees. I gave him time, then asked if he’d like me to saddle a horse for him.