by Stephen King
Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except young man didn’t really cover him, Depape realized; young man was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird’s skull like an enormous comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place? Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.
The kid laughed as well, nodding as if he understood how ridiculous the whole thing looked, how ridiculous the whole thing was. His laughter was infectious; Pettie, still up on her stool, tittered herself before clapping her hands over her mouth.
“This is no place for a boy such as you,” Depape said. His revolver, an old five-shooter, was still out; it lay in his fist on the bar, with Stanley Ruiz’s blood dripping off the gunsight. Depape, without raising it from the ironwood, waggled it slightly. “Boys who come to places like this learn bad habits, kid. Dying is apt to be one of them. So I give you this one chance. Get out of here.”
“Thank you, sir, I appreciate my one chance,” the boy said. He spoke with great and winning sincerity . . . but didn’t move. Still he stood just inside the batwing doors, with the wide elastic strap of his sling pulled back. Depape couldn’t quite make out what was in the cup, but it glittered in the gaslight. A metal ball of some sort.
“Well, then?” Depape snarled. This was getting old, and fast.
“I know I’m being a pain in the neck, sir—not to mention an ache in the ass and a milky drip from the tip of a sore dick—but if it’s all the same to you, my dear friend, I’d like to give my chance to the young fellow on his knees before you. Let him apologize, let him polish your boots with his clout until you are entirely satisfied, and let him go on living his life.”
There was an unfocused murmur of approval at this from the area where the card-players were watching. Depape didn’t like the sound of it at all, and he made a sudden decision. The boy would die as well, executed for the crime of impertinence. The swabby who had spilled the bucket of dregs on him was clearly retarded. Yon brat had not even that excuse. He just thought he was funny.
From the corner of his eye, Depape saw Reynolds moving to flank the boy, smooth as oiled silk. Depape appreciated the thought, but didn’t believe he’d need much help with the slingshot specialist.
“Boy, I think you’ve made a mistake,” he said in a kindly voice. “I really believe—” The cup of the slingshot dipped a little . . . or Depape fancied it did. He made his move.
3
They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.
Depape was young, and had the speed of a snake. Nevertheless, he never came close to getting a shot off at Cuthbert Allgood. There was a thip-TWANG! as the elastic was released, a steel gleam that drew itself across the saloon’s smoky air like a line on a slateboard, and then Depape screamed. His revolver tumbled to the floor, and a foot spun it away from him across the sawdust (no one would claim that foot while the Big Coffin Hunters were still in Hambry; hundreds claimed it after they were gone). Still screaming—he could not bear pain—Depape raised his bleeding hand and looked at it with agonized, unbelieving eyes. Actually, he had been lucky. Cuthbert’s ball had smashed the tip of the second finger and torn off the nail. Lower, and Depape would have been able to blow smoke-rings through his own palm.
Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir—”
“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner. I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”
“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”
“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”
“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”
“What?”
“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head—” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you’re a dead man!”
Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night—for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact—Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away . . . except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.
Lowering his voice to its former conversational—not to say playful—pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”
“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”
“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”
“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.
“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”
4
Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?
There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?
Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right. He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.
Where’s the other one? Dearborn?
A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.
Dearborn wasn’t in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry’s mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as m
arble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.
Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher’s, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat’s shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers’ Rest. Alain heard the squeak of a hinge, but Jonas’s gun was at his temple before he could even begin to turn.
“Sonny, unless you’re a barber, I think you’d better put that pigsticker down. You don’t get a second warning.”
“No,” Alain said.
Jonas, who had expected nothing but compliance and had been prepared for nothing else, was thunderstruck. “What?”
“You heard me,” Alain said. “I said no.”
5
After making their manners and excusing themselves from Seafront, Roland had left his friends to their own amusements—they would finish up at the Travellers’ Rest, he supposed, but wouldn’t stay long or get into much trouble when they had no money for cards and could drink nothing more exciting than cold tea. He had ridden into town another way, tethered his mount at a public post in the lower of the two town squares (Rusher had offered a single puzzled nicker at this treatment, but no more), and had since been tramping the empty, sleeping streets with his hat yanked low over his eyes and his hands clasped into an aching knot at the small of his back.
His mind was full of questions—things were wrong here, very wrong. At first he’d thought that was just his imagination, the childish part of him finding make-believe troubles and storybook intrigue because he had been removed from the heart of the real action. But after his talk with “Rennie” Renfrew, he knew better. There were questions, outright mysteries, and the most hellish thing of all was that he couldn’t concentrate on them, let alone go any distance toward making sense of them. Every time he tried, Susan Delgado’s face intruded . . . her face, or the sweep of her hair, or even the pretty, fearless way her silk-slippered feet had followed his boots in the dance, never lagging or hesitating. Again and again he heard the last thing he had said to her, speaking in the stilted, priggish voice of a boy preacher. He would have given almost anything to take back both the tone and the words themselves. She’d be on Thorin’s pillow come Reaptide, and kindle him a child before the first snow flew, perhaps a male heir, and what of it? Rich men, famous men, and well-blooded men had taken gilly-girls since the beginning of time; Arthur Eld had had better than forty himself, according to the tales. So, really, what was it to him?
I think I’ve gone and fallen in love with her. That’s what it is to me.
A dismaying idea, but not a dismissable one; he knew the landscape of his own heart too well. He loved her, very likely it was so, but part of him also hated her, and held to the shocking thought he’d had at dinner: that he could have shot Susan Delgado through the heart if he’d come armed. Some of this was jealousy, but not all; perhaps not even the greater part. He had made some indefinable but powerful connection between Olive Thorin—her sad but game little smile from the foot of the table—and his own mother. Hadn’t some of that same woeful, rueful look been in his mother’s eyes on the day when he had come upon her and his father’s advisor? Marten in an open-throated shirt, Gabrielle Deschain in a sacque that had slipped off one shoulder, the whole room reeking of what they had been up to that hot morning?
His mind, tough as it already was, shrank from the image, horrified. It returned instead to that of Susan Delgado—her gray eyes and shining hair. He saw her laughing, chin uptilted, hands clasped before the sapphire Thorin had given her.
Roland could forgive her the gilly business, he supposed. What he could not forgive, in spite of his attraction to Susan, was that awful smile on Olive Thorin’s face as she watched the girl sitting in what should have been her place. Sitting in her place and laughing.
These were the things that chased through his head as he paced off acres of moonlight. He had no business with such thoughts, Susan Delgado was not the reason he was here, nor was the ridiculous knuckle-cracking Mayor and his pitiable country-Mary of a wife . . . yet he couldn’t put them away and get to what was his business. He had forgotten the face of his father, and walked in the moonlight, hoping to find it again.
In such fashion he came along the sleeping, silver-gilded High Street, walking north to south, thinking vaguely that he would perhaps stand Cuthbert and Alain to a taste of something wet and toss the dice down Satan’s Alley a time or two before going back to get Rusher and call it a night. And so it was that he happened to spy Jonas—the man’s gaunt figure and fall of long white hair were impossible to mistake—standing outside the batwings of the Travellers’ Rest and peering in. Jonas did this with one hand on the butt of his gun and a tense set of body that put everything else from Roland’s mind at once. Something was going on, and if Bert and Alain were in there, it might involve them. They were the strangers in town, after all, and it was possible—even likely—that not everyone in Hambry loved the Affiliation with the fervor that had been professed at tonight’s dinner. Or perhaps it was Jonas’s friends who were in trouble. Something was brewing, in any case.
With no clear thought as to why he was doing it, Roland went softly up the steps to the mercantile’s porch. There was a line of carved animals there (and probably spiked firmly to the boards, so that drunken wags from the saloon across the street couldn’t carry them away, chanting the nursery rhymes of their childhood as they went). Roland stepped behind the last one in line—it was the Bear—and bent his knees so that the crown of his hat wouldn’t show. Then he went as still as the carving. He could see Jonas turn, look across the street, then look to his left, peering at something—
Very low, a sound: Waow! Waow!
It’s a cat. In the alley.
Jonas looked a moment longer, then stepped into the Rest. Roland was out from behind the carved bear, down the steps, and into the street at once. He hadn’t Alain’s gift of the touch, but he had intuitions that were sometimes very strong. This one was telling him he must hurry.
Overhead, the Kissing Moon drifted behind a cloud.
6
Pettie the Trotter still stood on her stool, but she no longer felt drunk and singing was the last thing on her mind. She could hardly believe what she was seeing: Jonas had the drop on a boy who had the drop on Reynolds who had the drop on another boy (this last one wearing a bird’s skull around his neck on a chain) who had the drop on Roy Depape. Who had, in fact, drawn some of Roy Depape’s blood. And when Jonas had told the big boy to put down the knife he was holding to Reynolds’s throat, the big boy had refused.
You can blow my lights out and send me to the clearing at the end of the path, thought Pettie, for now I’ve seen it all, so I have. She supposed she should get off the stool—there was apt to be shooting any second now, and likely a great lot of it—but sometimes you just had to take your chances.
Because some things were just too good to miss.
7
“We’re in this town on Affiliation business,” Alain said. He had one hand buried deep in Reynolds’s sweaty hair; the other maintained a steady pressure on the knife at Reynolds’s throat. Not quite enough to break the skin. “If you harm us, the Affiliation will take note. So will our fathers. You’ll be hunted like dogs and hung upside down, like as not, when you’re caught.”
“Sonny, there’s not an Affiliation patrol within two hundred wheels of here, probably three hundred,” Jonas said, “and I wouldn’t care a fart in a windstorm if there was one just over yon hill. Nor do your fathers mean a squitter to me. Put that knife down or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
“No.”
“Future developments in this matter should be quite wonderful,” Cuthbert said cheerily . . . although there was now a beat of nerves under his prattle. Not fear, perhaps not even nervous-ness, just nerves. The good kind, more likely than not, Jonas thou
ght sourly. He had underestimated these boys at meat; if nothing else was clear, that was. “You shoot Richard, and Richard cuts Mr. Cloak’s throat just as Mr. Cloak shoots me; my poor dying fingers release my sling’s elastic and put a steel ball in what passes for Mr. Spectacles’s brain. You’ll walk away, at least, and I suppose that will be a great comfort to your dead friends.”
“Call it a draw,” Alain said to the man with the gun at his temple. “We all stand back and walk away.”
“No, sonny,” Jonas said. His voice was patient, and he didn’t think his anger showed, but it was rising. Gods, to be outfaced like this, even temporarily! “No one does like that to the Big Coffin Hunters. This is your last chance to—”
Something hard and cold and very much to the point pressed against the back of Jonas’s shirt, dead center between the shoulderblades. He knew what it was and who held it at once, understood the game was lost, but couldn’t understand how such a ludicrous, maddening turn of events could have happened.
“Holster the gun,” the voice behind the sharp tip of metal said. It was empty, somehow—not just calm, but emotionless. “Do it now, or this goes in your heart. No more talk. Talking’s done. Do it or die.”
Jonas heard two things in that voice: youth and truth. He holstered his gun.
“You with the black hair. Take your gun out of my friend’s ear and put it back in your holster. Now.”
Clay Reynolds didn’t have to be invited twice, and he uttered a long, shaky sigh when Alain took the blade off his throat and stood back. Cuthbert did not look around, only stood with the elastic of his slingshot pulled and his elbow cocked.
“You at the bar,” Roland said. “Holster up.”
Depape did so, grimacing with pain as he bumped his hurt finger against his gunbelt. Only when this gun was put away did Cuthbert relax his hold on his sling and drop the ball from the cup into the palm of his hand.