by Stephen King
“The bonfire will burn and the stuffy-guys will burn on it,” Eldred Jonas had told Lengyll. “That’s all you’re to say. It’s all you need to say.”
And he’d been right, Lengyll saw. It was on every face. Not just the determination to do right, but a kind of dirty eagerness. There were old ways, old rites of which the red-handed stuffy-guys were one surviving remnant. There were los ceremoniosos: Charyou tree. It had been generations since they had been practiced (except, every once and again, in secret places out in the hills), but sometimes when the world moved on, it came back to where it had been.
Keep it brief, Jonas had said, and it had been fine advice, fine advice indeed. He wasn’t a man Lengyll would have wanted around in more peaceful times, but a useful one in times such as these.
“Gods give you peace,” he said now, stepping back and folding his arms with his hands on his shoulders to show he had finished. “Gods give us all peace.”
“Long days and peaceful nights,” they returned in a low, automatic chorus. And then they simply turned and left, to go wherever folks went on the afternoon before Reaping. For a good many of them, Lengyll knew, it would be the Travellers’ Rest or the Bayview Hotel. He raised a hand and mopped his brow. He hated to be out in front of people, and never so much as today, but he thought it had gone well. Very well, indeed.
6
The crowd streamed away without speaking. Most, as Lengyll had foreseen, headed for the saloons. Their way took them past the jail, but few looked at it . . . and those few who did did so in tiny, furtive glances. The porch was empty (save for a plump red-handed stuffy sprawled in Sheriff Avery’s rocker), and the door stood ajar, as it usually did on warm and sunny afternoons. The boys were inside, no doubt about that, but there was no sign that they were being guarded with any particular zeal.
If the men passing on their way downhill to the Rest and the Bayview had banded together into one group, they could have taken Roland and his friends with no trouble whatsoever. Instead, they went by with their heads down, walking stolidly and with no conversation to where the drinks were waiting. Today was not the day. Nor tonight.
Tomorrow, however—
7
Not too far from the Bar K, Susan saw something on the Barony’s long slope of grazing-land that made her rein up and simply sit in the saddle with her mouth open. Below her and much farther east of her position, at least three miles away, a band of a dozen cowboys had rounded up the biggest herd of Drop-runners she had ever seen: perhaps four hundred head in all. They ran lazily, going where the vaqs pointed them with no trouble.
Probably think they’re going in for the winter, Susan thought.
But they weren’t headed in toward the ranches running along the crest of the Drop; the herd, so large it flowed on the grass like a cloud-shadow, was headed west, toward Hanging Rock.
Susan had believed everything Roland said, but this made it true in a personal way, one she could relate directly to her dead father.
Horses, of courses.
“You bastards,” she murmured. “You horse-thieving bastards.”
She turned Pylon and rode for the burned-out ranch. To her right, her shadow was growing long. Overhead, the Demon Moon glimmered ghostly in the daylight sky.
8
She had worried that Jonas might have left men at the Bar K—although why he would’ve she didn’t really know, and the fear turned out to be groundless in any case. The ranch was as empty as it had been for the five or six years between the fire that had put paid to it and the arrival of the boys from In-World. She could see signs of that morning’s confrontation, however, and when she went into the bunkhouse where the three of them had slept, she at once saw the gaping hole in the floorboards. Jonas had neglected to close it up again after taking Alain’s and Cuthbert’s guns.
She went down the aisle between the bunks, dropped to one knee, and looked into the hole. Nothing. Yet she doubted if what she had come for had been there in the first place—the hole wasn’t big enough.
She paused, looking at the three cots. Which was Roland’s? She supposed she could find out—her nose would tell her, she knew the smell of his hair and skin very well—but she thought she would do better to put such soft impulses behind her. What she needed now was to be hard and quick—to move without pausing or looking back.
Ashes, Aunt Cord whispered in her head, almost too faintly to hear. Susan shook her head impatiently, as if to clear that voice away, and walked out back.
There was nothing behind the bunkhouse, nothing behind the privy or to either side of it. She went around to the back of the old cook-shack next, and there she found what she’d come looking for, placed casually and with no attempt at concealment: the two small barrels she had last seen slung over Caprichoso’s back.
The thought of the mule summoned the thought of Sheemie, looking down at her from his man’s height and with his hopeful boy’s face. I’d like to take a fin de año kiss from ye, so I would.
Sheemie, whose life had been saved by “Mr. Arthur Heath.” Sheemie, who had risked the wrath of the witch by giving Cuthbert the note meant for her aunt. Sheemie, who had brought these barrels up here. They had been smeared with soot to partially camouflage them, and Susan got some on her hands and the sleeves of her shirt as she took off the tops—more ashes. But the firecrackers were still inside: the round, fist-sized big-bangers and the smaller lady-fingers.
She took plenty of both, stuffing her pockets until they bulged and carrying more in her arms. She stowed them in her saddlebags, then looked up at the sky. Three-thirty. She wanted to get back to Hambry no earlier than twilight, and that meant at least an hour to wait. There was a little time to be soft, after all.
Susan went back into the bunkhouse and found the bed which had been Roland’s easily enough. She knelt beside it like a child saying bedtime prayers, put her face against his pillow, and inhaled deeply.
“Roland,” she said, her voice muffled. “How I love thee. How I love thee, dear.”
She lay on his bed and looked toward the window, watching the light drain away. Once she raised her hands in front of her eyes, examining the barrel-soot on her fingers. She thought of going to the pump in front of the cookhouse and washing, but decided not to. Let it stay. They were ka-tet, one from many—strong in purpose and strong in love.
Let the ashes stay, and do their worst.
9
My Susie has ’er faults, but she’s always on time, Pat Delgado used to say. Fearful punctual, that girl.
It was true on the night before Reap. She skirted her own house and rode up to the Travellers’ Rest not ten minutes after the sun had finally gone behind the hills, filling the High Street with thick mauve shadows.
The street was eerily deserted, considering it was the night before Reap; the band which had played in Green Heart every night for the last week was silent; there were periodic rattles of firecrackers, but no yelling, laughing children; only a few of the many colored lamps had been lit.
Stuffy-guys seemed to peer from every shadow-thickened porch. Susan shivered at the sight of their blank white-cross eyes.
Doings at the Rest were similarly odd. The hitching-rails were crowded (even more horses had been tied at the rails of the mercantile across the street) and light shone from every window—so many windows and so many lights that the inn looked like a vast ship on a darkened sea—but there was none of the usual riot and jubilation, all set to the jagtime tunes pouring out of Sheb’s piano.
She found she could imagine the customers inside all too well—a hundred men, maybe more—simply standing around and drinking. Not talking, not laughing, not chucking the dice down Satan’s Alley and cheering or groaning at the result. No bottoms stroked or pinched; no Reap-kisses stolen; no arguments started out of loose mouths and finished with hard fists. Just men drinking, not three hundred yards from where her love and his friends were locked up. The men who were here wouldn’t do anything tonight but drink, though. And if she was luc
ky . . . brave and lucky . . .
As she drew Pylon up in front of the saloon with a murmured word, a shape rose out of the shadows. She tensed, and then the first orangey light of the rising moon caught Sheemie’s face. She relaxed again—even laughed a little, mostly at herself. He was a part of their ka-tet; she knew he was. Was it surprising that he should know, as well?
“Susan,” he murmured, taking off his sombrera and holding it against his chest. “I been waiting for’ee.”
“Why?” she asked.
“ ’Cause I knew ye’d come.” He looked back over his shoulder at the Rest, a black bulk spraying crazy light toward every point of the compass. “We’re going to let Arthur and them free, ain’t we?”
“I hope so,” she said.
“We have to. The folks in there, they don’t talk, but they don’t have to talk. I knows, Susan, daughter of Pat. I knows.”
She supposed he did. “Is Coral inside?”
Sheemie shook his head. “Gone up to Mayor’s House. She told Stanley she was going to help lay out the bodies for the funeral day after tomorrow, but I don’t think she’ll be here for the funeral. I think the Big Coffin Hunters is going and she’ll go with ’em.” He raised a hand and swiped at his leaking eyes.
“Your mule, Sheemie—”
“All saddled, and I got the long halter.”
She looked at him, open-mouthed. “How did ye know—”
“Same way I knew ye’d be coming, Susan-sai. I just knew.” He shrugged, then pointed vaguely. “Capi’s around the back. I tied him to the cook’s pump.”
“That’s good.” She fumbled in the saddlebag where she had put the smaller firecrackers. “Here. Take some of these. Do’ee have a sulfur or two?”
“Aye.” He asked no questions, simply stuffed the firecrackers into his front pocket. She, however, who had never been through the batwing doors of the Travellers’ Rest in her whole life, had another question for him.
“What do they do with their coats and hats and serapes when they come in, Sheemie? They must take em off; drinking’s warm work.”
“Oh, aye. They puts em on a long table just inside the door. Some fights about whose is whose when they’re ready to go home.”
She nodded, thinking hard and fast. He stood before her, still holding his sombrera against his chest, letting her do what he could not . . . at least not in the conventionally understood way. At last she raised her head again.
“Sheemie, if you help me, you’re done in Hambry . . . done in Mejis . . . done in the Outer Arc. You go with us if we get away. You have to understand that. Do you?”
She saw he did; his face fairly shone with the idea. “Aye, Susan! Go with you and Will Dearborn and Richard Stockworth and my best friend, Mr. Arthur Heath! Go to In-World! We’ll see buildings and statues and women in gowns like fairy princesses and—”
“If we’re caught, we’ll be killed.”
He stopped smiling, but his eyes didn’t waver. “Aye, killed we’ll be if ta’en, most like.”
“Will you still help me?”
“Capi’s all saddled,” he repeated. Susan reckoned that was answer enough. She took hold of the hand pressing the sombrera to Sheemie’s chest (the hat’s crown was pretty well crushed, and not for the first time). She bent, holding Sheemie’s fingers with one hand and the horn of her saddle with the other, and kissed his cheek. He smiled up at her.
“We’ll do our best, won’t we?” she asked him.
“Aye, Susan daughter of Pat. We’ll do our best for our friends. Our very best.”
“Yes. Now listen, Sheemie. Very carefully.”
She began to talk, and Sheemie listened.
10
Twenty minutes later, as the bloated orange moon struggled above the buildings of the town like a pregnant woman climbing a steep hill, a lone vaquero led a mule along Hill Street in the direction of the Sheriff’s office. This end of Hill Street was a pit of shadows. There was a little light around Green Heart, but even the park (which would have been thronged, noisy, and brilliantly lit in any other year) was mostly empty. Nearly all the booths were closed, and of those few that remained open, only the fortune-teller was doing any business. Tonight all fortunes were bad, but still they came—don’t they always?
The vaquero was wearing a heavy serape; if this particular cowboy had the breasts of a woman, they were concealed. The vaq wore a large, sweat-stained sombrero; if this cowboy had the face of a woman, it was likewise concealed. Low, from beneath that hat’s broad brim, came a voice singing “Careless Love.”
The mule’s small saddle was buried under the large bundle which had been roped to it—cloth or clothes of some kind, it might have been, although the deepening shadows made it impossible to say for sure. Most amusing of all was what hung around the mule’s neck like some peculiar reap-charm: two sombreros and a drover’s hat strung on a length of rope.
As the vaq neared the Sheriff’s office, the singing ceased. The place might have been deserted if not for the single dim light shining through one window. In the porch rocker was a comical stuffy-guy wearing one of Herk Avery’s embroidered vests and a tin star. There were no guards; absolutely no sign that the three most hated men in Mejis were sequestered within. And now, very faintly, the vaquero could hear the strum of a guitar.
It was blotted out by a thin rattle of firecrackers. The vaq looked over one shoulder and saw a dim figure. It waved. The vaquero nodded, waved back, then tied the mule to the hitching-post—the same one where Roland and his friends had tied their horses when they had come to introduce themselves to the Sheriff, on a summer day so long ago.
11
The door opened—no one had bothered to lock it—while Dave Hollis was trying, for about the two hundredth time, to play the bridge of “Captain Mills, You Bastard.” Across from him, Sheriff Avery sat rocked back in his desk chair with his hands laced together on his paunch. The room flickered with mild orange lamplight.
“You keep it up, Deputy Dave, and there won’t have to be any execution,” Cuthbert Allgood said. He was standing at the door of one of the cells with his hands wrapped around the bars. “We’ll kill ourselves. In self-defense.”
“Shut up, maggot,” Sheriff Avery said. He was half-dozing in the wake of a four-chop dinner, thinking of how he would tell his brother (and his brother’s wife, who was killing pretty) in the next Barony about this heroic day. He would be modest, but he would still get it across to them that he’d played a central role; that if not for him, these three young ladrones might have—
“Just don’t sing,” Cuthbert said to Dave. “I’ll confess to the murder of Arthur Eld himself if you just don’t sing.”
To Bert’s left, Alain was sitting cross-legged on his bunk. Roland was lying on his with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. But at the moment the door’s latch clicked, he swung to a sitting position. As if he’d only been waiting.
“That’ll be Bridger,” Deputy Dave said, gladly putting his guitar aside. He hated this duty and couldn’t wait to be relieved. Heath’s jokes were the worst. That he could continue to joke in the face of what was going to happen to them tomorrow.
“I think it’s likely one of them,” Sheriff Avery said, meaning the Big Coffin Hunters.
In fact, it was neither. It was a cowboy all but buried in a serape that looked much too big for him (the ends actually dragged on the boards as he clumped in and shut the door behind him), and wearing a hat that came way down over his eyes. To Herk Avery, the fellow looked like somebody’s idea of a cowboy stuffy.
“Say, stranger!” he said, beginning to smile . . . for this was surely someone’s joke, and Herk Avery could take a joke as well as any man. Especially after four chops and a mountain of mashed. “Howdy! What business do ye—”
The hand which hadn’t closed the door had been under the serape. When it came out, it was clumsily holding a gun all three of the prisoners recognized at once. Avery stared at it, his smile slowly fading. His hands u
nlaced themselves. His feet, which had been propped up on his desk, came down to the floor.
“Whoa, partner,” he said slowly. “Let’s talk about it.”
“Get the keys off the wall and unlock the cells,” the vaq said in a hoarse, artificially deep voice. Outside, unnoticed by all save Roland, more firecrackers rattled in a dry, popping string.
“I can’t hardly do that,” Avery said, easing open the bottom drawer of his desk with his foot. There were several guns, left over from that morning, inside. “Now, I don’t know if that thing’s loaded, but I don’t hardly think a traildog like you—”
The newcomer pointed the gun at the desk and pulled the trigger. The report was deafening in the little room, but Roland thought—hoped—that with the door shut, it would sound like just another firecracker. Bigger than some, smaller than others.
Good girl, he thought. Oh, good girl—but be careful. For gods’ sake, Sue, be careful.
All three of them standing in a line at the cell doors now, eyes wide and mouths tight.
The bullet struck the corner of the Sheriff’s rolltop and tore off a huge splinter. Avery screamed, tilted back in his chair again, and went sprawling. His foot remained hooked under the drawer-pull; the drawer shot out and overturned, spilling three ancient firearms across the board floor.