Topsy sneezed again— K’chow! —and lowered his head wearily.
The gunslinger saw the source of the tinkling. Above the cross on the church doors, a cord had been strung in a long, shallow arc. Hung 148
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from it were perhaps two dozen tiny silver bells. There was hardly any breeze today, but enough so these smalls were never quite still . . . and if a real wind should rise, Roland thought, the sound made by the tintinnabulation of the bells would probably be a good deal less pleasant; more like the strident parlay of gossips’ tongues.
“Hello!” Roland called, looking across the street at what a large false-fronted sign proclaimed to be the Good Beds Hotel. “Hello, the town!”
No answer but the bells, the tunesome insects, and that odd wooden clunking. No answer, no movement . . . but there were folk here. Folk or something. He was being watched. The tiny hairs on the nape of his neck had stiffened.
Roland stepped onward, leading Topsy toward the center of town, puffing up the unlaid High Street dust with each step. Forty paces farther along, he stopped in front of a low building marked with a single curt word: LAW. The Sheriff’s office (if they had such this far from the Inners) looked remarkably similar to the church—wooden boards stained a rather forbidding shade of dark brown above a stone foundation.
The bells behind him rustled and whispered.
He left the roan standing in the middle of the street and mounted the steps to the LAW office. He was very aware of the bells, of the sun beating against his neck, and of the sweat trickling down his sides.
The door was shut but unlocked. He opened it, then winced back, half-raising a hand as the heat trapped inside rushed out in a sound-less gasp. If all the closed buildings were this hot inside, he mused, the livery barns would soon not be the only burnt-out hulks. And with no rain to stop the flames (and certainly no volunteer fire department, not anymore), the town would not be long for the face of the earth.
He stepped inside, trying to sip at the stifling air rather than taking deep breaths. He immediately heard the low drone of flies.
There was a single cell, commodious and empty, its barred door standing open. Filthy skin-shoes, one of the pair coming unsewn, lay beneath a bunk sodden with the same dried maroon stuff that had 149
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marked The Bustling Pig. Here was where the flies were, crawling over the stain, feeding from it.
On the desk was a ledger. Roland turned it toward him and read what was embossed upon its red cover:
REGISTRY OF MISDEEDS & REDRESS
IN THE YEARS OF OUR LORD
ELURIA
So now he knew the name of the town, at least—Eluria. Pretty, yet somehow ominous, as well. But any name would have seemed ominous, Roland supposed, given these circumstances. He turned to leave, and saw a closed door secured by a wooden bolt.
He went to it, stood before it for a moment, then drew one of the big revolvers he carried low on his hips. He stood a moment longer, head down, thinking (Cuthbert, his old friend, liked to say that the wheels inside Roland’s head ground slow but exceedingly fine), and then retracted the bolt. He opened the door and immediately stood back, leveling his gun, expecting a body (Eluria’s Sheriff, mayhap) to come tumbling into the room with his throat cut and his eyes gouged out, victim of a MISDEED in need of REDRESS—
Nothing.
Well, half a dozen stained jumpers which longer-term prisoners were probably required to wear, two bows, a quiver of arrows, an old, dusty motor, a rifle that had probably last been fired a hundred years ago, and a mop . . . but in the gunslinger’s mind, all that came down to nothing. Just a storage closet.
He went back to the desk, opened the register, and leafed through it. Even the pages were warm, as if the book had been baked. In a way, he supposed it had been. If the High Street layout had been different, he might have expected a large number of religious offenses to be recorded, but he wasn’t surprised to find none here—if the Jesus-Man church had coexisted with a couple of saloons, the churchfolk must have been fairly reasonable.
What Roland found was the usual petty offenses, and a few not so 150
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petty—a murder, a horse-thieving, the Distressal of a Lady (which probably meant rape). The murderer had been removed to a place called Lexingworth to be hanged. Roland had never heard of it. One note toward the end read Green folk sent hence. It meant nothing to Roland. The most recent entry was this:
12/Fe/99. Chas. Freeborn, cattle-theef to be tryed.
Roland wasn’t familiar with the notation 12/Fe/99, but as this was a long stretch from February, he supposed Fe might stand for Full Earth. In any case, the ink looked about as fresh as the blood on the bunk in the cell, and the gunslinger had a good idea that Chas. Freeborn, cattle-theef, had reached the clearing at the end of his path.
He went out into the heat and the lacy sound of bells. Topsy looked at Roland dully, then lowered his head again, as if there were something in the dust of the High Street which could be cropped.
As if he would ever want to crop again, for that matter.
The gunslinger gathered up the reins, slapped the dust off them against the faded no-color of his jeans, and continued on up the street.
The wooden knocking sound grew steadily louder as he walked (he had not holstered his gun when leaving LAW, nor cared to holster it now), and as he neared the town square, which must have housed the Eluria market in more normal times, Roland at last saw movement.
On the far side of the square was a long watering trough, made of ironwood from the look (what some called “seequoiah” out here), apparently fed in happier times from a rusty steel pipe which now jutted waterless above the trough’s south end. Lolling over one side of this municipal oasis, about halfway down its length, was a leg clad in faded gray pants and terminating in a well-chewed cowboy boot.
The chewer was a large dog, perhaps two shades grayer than the corduroy pants. Under other circumstances, Roland supposed, the mutt would have had the boot off long since, but perhaps the foot and lower calf inside it had swelled. In any case, the dog was well on its way to simply chewing the obstacle away. It would seize the boot and shake it back and forth. Every now and then the boot’s heel would col-151
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lide with the wooden side of the trough, producing another hollow knock. The gunslinger hadn’t been so wrong to think of coffintops after all, it seemed.
Why doesn’t it just back off a few steps, jump into the trough, and have at him? Roland wondered. No water coming out of the pipe, so it can’t be afraid of drowning.
Topsy uttered another of his hollow, tired sneezes, and when the dog lurched around in response, Roland understood why it was doing things the hard way. One of its front legs had been badly broken and crookedly mended. Walking would be a chore for it, jumping out of the question. On its chest was a patch of dirty white fur. Growing out of this patch was black fur in a roughly cruciform shape. A Jesus-dog, mayhap, hoping for a spot of afternoon communion.
There was nothing very religious about the snarl which began to wind out of its chest, however, or the roll of its rheumy eyes. It lifted its upper lip in a trembling sneer, revealing a goodish set of teeth.
“Light out,” Roland said. “While you can.”
The dog backed up until its hindquarters were pressed against the chewed boot. It regarded the oncoming man fearfully, but clearly meant to stand its ground. The revolver in Roland’s hand held no sig-nificance for it. The gunslinger wasn’t surprised—he guessed the dog had never seen one, had no idea it was anything other than a club of some kind, which could only be thrown once.
“Hie on with you, now,” Roland said, but still the dog wouldn’t move.
He should have shot it—it was no good to itself, and a dog that had acquired a taste for human flesh could be no good to anyone else—but he somehow didn’t like to. Killing the only thing still living in this town (other than the singing bugs, that was) seemed like an invitation to bad luck.
He fired into the dust near the dog’s good forepaw, the sound crash-ing into the hot day and temporarily silencing the insects. The dog could run, it seemed, although at a lurching trot that hurt Roland’s eyes . . . and his heart, a little, too. It stopped at the far side of the square, by an overturned flatbed wagon (there looked to be more dried 152