door to it. On Mayor Thorin’s orders, I’ve taken the liberty of stocking the larder and having the bunkhouse swept out and spruced up a little. Ye may see the occasional bug, but nothing that’ll bite or sting . . . and no snakes, unless there’s a few under the floor, and if there are, let em stay there’s what I say. Hey, boys? Let em stay there!”
“Let em stay there, right under the floor where they’re happy,” Cuthbert agreed, still gazing down at the harbor with his arms folded over his chest.
Avery gave him a brief, uncertain glance, his smile flickering a bit at the comers.
Then he turned back to Roland, and the smile shone out strongly once more.
“There’s no holes in the roof, lad, and if it rains, ye’ll be dry. What think ye of that? Does it sound well to ye?”
“Better than we deserve. I think that you’ve been very efficient and Mayor Thorin’s been far too kind.” And he did think that. The question was why. “But we appreciate his thoughtfulness. Don’t we, boys?”
Cuthbert and Alain made vigorous assent.
“And we accept with thanks.”
Avery nodded. “I’ll tell him. Go safely, boys.”
They had reached the hitching rail. Avery once more shook hands all around, this time saving his keenest looks for their horses.
“Until tomorrow night, then, young gents?”
“Tomorrow night,” Roland agreed.
“Will ye be able to find the Bar K on your own, do yer think?”
Again Roland was struck by the man’s unspoken contempt and unconscious condescension. Yet perhaps it was to the good. If the High Sheriff thought they were stupid, who knew what might come of it?
“We’ll find it,” Cuthbert said, mounting up. Avery was looking suspiciously at the rook’s skull on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but for once managed to keep his mouth shut. Roland was both amazed and pleased by this unexpected reticence. “Fare you well, Sheriff.”
“And you, boy.”
He stood there by the hitching post, a large man in a khaki shirt with sweat-stains around the armpits and black boots that looked too shiny for a working sheriff’s feet. And where’s the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding?
Roland thought. I’d like to see the cut of that Cayuse.
Avery waved to them as they went. The other deputies came down the walk, Deputy Dave in the forefront. They waved, too.
3
The moment the Affiliation brats mounted on their fathers’ expensive horseflesh were around the comer and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one marginally more intelligent.
“What think ye, Dave?”
Dave lifted his monocle to his mouth and began to nibble nervously at its brass edging, a habit about which Sheriff Avery had long since ceased to nag him. Even Dave’s wife, Judy, had given up on that score, and Judy Hollis—Judy Wertner that was—was a fair engine when it came to getting her own way.
“Soft,” Dave said. “Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken’s ass.”
“Mayhap,” Avery said, putting his thumbs in his belt and rocking enormously back and forth, “but the one did most of the talking, him in the flathead hat, he doesn’t think he’s soft.”
“Don’t matter what he thinks,” Dave said, still nibbling at his eyeglass. “He’s in Hambry, now. He may have to change his way of thinking to our’n.”
Behind him, the other deputies laughed. Even Avery smiled. They would leave the rich boys alone if the rich boys left them alone—those were orders, straight from Mayor’s House—but Avery had to admit that he wouldn’t mind a little dust-up with them, so he wouldn’t. He would enjoy putting his boot into the balls of the one with that idiotic bird’s skull on his saddle-horn—standing there and mocking him, he’d been, thinking all the while that Herk Avery was too country-dumb to know what he was up to—but the thing he’d realty enjoy would be beating the cool look from the eyes of the boy in the flathead preacher’s hat, seeing a hotter expression of fear rise up in them as Mr. Will Dearborn of Hemphill realized that New Canaan was far away and his rich father couldn’t help him.
“Aye,” he said, clapping Dave on the shoulder. “Mayhap he’ll have to change his way of thinking.” He smiled—one very different from any of those he had shown the Affiliation counters. “Mayhap they all will.”
4
The three boys rode in single file until they were past the Travellers’ Rest (a young and obviously retarded man with kinky black hair looked up from scrubbing the brick stoop and waved to them; they waved back). Then they moved up abreast, Roland in the middle.
“What did you think of our new friend, the High Sheriff?” Roland asked.
“I have no opinion,” Cuthbert said brightly. “No, none at all. Opinion is politics, and politics is an evil which has caused many a fellow to be hung while he’s still young and pretty.” He leaned forward and tapped the rook’s skull with his knuckles. “The lookout didn’t care for him, though. I’m sorry to say that our faithful lookout thought Sheriff Avery a fat bag of guts without a trustworthy bone in his body.”
Roland turned to Alain. “And you, young Master Stockworth?”
Alain considered it for some time, as was his way, chewing a piece of grass he’d bent oversaddle to pluck from his side of the road. At last he said: “If he came upon us burning in the street, I don’t think he’d piss on us to put us out.”
Cuthbert laughed heartily at that. “And you, Will? How do you say, dear captain?”
“He doesn’t interest me much … but one thing he said does. Given that the horse-meadow they call the Drop has to be at least thirty wheels long and runs five or more to the dusty desert, how do you suppose Sheriff Avery knew we were on the part of it that belongs to Croydon’s Piano Ranch?”
They looked at him, first with surprise, then speculation. After a moment Cuthbert leaned forward and rapped once more on the rook’s skull. “We’re being watched, and you never reported it? No supper for you, sir, and it’ll be the stockade the next time it happens!”
But before they had gone much farther, Roland’s thoughts of Sheriff Avery gave way to more pleasant ones of Susan Delgado. He would see her the following night, of that he was sure. He wondered if her hair would be down.
He couldn’t wait to find out.
5
Now here they were, at Mayor’s House. Let the game begin, Roland thought, not
clear on what that meant even as the phrase went through his mind, surely not thinking of Castles . . . not then.
The hostlers led their mounts away, and for a moment the three of them stood at the foot of the steps—huddled, almost, as horses do in unfriendly weather—their beardless faces washed by the light of the torches. From inside, the guitars played and voices were raised in a fresh eddy of laughter.
“Do we knock?” Cuthbert asked. “Or just open and march in?”
Roland was spared answering. The main door of the had was thrown open and two women stepped out, both wearing long white-collared dresses that reminded all three boys of the dresses stockmen’s wives wore in their own part of the world.
Their hair was caught back in snoods that sparkled with some bright diamondy stuff in the light of the torches.
The plumper of the two stepped forward, smiling, and dropped them a deep curtsey. Her earrings, which looked like square-cut firedims, flashed and bobbed.
“You are the young men from the Affiliation, so you are, and welcome you are, as well. Goodeven, sirs, and may your days be long upon the earth!”
They bowed in unison, boots forward, and thanked her in an unintended chorus that made her laugh and clap her hands. The tall woman beside her offered them a smile as spare as her frame.
“I am Olive Thorin,” the plump woman said, “the Mayor’s wife. This is my sister-in-law, Coral.”
Coral Thorin, still with that narrow smile (it barely creased her lips and touched her eyes not at all), dipped them a token curtsey. Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain bowed again over their outstretched legs.
“I welcome you to Seafront,” Olive Thorin said, her dignity leavened and made pleasant by her artless smile, her obvious dazzlement at the appearance of her young visitors from In-World. “Come to our house with joy. I say so with all my heart, so I do.”
“And so we will, madam,” Roland said, “for your greeting has made us joyful.” He took her hand, and, with no calculation whatever, raised it to his lips and kissed it.