Zalia curtsied, spreading invisible skirts to either side of her battered corduroy pants.
“—and here are Ben Slightman the Elder and Benny the Younger.”
The father raised his fist to his forehead and nodded. The son, his face a study in awe (it was mostly the guns, Susannah surmised), bowed with his right leg out stiffly in front of him and the heel planted.
“The Old Fella you already know,” Overholser finished, speaking with exactly the sort of offhand contempt
at which Overholser himself would have taken deep offense, had it been directed toward his valued self.
Susannah supposed that when you were the big farmer, you got used to talking just about any way you wanted. She wondered how far he might push Roland before discovering that he hadn’t been pushing at all.
Because some men couldn’t be pushed. They might go along with you for awhile, but then—
“These are my trailmates,” Roland said. “Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers, of New York. And this is Susannah.” He gestured at her without turning in her direction. Overholser’s face took on a knowing, intensely male look Susannah had seen before. Detta Walker had had a way of wiping that look off men’s faces that she didn’t believe sai Overholser would care for at all.
Nonetheless, she gave Overholser and the rest of them a demure little smile and made her own invisible-skirts curtsy. She thought hers as graceful in its way as the one made by Zalia Jaffords, but of course a curtsy didn’t look quite the same when you were missing your lower legs and feet. The newcomers had marked the part of her that was gone, of course, but their feelings on that score didn’t interest her much. She did wonder what they thought of her wheelchair, though, the one Eddie had gotten her in Topeka, where Blaine the Mono had finished up. These folks would never have seen the like of it.
Callahan may have, she thought. Because Callahans from our side. He—
The boy said, “Is that a bumbler?”
“Hush, do ya,” Slightman said, sounding almost shocked that his son had spoken.
“That’s okay,” Jake said. “Yeah, he’s a bumbler. Oy, go to him.” He pointed at Ben the Younger. Oy trotted around the campfire to where the newcomer stood and looked up at the boy with his gold-ringed eyes.
“I never saw a tame one before,” Tian said. “Have heard of em, of course, but the world has moved on.”
“Mayhap not all of it has moved on,” Roland said. He looked at Overholser. “Mayhap some of the old ways still hold.”
“Can I pat him?” the boy asked Jake. “Will he bite?”
“You can and he won’t.”
As Slightman the Younger dropped on his hunkers in front of Oy, Susannah certainly hoped Jake was right.
Having a billy-bumbler chomp off this kid’s nose would not set them on in any style at all.
But Oy suffered himself to be stroked, even stretching his long neck up so he could sample the odor of Slightman’s face. The boy laughed. “What did you say his name was?”
Before Jake could reply, the bumbler spoke for himself. “Oy!”
They all laughed. And as simply as that they were together, well-met on this road that followed the Path of the Beam. The bond was fragile, but even Overholser sensed it. And when he laughed, the big farmer looked as if he might be a good enough fellow. Maybe frightened, and pompous to be sure, but there was something there.
Susannah didn’t know whether to be glad or afraid.
FOUR
“I’d have a word alone with’ee, if it does ya,” Overholser said. The two boys had walked off a little distance with Oy between them, Slightman the Younger asking Jake if the bumbler could count, as he’d heard some of them could.
“I think not, Wayne,” Jaffords said at once. “It was agreed we’d go back to our camp, break bread, and explain our need to these folk. And then, if they agreed to come further—”
“I have no objection to passing a word with sai Overholser.” Roland said, “nor will you, sai Jaffords, I think.
For is he not your dinh?” And then, before Tian could object further (or deny it): “Give these folks tea, Susannah. Eddie, step over here with us a bit, if it do ya fine.”
This phrase, new to all their ears, came out of Roland’s mouth sounding perfectly natural. Susannah marveled at it. If she had tried saying that, she would have sounded as if she were sucking up.
“We have food south aways,” Zalia said timidly. “Food and graf and coffee. Andy—”
“We’ll eat with pleasure, and drink your coffee with joy,” Roland said. “But have tea first, I beg. We’ll only be a moment or two, won’t we, sai?”
Overholser nodded. His look of stern unease had departed. So had his stiffness of body. From the far side of the road (close to where a woman named Mia had slipped into the woods only the night before), the boys laughed as Oy did something clever—Benny with surprise, Jake with obvious pride.
Roland took Overholser’s arm and led him a little piece up the road. Eddie strolled with them. Jaffords, frowning, made as if to go with them anyway. Susannah touched his shoulder. “Don’t,” she said in a low voice. “He knows what he’s doing.”
Jaffords looked at her doubtfully for a moment, then came with her. “P’raps I could build that fire up for you a bit, sai,” Slightman the Elder said with a kindly look at her diminished legs. “For I see a few sparks yet, so I do.”
“If you please,” Susannah said, thinking how wonderful all this was. How wonderful, how strange.
Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.
FIVE
Up the road about forty feet from the others, the three men stood together. Overholser appeared to be doing all the talking, sometimes gesturing violently to punctuate a point. He spoke as if Roland were no more than some gunbunny hobo who happened to come drifting down the road with a few no-account friends riding drogue behind him. He explained to Roland that Tian Jaffords was a fool (albeit a well-meaning one) who did not understand the facts of life. He told Roland that Jaffords had to be restrained, cooled off, not only in his best interests but in those of the entire Calla. He insisted to Roland that if anything could be done, Wayne Overholser, son of Alan, would be first in line to do it; he’d never shirked a chore in his life, but to go against the Wolves was madness. And, he added, lowering his voice, speaking of madness, there was the Old Fella.
When he kept to his church and his rituals, he was fine. In such things, a little madness made a fine sauce.
This, however, was summat different. Aye, and by a long hike.
Roland listened to it all, nodding occasionally. He said almost nothing. And when Overholser was finally finished, Calla Bryn Sturgis’s big farmer simply looked with a kind of fixed fascination at the gunman who stood before him. Mostly at those faded blue eyes.
“Are ye what ye say?” he asked finally. “Tell me true, sai.”
“I’m Roland of Gilead,” the gunslinger said.
“From the line of Eld? Ye do say it?”
“By watch and by warrant,” Roland said.
“But Gilead…” Overholser paused. “Gilead’s long gone.”
“I,” Roland said, “am not.”
“Would ye kill us all, or cause us to be killed? Tell me, I beg.”
“What would you, sai Overholser? Not later; not a day or a week or a moon from now, but at this minute?”
Overholser stood a long time, looking from Roland to Eddie and then back to Roland again. Here was a man not used to changing his mind; if he did so, it would hurt him like a rupture. From down the road came the laughter of the boys as Oy fetched something Benny had thrown—a stick almost as big as the bumbler was himself.
“I’d listen,” Overholser said at last. “I’d do that much, gods help me, and say thankee.”
“In other words he explained all the reasons why it was a fool’s errand,” Eddie told her later, “and then did exactly what Roland wanted him to do. It was like magic.”
“Sometimes Roland is magic,” she said.
SIX
The Calla’s party had camped in a pleasant hilltop clearing not far south of the road but just enough off the Path of the Beam so that the clouds hung still and moveless in the sky, seemingly close enough to touch. The way there through the woods had been carefully marked; some of the blazes Susannah saw were as big as her palm. These people might be crackerjack farmers and stockmen, but it was clear the woods made them uneasy.