there’s a good visible reason not to. I see no reason not to here. And if there are people, well, that might be a good thing. We could do with a little palaver.”
Susannah reflected that Roland seemed different now, and she didn’t think it was simply
because the voices in his mind had ceased. This is the way he was when he still had wars to
fight and men to lead and his old friends around him, she thought. How he was before the
world moved on and he moved on with it, chasing that man Walter. This is how he was
before the Big Empty turned him inward on himself and made him strange.
“They might know what those drum sounds are,” Jake suggested.
Roland nodded again. “Anything they know—particularly about the city—would come in
handy, but there’s no need to think ahead too much about people who may not even be
there.”
“Tell you what,” Susannah said, “I wouldn’t come out if I saw us. Four people, three of them armed? We probably look like a gang of those old-time outlaws in your stories,
Roland—what do you call them?”
“Harriers.” His left hand dropped to the sandalwood grip of his remaining revolver and he pulled it a little way out of the holster. “But no harrier ever born carried one of these, and if there are old-timers in yon village, they’ll know it. Let’s go.”
Jake glanced behind them and saw the bumbler lying in the road with his muzzle between
his short front paws, watching them closely. “Oy!” Jake called.
“Oy!” the bumbler echoed, and scrambled to its feet at once.
They started down the shallow knoll toward the town with Oy trot- ting along behind them.
4
Two BUILDINGS ON THE outskirts had been burned; the rest of the town appeared dusty
but intact. They passed an abandoned livery stable on the left, a building that might have
been a market on the right, and then they were in the town proper—such as it was. There
were perhaps a dozen rickety buildings standing on either side of the road. Alleys ran
between some of them. The other road, this one a dirt track mostly overgrown with plains
grass, ran northeast to southwest.
Susannah looked at its northeast arm and thought: Once there were barges on the river, and
somewhere down that road there was a landing, and probably another shacky little town, mostly saloons and cribs, built up around it. That was the last point of trade before the
barges went on down to the city. The wagons came through this place going to that place
and then back again. How long ago was that?
She didn’t know—but a long time, from the look of this place.
Somewhere a rusty hinge squalled monotonously. Somewhere else one shutter clapped
lonesomely to and fro in the plains wind.
There were hitching rails, most of them broken, in front of the buildings. Once there had
been board sidewalks, but now most of the boards were gone and grass grew up through the
holes where they had been. The signs on the buildings were faded, but some were still
read- able, written in a bastardized form of English which was, she supposed, what Roland
called the low speech. FOOD AND GRAIN, one said, and she guessed that might mean
feed and grain. On the false front next to it, below a crude drawing of a plains-buffalo lying
in the grass, were the words REST EAT DRINK. Under the sign, batwing doors hung
crookedly, moving a little in the wind.
“Is that a saloon?” She didn’t know exactly why she was whispering, only that she couldn’t have spoken in a normal tone of voice. It would have been like playing “Clinch Mountain
Breakdown” on the banjo at a funeral.
“It was,” Roland said. He didn’t whisper, but his voice was low-pitched and thoughtful.
Jake was walking close by his side, looking around nervously. Behind them, Oy had closed
up his distance to ten yards. He trotted quickly, head swinging from side to side like a
pendulum as he examined the buildings.
Now Susannah began to feel it: that sensation of being watched. It was exactly as Roland
had said it would be, a feeling sunshine had been replaced by shade.
“There are people, aren’t there?” she whispered.
Roland nodded.
Standing on the northeast corner of the crossroads was a building with another sign she
recognized: HOSTEL, it said, and COTTS. Except for a church with a tilted steeple up
ahead, it was the tallest building in town—three stories. She glanced up in time to see a
white blur, surely a face, draw away from one of the glassless windows. Suddenly she
wanted to get out of here. Roland was setting a slow, deliberate pace, however, and she
supposed she knew why. Hurrying might give the watchers the impression that they were
scared .. . and that they could be taken. All the same—
At the crossroads the intersecting streets widened out, creating a town square which had
been overrun by grass and weeds. In the center was an eroded stone marker. Above it, a
metal box hung on a sagging length of rusty cable.
Roland, with Jake by his side, walked toward the marker. Eddie pushed Susannah’s chair after. Grass whispered in its spokes and the wind tickled a lock of hair against her cheek.
Further along the street, the shutter banged and the hinge squealed. She shivered and
brushed the hair away.
“I wish he’d hurry up,” Eddie said in a low voice. “This place gives me the creeps.”
Susannah nodded. She looked around the square and again she could almost see how it
must have been on market-day—the sidewalks thronged with people, a few of them town
ladies with their baskets over their arms, most of them waggoners and roughly-dressed
bargemen (she did not know why she was so sure of the barges and bargemen, but she was);
the wagons passing through the town square, the ones on the unpaved road raising choking
clouds of yellow dust as the drivers flogged their carthorses
(oxen they were oxen)
along. She could see those carts, dusty swatches of canvas tied down over bales of cloth on
some and pyramids of tarred barrels on others; could see the oxen, double-yoked and
straining patiently, flicking their ears at the flies buzzing around their huge heads; could
hear voices, and laughter, and the piano in the saloon pounding out a lively tune like
“Buffalo Gals” or “Darlin’ Katy.”
It’s as if I lived here in another life, she thought.
The gunslinger bent over the inscription on the marker. “Great Road,” he read. “Lud, one hundred and sixty wheels.”
“Wheels?” Jake asked.
“An old form of measurement.”
“Have you heard of Lud?” Eddie asked.
“Perhaps,” the gunslinger said. “When I was very small.”
“It rhymes with crud,” Eddie said. “Maybe not such a good sign.”
Jake was examining the east side of the stone. “River Road. It’s written funny, but that’s
what it says.”
Eddie looked at the west side of the marker. “It says Jimtown, forty wheels. Isn’t that the birthplace of Wayne Newton, Roland?”
Roland looked at him blankly.
“Shet ma mouf,” Eddie said, and rolled his eyes.
On the southwest corner of the square was the town’s only stone building—a squat, dusty
cube with rusty bars on the windows. Combina- tion county jail and courthouse, Susannah
thought. She had seen similar ones down south; add a few slant parking spaces in front and
you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Something had been daubed across the facade of
the building in fading yellow paint. She could read it, and although she couldn’t understand
it, it made her more anxious than ever to get out of this town. PUBES DIE, it said.
“Roland!” When she had his attention, she pointed at the graffito. “What does that mean?”
He read it, then shook his head. “Don’t know.”
She looked around again. The square now seemed smaller, and the buildings seemed to be
leaning over them. “Can we get out of here?”
“Soon.” He bent down and pried a small chunk of cobble out of the roadbed. He bounced it thoughtfully in his left hand as he looked up at the metal box which hung over the marker.
He cocked his arm and Susannah realized, an instant too late, what he meant to do.
“No, Roland!” she cried, then cringed back at the sound of her own horrified voice.
He took no notice of her but fired the stone upward. His aim was as true as ever, and it
struck the box dead center with a hollow, metallic bang. There was a whir of clockwork
from within, and a rusty green flag unfolded from a slot in the side. When it locked in place,
a bell rang briskly. Written in large black letters on the side of the flag was the word GO.
“I’ll be damned,” Eddie said. “It’s a Keystone Kops traffic-light. If you hit it again, does it say STOP?”