above MOTHER. He poked this sheet on a rusty nailhead where it was sure to be seen, then tore the book up and stamped on the pieces. Which boy had it belonged to? He hoped it was Dearborn’s, but it didn’t really matter.
The first thing Jonas noticed when he went inside was the pigeons, cooing in their cages. He had thought they might be using a helio to send (heir messages, but pigeons! My! That was ever so much more trig!
“I’ll get to you in a few minutes,” he said. “Be patient, darlings; peck and shit while you still can.”
He looked around with some curiosity, the soft coo of the pigeons soothing in his ears. Lads or lords? Roy had asked the old man in Ritzy. The old man had said maybe both. Neat lads, at the very least, from the way they kept their quarters, Jonas thought. Well trained. Three bunks, all made. Three piles of goods at the foot of each, stacked up just as neat. In each pile he found a picture of a mother—oh, such good fellows they were—and in one he found a picture of both parents. He had hoped for names, possibly documents of some kind (even love letters from the girl, mayhap), but there was nothing like that. Lads or lords, they were careful enough. Jonas removed the pictures from their frames and shredded them. The goods he scattered to all points of the compass, destroying as much as he could in the limited time he had. When he found a linen handkerchief in the pocket of a pair of dress pants, he blew his nose on it and then spread it carefully on the toes of the boy’s dress boots, so that the green splat would show to good advantage. What could be more aggravating— more unsettling— than to come home after a hard day spent tallying stock and find some stranger’s snot on one of your personals?
The pigeons were upset now; they were incapable of scolding like jays or rooks,
but they tried to flutter away from him when he opened their cages. It did no good, of course. He caught them one by one and twisted their heads off. That much accomplished, Jonas popped one bird beneath the strawtick pillow of each boy.
Beneath one of these pillows he found a small bonus: paper strips and a storage-pen, undoubtedly kept for the composition of messages. He broke the pen and flung it across the room. The strips he put in his own pocket. Paper always came in handy.
With the pigeons seen to, he could hear better. He began walking slowly back and forth on the board floor, head cocked, listening.
4
When Alain came riding up to him at a gallop, Roland ignored the boy’s strained white face and burning, frightened eyes. “I make it thirty-one on my side,” he said,
“all with the Barony brand, crown and shield. You?”
“We have to go back,” Alain said. “Something’s wrong. It’s the touch. I’ve never felt it so clear.”
“Your count?” Roland asked again. There were times, such as now, when he found Alain’s ability to use the touch more annoying than helpful.
“Forty. Or forty-one, I forget. And what does it matter? They’ve moved what they don’t want us to count. Roland, didn’t you hear me? We have to go back!
Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong at our place /”
Roland glanced toward Bert, riding peaceably some five hundred yards away.
Then he looked back at Alain, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.
“Bert? He’s numb to the touch and always has been—you know it. I’m not. You know I’m not! Roland, please! Whoever it is will see the pigeons! Maybe find our guns!” The normally phlegmatic Alain was nearly crying in his excitement and dismay. “If you won’t go back with me, give me leave to go back by myself! Give me leave, Roland, for your father’s sake!”
“For your father’s sake, I give you none,” Roland said. “My count is thirty-one.
Yours is forty. Yes, we’ll say forty. Forty’s a good number— good as any, I wot.
Now we’ll change sides and count again.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Alain almost whispered. He was looking at Roland as if Roland had gone mad.
“Nothing.”
“You knew! You knew when we left this morning!”
“Oh, I might have seen something,” Roland said. “A reflection, perhaps, but … do you trust me, Al? That’s what matters, I think. Do you trust me, or do you think I lost my wits when I lost my heart? As he does?” He jerked his head in Cuthbert’s direction. Roland was looking at Alain with a faint smile on his lips, but his eyes were ruthless and distant it was Roland’s over-the-horizon look. Alain wondered if Susan Delgado had seen that expression yet, and if she had, what she made of it.
“I trust you.” By now Alain was so confused that he didn’t know for Mire if that was a lie or the truth.
“Good. Then switch sides with me. My count is thirty-one, mind.”
“Thirty-one,” Alain agreed. He raised his hands, then dropped them hack to his thighs with a slap so sharp his normally stolid mount laid his cars back and jigged a bit under him. “Thirty-one.”
“I think we may go back early today, if that’s any satisfaction to you,” Roland said, and rode away. Alain watched him. He’d always wondered what went on in Roland’s head, but never more than now.
5
Creak. Creak-creak.
Here was what he’d been listening for, and just as Jonas was about to give up the hunt. He had expected to find their hidey-hole a little closer to their beds, but they were trig, all right.
He went to one knee and used the blade of his knife to pry up the board which had creaked. Under it were three bundles, each swaddled in dark strips of cotton cloth.
These strips were damp to the touch and smelled fragrantly of gun-oil. Jonas took the bundles out and unwrapped each, curious to see what sort of calibers the youngsters had brought. The answer turned out to be serviceable but undistinguished. Two of the bundles contained single five-shot revolvers of a type then called (for no reason I know) “carvers.” The third contained two guns, six-shooters of higher quality than the carvers. In fact, for one heart-stopping moment, Jonas thought he had found the big revolvers of a gunslinger—true-blue steel barrels, sandalwood grips, bores like mineshafts. Such guns he could not
have left, no matter what the cost to his plans. Seeing the plain grips was thus something of a relief. Disappointment was never a thing you looked for, but it had a wonderful way of clearing the mind.
He rewrapped the guns and put them back, put the board back as well. A gang of ne’er-do-well clots from town might possibly come out here, and might possibly vandalize the unguarded bunkhouse, scattering what they didn’t tear up, but find a hiding place such as this? No, my son. Not likely.
Do you really think they’ll believe it was hooligans from town that did this?
They might; just because he had underestimated them to start with didn’t mean he should turn about-face and begin overestimating them now. And he had the luxury of not needing to care. Either way, it would make them angry. Angry enough to rush full-tilt around their Hillock, perhaps. To throw caution to the wind . . . and reap the whirlwind.
Jonas poked the end of the severed dog’s tail into one of the pigeon-cages, so it stuck up like a huge, mocking feather. He used the paint to write such charmingly boyish slogans as
and
on the walls. Then he left, standing on the porch for a moment to verify he still had the Bar K to himself. Of course he did. Yet for a blink or two, there at the end, he’d felt uneasy—almost as though he’d been scented. By some sort of In-World telepathy, mayhap.
There is such; you know it. The touch, it’s called.
Aye, but that was the tool of gunslingers, artists, and lunatics. Not of boys, be they lords or just lads.
Jonas went back to his horse at a near-trot nevertheless, mounted, and rode toward
town. Things were reaching the boil, and there would be a lot to do before Demon Moon rose full in the sky.
6
Rhea’s hut, its stone walls and the cracked guijarros of its roof slimed with moss, huddled on the last hill of the Coos. Beyond it was a magnificent view northwest—the Bad Grass, the desert, Hanging Rock, Eyebolt Canyon—but scenic vistas were the last thing on Sheemie’s mind as he led Capriccioso cautiously into Rhea’s yard not long after noon. He’d been hungry for the last hour or so, but now the pangs were gone. He hated this place worse than any other in Barony, even more than Citgo with its big towers always going creakedy-creak and clangety-clang.