do more than get a hand on the gunstock, Roland blew the silver bell off his chest and exploded the heart which lay beneath it. Hookey pitched out of his saddle with a grunt.
Cuthbert caught up with Roland on the right side and shot two more men off their horses. He gave Roland a fierce and blazing grin. “Al was right!” he shouted.
“These are hard calibers!”
Roland’s talented fingers did their work, rolling the cylinders of the guns he held and reloading at a full gallop—doing it with a ghastly, supernatural speed—and then beginning to fire again. Now they had come almost all the way through the group, riding hard, laying men low on both sides and straight ahead as well. Alain dropped back a little and turned his horse, covering Roland and Cuthbert from behind.
Roland saw Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll reining around to face their attackers.
Lengyll was clawing at his machine-gun, but the strap had gotten tangled in the wide collar of the duster he wore, and every time he grabbed for the stock, it bobbed out of his reach. Beneath his heavy gray-blond mustache, Lengyll’s mouth was twisted with fury.
Now, riding between Roland and Cuthbert and these three, holding a huge blued-steel five-shot in one hand, came Hash Renfrew.
“Gods damn you!” Renfrew cried. “Oh, you rotten sister-fuckers!” He dropped his reins and laid the five-shot in the crook of one elbow to steady it. The wind gusted viciously, wrapping him in an envelope of swirling brown grit.
Roland had no thought of retreating, or perhaps jigging to one side or the other. He had, in fact, no thoughts at all. The fever had descended over his mind and he burned with it like a torch inside a glass sleeve. Screaming through the reins caught in his teeth, he galloped toward Hash Renfrew and the three men behind him.
23
Jonas had no clear idea of what was happening until he heard Will Dearborn screaming
(Hile! To me! No prisoners!)
a battle-cry he knew of old. Then it fell into place and the rattle of gunfire made
sense. He reined around, aware of Roy doing the same beside him . . . but most aware of the ball in its bag, a thing both powerful and fragile, swinging back and forth against the neck of his horse.
“It’s those kids!” Roy exclaimed. His total surprise made him look more stupid than ever.
“Dearborn, you bastard!” Hash Renfrew spat, and the gun in his hand thundered a single time.
Jonas saw Dearborn’s sombrero rise from his head, its brim chewed away. Then the kid was firing, and he was good—better than anyone Jonas had ever seen in his life. Renfrew was hammered back out of his saddle with both legs kicking, still holding onto his monster gun, firing it twice at the dusty-blue sky before hitting the ground on his back and rolling, dead, on his side.
Lengyll’s hand dropped away from the elusive wire stock of his speed-shooter and he only stared, unable to believe the apparition bearing down on him out of the dust. “Get back!” he cried. “In the name of the Horsemen’s Association, I tell you—” Then a large black hole appeared in the center of his forehead, just above the place where his eyebrows tangled together. His hands flew up to his shoulders, palms out, as if he were declaring surrender. That was how he died.
“Son of a bitch, oh you little sister-fucking son of a bitch!” Depape howled. He tried to draw and his revolver got caught in his scrape. He was still trying to pull it free when a bullet from Roland’s gun opened his mouth in a red scream almost all the way down to his adam’s apple.
This can’t be happening, Jonas thought stupidly. It can’t, there are too many of us.
But it was happening. The In-World boys had struck unerringly at the fracture-line; were performing what amounted to a textbook example of how gunslingers were supposed to attack when the odds were bad. And Jonas’s coalition of ranchers, cowboys, and town tough-boys had shattered. Those not dead were fleeing to every point of the compass, spurring their horses as if a hundred devils paroled from hell were in pursuit. They were far from a hundred, but they fought like a hundred. Bodies were scattered in the dust everywhere, and as Jonas watched, he saw the one serving as their back door—Stockworth—ride down another man, bump him out of his saddle, and put a bullet in his head as he fell.
Gods of the earth, he thought, that was Croydon, him that owns the Piano Ranch!
Except he didn’t own it anymore.
And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.
Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.
“Come any closer and I’ll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you are!”
Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror … or a wizard’s glass.
Jonas thought: Gods, it’s him! It’s Arthur Eld himself come to take me!
And as the barrel of Roland’s gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.
I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But surely he won’t risk the ball . . . he can’t risk the ball, he’s the dinh of this ka-tet and he can’t risk it…
“To me!” Jonas screamed. “To me, boys! They’re only three, for gods’ sake! To me, you cowards!”
But he was alone—Lengyll killed with his idiotic machine-gun lying by his side, Roy a corpse glaring up at the bitter sky, Quint fled, Hookey dead, the ranchers who had ridden with them gone. Only Clay still lived, and he was miles from here.
“I’ll smash it!” he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like death’s sleekest engine. “Before all the gods, I’ll—”
Roland thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and fired. The bullet struck the center of the tattooed hand holding the drawstring cord and vaporized the palm, leaving only fingers that twitched their random way out of a spongy red mass. For just a moment Roland saw the blue coffin, and then it was covered by downspilling blood.
The bag dropped. And, as Rusher collided with Jonas’s horse and slewed it to the side. Roland caught the bag deftly in the crook of one arm. Jonas, screaming in dismay as the prize left him, grabbed at Roland, caught his shoulder, and almost succeeded in turning the gunslinger out of his saddle. Jonas’s blood rained across
Roland’s face in hot drops.
“Give it back, you brat!” Jonas clawed under his serape and brought out another gun. “Give it back, it’s mine!”
“Not anymore,” Roland said. And, as Rusher danced around, quick and delicate for such a large animal, Roland fired two point-blank rounds into Jonas’s face.
Jonas’s horse bolted out from under him and the man with the white hair landed spreadeagled on his back with a thump. His arms and legs spasmed, jerked, trembled, then stilled.
Roland looped the bag’s drawstring over his shoulder and rode back toward Alain and Cuthbert, ready to give aid … but there was no need. They sat their horses side by side in the blowing dust, at the end of a scattered road of dead bodies, their eyes wide and dazed—eyes of boys who have passed through fire for the first time and can hardly believe they have not been burned. Only Alain had been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but left a scar he bore until his dying day. He could not remember who had shot him, he said later on, or at what point of the battle. He had been lost to himself during the shooting, and had only vague memories of what had happened after the charge began. Cuthbert said much the same.
“Roland,” Cuthbert said now. He passed a shaky hand down his face. “Hile, gunslinger.”
“Hile.”
Cuthbert’s eyes were red and irritated from the sand, as if he had been crying. He took back the unspent silver slingshot balls when Roland handed them to him without seeming to know what they were. “Roland, we’re alive.”
“Yes.”
Alain was looking around dazedly. “Where did the others go?”
“I’d say at least twenty-five of them are back there,” Roland said, gesturing at the road of dead bodies. “The rest—” He waved his hand, still with a revolver in it, in a wide half-circle. “They’ve gone. Had their fill of Mid-World’s wars, I wot.”