Standing just inside the batwing doors was the purveyor of this idiotic and potentially fatal screed: a young man of middling height, his flat-crowned hat pushed back to reveal a tumbled comma of brown hair. Except young man didn’t really cover him, Depape realized; young man was drawing it heavy. He was only a kid. Around his neck, gods knew why, he wore a bird’s skull like an enormous
comical pendant. It was hung on a chain that ran through the eyeholes. And in his hands was not a gun (where would an unwhiskered dribble like him get a gun in the first place? Depape wondered) but a goddam slingshot. Depape burst out laughing.
The kid laughed as well, nodding as if he understood how ridiculous the whole thing looked, how ridiculous the whole thing was. His laughter was infectious; Pettie, still up on her stool, tittered herself before clapping her hands over her mouth.
“This is no place for a boy such as you,” Depape said. His revolver, an old five-shooter, was still out; it lay in his fist on the bar, with Stanley Ruiz’s blood dripping off the gunsight. Depape, without raising it from the ironwood, waggled it slightly. “Boys who come to places like this learn had habits, kid. Dying is apt to be one of them. So I give you this one chance. Get out of here.”
“Thank you, sir, 1 appreciate my one chance,” the boy said. He spoke with great and winning sincerity . . . but didn’t move. Still he stood just inside the batwing doors, with the wide elastic strap of his sling pulled hack. Depape couldn’t quite make out what was in the cup, but it glittered in the gaslight. A metal ball of some sort.
“Well, then?” Depape snarled. This was getting old, and fast.
“I know I’m being a pain in the neck, sir—not to mention an ache in (he ass and a milky drip from the tip of a sore dick—but if it’s all the same to you, my dear friend, I’d like to give my chance to the young fellow on his knees before you. Let him apologize, let him polish your boots with his clout until you are entirely satisfied, and let him go on living his life.”
There was an unfocused murmur of approval at this from the area where the card-players were watching. Depape didn’t like the sound of it at all, and he made a sudden decision. The boy would die as well, executed for the crime of impertinence. The swabby who had spilled the bucket of dregs on him was clearly retarded. Yon brat had not even that excuse. He just thought he was funny.
From the comer of his eye, Depape saw Reynolds moving to flank the boy, smooth as oiled silk. Depape appreciated the thought, but didn’t believe he’d need much help with the slingshot specialist.
“Boy, I think you’ve made a mistake,” he said in a kindly voice. “I really believe—” The cup of the slingshot dipped a little … or Depape fancied it did. He
made his move.
3
They talked about it in Hambry for years to come; three decades after the fall of Gilead and the end of the Affiliation, they were still talking. By that time there were better than five hundred old gaffers (and a few old gammers) claiming that they were drinking a beer in the Rest that night, and saw it all.
Depape was young, and had the speed of a snake. Nevertheless, he never came close to getting a shot off at Cuthbert Allgood. There was a thip-TWANG! as the elastic was released, a steel gleam that drew itself across the saloon’s smoky air like a line on a slateboard, and then Depape screamed. His revolver tumbled to the floor, and a foot spun it away from him across the sawdust (no one would claim that foot while the Big Coffin Hunters were still in Hambry; hundreds claimed it after they were gone). Still screaming—he could not bear pain—Depape raised his bleeding hand and looked at it with agonized, unbelieving eyes. Actually, he had been lucky. Cuthbert’s ball had smashed the tip of the second finger and torn off the nail. Lower, and Depape would have been able to blow smoke-rings through his own palm.
Cuthbert, meanwhile, had already reloaded the cup of his slingshot and drawn the elastic back again. “Now,” he said, “if I have your attention, good sir—”
“I can’t speak for his,” Reynolds said from behind him, “but you got mine, partner.
I don’t know if you’re good with that thing or just shitass lucky, but either way, you’re done with it now. Relax the draw on it and put it down. That table in front of you’s the place I want to see it.”
“I’ve been blindsided,” Cuthbert said sadly. “Betrayed once more by my own callow youth.”
“I don’t know nothing about your callow youth, brother, but you’ve been blindsided, all right,” Reynolds agreed. He stood behind and slightly to the left of Cuthbert, and now he moved his gun forward until the boy could feel the muzzle against the back of his head. Reynolds thumbed the hammer. In the pool of silence which the Travellers’ Rest had become, the sound was very loud. “Now put that twanger down.”
“I think, good sir, that I must offer my regrets and decline.”
“What?”
“You see, I’ve got my trusty sling aimed at your pleasant friend’s head—” Cuthbert began, and when Depape shifted uneasily against the bar, Cuthbert’s voice rose in a whipcrack that did not sound callow in the least. “Stand still! Move again and you ‘re a dead man!”
Depape subsided, holding his bloody hand against his pine-tacky shirt. For the first time he looked frightened, and for the first time that night—for the first time since hooking up with Jonas, in fact—Reynolds felt mastery of a situation on the verge of slipping away … except how could it be? How could it be when he’d been able to circle around this smart-talking squint and get the drop on him? This should be over.
Lowering his voice to its former conversational—not to say playful—pitch, Cuthbert said: “If you shoot me, the ball flies and your friend dies, too.”
“I don’t believe that,” Reynolds said, but he didn’t like what he heard in his own voice. It sounded like doubt. “No man could make a shot like that.”
“Why don’t we let your friend decide?” Cuthbert raised his voice in a good-humored hail. “Hi-ho, there, Mr. Spectacles! Would you like your pal to shoot me?”
“No!” Depape’s cry was shrill, verging on panic. “No, Clay! Don’t shoot!”
“So it’s a standoff,” Reynolds said, bemused. And then bemusement changed to horror as he felt the blade of a very large knife slip against his throat. It pressed the tender skin just over his adam’s apple.
“No, it’s not,” Alain said softly. “Put the gun down, my friend, or I’ll cut your throat.”
4
Standing outside the batwing doors, having arrived by simple good fortune in time for this Pinch and Jilly show, Jonas watched with amazement, contempt, and something close to horror. First one of the Affiliation brats gets the drop on Depape, and when Reynolds covers that one, the big kid with the round face and the plowboy’s shoulders puts a knife to Reynolds’s throat. Neither of the brats a day over fifteen, and neither with a gun. Marvelous. He would have thought it
better than a travelling circus, if not for the problems that would follow if this were not put right. What sort of work could they do in Hambry if it got around that the boogeymen were afraid of the children, instead of vice-versa?
There’s time to stop this before there’s killing, mayhap. If you want to. Do you?
Jonas decided he did; that they could walk out winners if they played it just right.
He also decided the Affiliation brats would not, unless they were very lucky indeed, be leaving Mejis Barony alive.
Where’s the other one? Dearborn?
A good question. An important question. Embarrassment would become outright humiliation if he found himself trumped in the same fashion as Roy and Clay.
Dearborn wasn’t in the bar, and that was sure. Jonas turned on his heels, scanning the South High Street in both directions. It was almost day-bright under a Kissing Moon only two nights past the full. No one there, not in the street, not on the far side, where Hambry’s mercantile store stood. The mercantile had a porch, but there was nothing on it save for a line of carved totems illustrating Guardians of the Beam: Bear, Turtle, Fish, Eagle, Lion, Bat, and Wolf. Seven of twelve, bright as marble in the moonlight, and no doubt great favorites of the kiddies. No men over there, though. Good. Lovely.
Jonas peered hard into the thread of alley between the mercantile and the butcher’s, glimpsed a shadow behind a tumble of cast-off boxes, tensed, then relaxed as he saw a cat’s shining green eyes. He nodded and turned to the business at hand, pushing back the lefthand batwing and stepping into the Travellers’ Rest.