The three boys stared at each other with frightened eyes.
Jump in, gunslinger, a voice suddenly called. It was the voice of the thinny; it was the voice of his father; it was also the voice of Marten the enchanter, Marten the seducer. Most terrible of all, it was his own voice.
Jump in and let all these cares cease. There is no love of girls to worry you here, and no mourning of lost mothers to weigh your child’s heart. Only the hum of the growing cavity at the center of the universe; only the punky sweetness of rotting flesh.
Come, gunslinger. Be apart of the thinny.
Dreamy-faced and blank-eyed, Alain began walking along the edge of the drop, his right boot so close to it that the heel puffed little clouds of dust over the chasm and sent clusters of pebbles down into it. Before he could get more than five steps, Roland grabbed him by the belt and yanked him roughly back.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Alain looked at him with sleepwalker’s eyes. They began to clear, but slowly. “I don’t… know, Roland.”
Below them, the thinny hummed and growled and sang. There was a sound, as well: an oozing, sludgy mutter.
“I know,” Cuthbert said. “I know where we’re all going. Back to the Bar K. Come on, let’s get out of here.” He looked pleadingly at Roland. “Please. It’s awful.”
“All right.”
But before he led them back to the path, he stepped to the edge and looked down at the smoky silver ooze below him. “Counting,” he said with a kind of clear defiance. “Counting one thinny.” Then, lowering his voice: “And be damned to you.”
3
Their composure returned as they rode back-the sea-breeze in their faces was wonderfully restorative after the dead and somehow baked smell of the canyon and the thinny.
As they rode up the Drop (on a long diagonal, so as to save the horses a little), Alain said: “What do we do next, Roland? Do you know?”
“No. As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“Supper would be a start,” Cuthbert said brightly, and tapped the lookout’s hollow skull for emphasis.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” Cuthbert agreed. “And I’ll tell you something, Roland-”
“Will, please. Now that we’re back on the Drop, let me be Will.”
“Aye, fine. I’ll tell you something, Will: we can’t go on counting nets and boats and looms and wheel-irons much longer. We’re running out of things that don’t matter. I believe that looking stupid will become a good deal harder once we move to the horse-breeding side of life as it’s lived in Hambry.”
“Aye,” Roland said. He stopped Rusher and looked back the way they had come. He was momentarily enchanted by the sight of horses, apparently infected with a kind of moon-madness, frolicking and racing across the silvery grass. “But I tell you both again, this is not just about horses. Does Farson need them? Aye, mayhap. So does the Affiliation. Oxen as well. But there are horses everywhere-perhaps not as good as these, I’ll admit, but any port does in a storm, so they say. So, if it’s not horses, what is it? Until we know, or decide we’ll never know, we go on as we are.”
Part of the answer was waiting for them back at the Bar K. It was perched on the hitching rail and flicking its tail saucily. When the pigeon hopped into Roland’s hand, he saw that one of its wings was oddly frayed. Some animal-likely a cat-had crept up on it close enough to pounce, he reckoned.
The note curled against the pigeon’s leg was short, but it explained a good deal of what they hadn’t understood.
I’ll have to see her again, Roland thought after reading it, and felt a surge of gladness. His pulse quickened, and in the cold silver light of the Peddler’s Moon, he smiled.
Chapter IX
CITGO
1
The Peddler’s Moon began to wane; it would take the hottest, fairest part of the summer with it when it went. On an afternoon four days past the full, the old mozo from Mayor’s House (Miguel had been there long before Hart Thorin’s time and would likely be there long after Thorin had gone back to his ranch) showed up at the house Susan shared with her aunt. He was leading a beautiful chestnut mare by a hack'. It was the second of the three promised horses, and Susan recognized Felicia at once. The mare had been one other childhood’s favorites.
Susan embraced Miguel and covered his bearded cheeks with kisses. The old man’s wide grin would have showed every tooth in his head, if he’d had any left to show. “Gracias, gracias, a thousand thanks, old father,” she told him.
“Da nada,” he replied, and handed her the bridle. “It is the Mayor’s earnest gift.”
She watched him away, the smile slowly fading from her lips. Felicia stood docilely beside her, her dark brown coat shining like a dream in the summer sunlight. But this was no dream. It had seemed like one at first- that sense of unreality had been another inducement to walk into the trap, she now understood-but it was no dream. She had been proved honest; now she found herself the recipient of “earnest gifts” from a rich man. The phrase was a sop to conventionality, of course… or a bitter joke, depending on one’s mood and outlook. Felicia was no more a gift than Pylon had been-they were step-by-step fulfillments of the contract into which she had entered. Aunt Cord could express shock, but Susan knew the truth: what lay directly ahead was whoring, pure and simple.
Aunt Cord was in the kitchen window as Susan walked her gift (which was really just returned property, in her view) to the stable. She called out something passing cheery about how the horse was a good thing, that caring for it would give Susan less time for her megrims. Susan felt a hot reply rise to her lips and held it back. There had been a wary truce between the two of them since the shouting match about the shirts, and Susan didn’t want to be the one to break it. There was too much on her mind and heart. She thought that one more argument with her aunt and she might simply snap like a dry twig under a boot. Because often silence is best, her father had told her when, at age ten or so, she had asked him why he was always so quiet. The answer had puzzled her then, but now she understood better.
She stabled Felicia next to Pylon, rubbed her down, fed her. While the mare munched oats, Susan examined her hooves. She didn’t care much for the look of the iron the mare was wearing-that was Seafront for you-and so she took her father’s shoebag from its nail beside the stable door, slung the strap over her head and shoulder so the bag hung on her hip, and walked the two miles to Hockey’s Stable and Fancy Livery. Feeling the leather bag bang against her hip brought back her father in a way so fresh and clear that grief pricked her again and made her feel like crying. She thought he would have been appalled at her current situation, perhaps even disgusted. And he would have liked Will Dearborn, of that she was sure-liked him and approved of him for her. It was the final miserable touch.
2
She had known how to shoe most of her life, and even enjoyed it, when her mood was right; it was dusty, elemental work, with always the possibility of a healthy kick in the slats to relieve the boredom and bring a girl back to reality. But of making shoes she knew nothing, nor wished to. Brian Hookey made them at the forge behind his barn and hostelry, however; Susan easily picked out four new ones of the right size, enjoying the smell of horseflesh and fresh hay as she did. Fresh paint, too. Hockey’s Stable amp; Smithy looked very well, indeed. Glancing up, she saw not so much as a single hole in the barn roof. Times had been good for Hookey, it seemed.
He wrote the new shoes up on a beam, still wearing his blacksmith’s apron and squinting horribly out of one eye at his own figures. When Susan began to speak haltingly to him about payment, he laughed, told her he knew she’d settle her accounts as soon as she could, gods bless her, yes. ’sides, they weren’t any of them going anywhere, were they? Nawp, nawp. All the time gently propelling her through the fragrant smells of hay and horses toward the door. He would not have treated even so small a matter as four iron shoes in such a carefree manner a year ago, but now she was Mayor Thorin’s good friend, and things had changed.
The afternoon sunlight was dazzling after the dimness of Hockey’s barn, and she was momentarily blinded, groping forward toward the street with the leather bag bouncing on her hip and the shoes clashing softly inside. She had just a moment to register a shape looming in the brightness, and then it thumped into her hard enough to rattle her teeth and make Felicia’s new shoes clang. She would have fallen, but for strong hands that quickly reached out and grasped her shoulders. By then her eyes were adjusting and she saw with dismay and amusement that the young man who had almost knocked her sprawling into the dirt was one of Will’s friends- Richard Stockworth.
“Oh, sai, your pardon!” he said, brushing the arms of her dress as if he had knocked her over. “Are you well? Are you quite well?”
“Quite well,” she said, smiling. “Please don’t apologize.” She felt a sudden wild impulse to stand on tiptoe and kiss his mouth and say, Give that to Will and tell him to never mind what I said! Tell him there are a thousand more where that came from! Tell him to come and get every one!
Instead, she fixed on a comic image: this Richard Stockworth smacking Will full on the mouth and saying it was from Susan Delgado. She began to giggle. She put her hands to her mouth, but it did no good. Sai Stockworth smiled back at her… tentatively, cautiously. He probably thinks I’m mad… and I am! I am!
“Good day, Mr. Stockworth,” she said, and passed on before she could embarrass herself further.
“Good day, Susan Delgado,” he called in return.
She looked back once, when she was fifty yards or so farther up the street, but he was already gone. Not into Hockey’s, though; of that she was quite sure. She wondered what Mr. Stockworth had been doing at that end of town to begin with.
Half an hour later, as she took the new iron from her da’s shoebag, she found out. There was a folded scrap of paper tucked between two of the shoes, and even before she unfolded it, she
