“Sent where?” Alain asked.
“Where he’ll have to shit in the bushes and sleep in the rain if the weather’s bad.” Roland laughed shortly, without much humor. “Jonas has got Depape running our backtrail, more likely than not.”
Alain grunted softly, in surprise that wasn’t really surprise. Roland sat easily astride Rusher, looking out over the dreamy depths of land, at the grazing horses. With one hand he unconsciously rubbed the corvette he had tucked into his shirt. At last he looked around at them again.
“We’ll wait a bit longer,” he said. “Perhaps she’ll change her mind.”
“Roland-” Alain began, and his tone was deadly in its gentleness.
Roland raised his hands before Alain could go on. “Doubt me not, Alain-I speak as my father’s son.”
“All right.” Alain reached out and briefly gripped Roland’s shoulder. As for Cuthbert, he reserved judgment. Roland might or might not be acting as his father’s son; Cuthbert guessed that at this point Roland hardly knew his own mind at all.
“Do you remember what Cort used to say was the primary weakness of maggots such as us?” Roland asked with a trace of a smile.
“You run without consideration and fall in a hole,'” Alain quoted in a gruff imitation that made Cuthbert laugh aloud.
Roland’s smile broadened a touch. “Aye. They’re words I mean to remember, boys. I’ll not upset this cart in order to see what’s in it… not unless there’s no other choice. Susan may come around yet, given time to think. I believe she would have agreed to meet me already, if not for… other matters between us.”
He paused, and for a little while there was quiet among them.
“I wish our fathers hadn’t sent us,” Alain said at last… although it was Roland’s father who had sent them, and all three knew it. “We’re too young for matters such as these. Too young by years.”
“We did all right that night in the Rest,” Cuthbert said.
“That was training, not guile-and they didn’t take us seriously. That won’t happen again.”
“They wouldn’t have sent us-not my father, not yours-if they’d known what we’d find,” Roland said. “But now we’ve found it, and now we’re for it. Yes?”
Alain and Cuthbert nodded. They were for it, all right-there no longer seemed any doubt of that.
“In any case, it’s too late to worry about it now. We’ll wait and hope for Susan. I’d rather not go near Citgo without someone from Hambry who knows the lay of the place… but if Depape comes back, we’ll have to take our chance. God knows what he may find out, or what stories he may invent to please Jonas, or what Jonas may do after they palaver. There may be shooting.”
“After all this creeping around, I’d almost welcome it,” Cuthbert said.
“Will you send her another note, Will Dearborn?” Alain asked.
Roland thought about it. Cuthbert laid an interior bet with himself on which way Roland would go. And lost.
“No,” he said at last. “We’ll have to give her time, hard as that is. And hope her curiosity will bring her around.”
With that he turned Rusher toward the abandoned bunkhouse which now served them as home. Cuthbert and Alain followed.
6
Susan, worked herself hard the rest of that Sanday, mucking out the stables, carrying water, washing down all the steps. Aunt Cord watched all this in silence, her expression one of mingled doubt and amazement. Susan cared not a bit for how her aunt looked-she wanted only to exhaust herself and avoid another sleepless night. It was over. Will would know it as well now, and that was to the good. Let done be done.
“Are ye daft, girl?” was all Aunt Cord asked her as Susan dumped her last pail of dirty rinse-water behind the kitchen. “It’s Sanday!”
“Not daft a bit,” she replied shortly, without looking around.
She accomplished the first half of her aim, going to bed just after moonrise with tired arms, aching legs, and a throbbing back-but sleep still did not come. She lay in bed wide-eyed and unhappy. The hours passed, the moon set, and still Susan couldn’t sleep. She looked into the dark and wondered if there was any possibility, even the slightest, that her father had been murdered. To stop his mouth, to close his eyes.
Finally she reached the conclusion Roland had already come to: if there had been no attraction for her in those eyes of his, or the touch of his hands and lips, she would have agreed in a flash to the meeting he wanted. If only to set her troubled mind to rest.
At this realization, relief overspread her and she was able to sleep.
7
Late the next afternoon, while Roland and his friends were at fives in the Travellers’ Rest (cold beef sandwiches and gallons of white iced tea-not as good as that made by Deputy Dave’s wife, but not bad), Sheemie came in from outside, where he had been watering his flowers. He was wearing his pink sombrero and a wide grin. In one hand he held a little packet.
“Hello, there, you Little Coffin Hunters!” he cried cheerfully, and made a bow which was an amusingly good imitation of their own. Cuthbert particularly enjoyed seeing such a bow done in gardening sandals. “How be you? Well, I’m hoping, so I do!”
“Right as rainbarrels,” Cuthbert said, “but none of us enjoys being called Little Coffin Hunters, so maybe you could just play soft on that, all right?”
“Aye,” Sheemie said, as cheerful as ever. “Aye, Mr. Arthur Heath, good fella who saved my life!” He paused and looked puzzled for a moment, as if unable to remember why he had approached them in the first place. Then his eyes cleared, his grin shone out, and he held the packet out to Roland. “For you, Will Dearborn!”
“Really? What is it?”
“Seeds! So they are!”
“From you, Sheemie?”
“Oh, no.”
Roland took the packet-just an envelope which had been folded over and sealed. There was nothing written on the front or back, and the tips of his fingers felt no seeds within.
“Who from, then?”
“Can’t remember,” said Sheemie, who then cast his eyes aside. His brains had been stirred just enough, Roland reflected, so that he would never be unhappy for long, and would never be able to lie at all. Then his eyes, hopeful and timid, came back to Roland’s. “I remember what I was supposed to say to you, though.”
“Aye? Then say it, Sheemie.”
Speaking as one who recites a painfully memorized line, both proud and nervous, he said: “These are the seeds you scattered on the Drop.”
Roland’s eyes blazed so fiercely that Sheemie stumbled back a step. He gave his sombrero a quick tug, turned, and hurried back to the safety of his flowers. He liked Will Dearborn and Will’s friends (especially Mr. Arthur Heath, who sometimes said things that made Sheemie laugh fit to split), but in that moment he saw something in Will-sai’s eyes that frightened him badly. In that instant he understood that Will was as much a killer as the one in the cloak, or the one who had wanted Sheemie to lick his boots clean, or old white-haired Jonas with the trembly voice.
As bad as them, or even worse.
8
Roland slipped the “seed-packet” into his shirt and didn’t open it until the three of them were back on the porch of the Bar K. In the distance, the thinny grumbled, making their horses twitch their ears nervously.
“Well?” Cuthbert asked at last, unable to restrain himself any longer. Roland took the envelope from inside his shirt, and tore it open. As he did, he reflected that Susan had known exactly what to say. To a nicety.
The others bent in, Alain (mm his left and Cuthbert from his right, as he unfolded the single scrap of paper. Again he saw her simple, neatly made writing, the message not much longer than the previous one. Very different in content, however.
There is an orange grove a mile off the road on the town side of Citgo. Meet me there at moonrise. Come alone. S.
And below that, printed in emphatic little letters: burn this. “We’ll keep a lookout,” Alain said. Roland nodded. “Aye. But from a distance.” Then he burned the note.
9
The orange grove was a neatly kept rectangle of about a dozen rows at the end of a partly overgrown cart-track. Roland arrived there after dark but still a good half hour before the rapidly thinning Peddler would haul himself over the horizon once more.
As the boy wandered along one of the rows, listening to the somehow skeletal sounds from the oilpatch to the north (squealing pistons, grinding gears, thudding driveshafts), he was struck by deep homesickness. It was the fragile fragrance of orange-blossoms-a bright runner laid over the darker stench of oil-that brought it on. This toy grove was nothing like the great apple orchards of New Canaan… except somehow it was. There was the same feeling of dignity and civilization here, of much time devoted to something not strictly necessary. And in this case, he suspected, not very useful, either. Oranges grown this far north of the warm latitudes were probably almost as sour as lemons. Still, when the breeze stirred the trees, the smell made him think of Gilead with bitter longing, and for the first time he considered the possibility that he might never see home again-that he had become as much a wanderer as old Peddler Moon in the sky.
