The Wind Through the Keyhole

THE SKIN — MAN

Not long after the death of my mother, which as you know came by my own hand, my father-Steven, son of Henry the Tall-summoned me to his study in the north wing of the palace. It was a small, cold room. I remember the wind whining around the slit windows. I remember the high, frowning shelves of books-worth a fortune, they were, but never read. Not by him, anyway. And I remember the black collar of mourning he wore. It was the same as my own. Every man in Gilead wore the same collar, or a band around his shirtsleeve. The women wore black nets on their hair. This would go on until Gabrielle Deschain was six months in her tomb.

I saluted him, fist to forehead. He didn’t look up from the papers on his desk, but I knew he saw it. My father saw everything, and very well. I waited. He signed his name several times while the wind whistled and the rooks cawed in the courtyard. The fireplace was a dead socket. He rarely called for it to be lit, even on the coldest days.

At last he looked up.

“How is Cort, Roland? How goes it with your teacher that was? You must know, because I’ve been given to understand that you spend most of your time in his hut, feeding him and such.”

“He has days when he knows me,” I said. “Many days he doesn’t. He still sees a little from one eye. The other…” I didn’t need to finish. The other was gone. My hawk, David, had taken it from him in my test of manhood. Cort, in turn, had taken David’s life, but that was to be his last kill.

“I know what happened to his other peep. Do you truly feed him?”

“Aye, Father, I do.”

“Do you clean him when he messes?”

I stood there before his desk like a chastened schoolboy called before the master, and that is how I felt. Only how many chastened schoolboys have killed their own mothers?

“Answer me, Roland. I am your dinh as well as your father and I’d have you answer.”

“Sometimes.” Which was not really a lie. Sometimes I changed his dirty clouts three and four times a day, sometimes, on the good days, only once or not at all. He could get to the jakes if I helped him. And if he remembered he had to go.

“Does he not have the white ammies who come in?”

“I sent them away,” I said.

He looked at me with real curiosity. I searched for contempt in his face-part of me wanted to see it-but there was none that I could tell. “Did I raise you to the gun so you could become an ammie and nurse a broken old man?”

I felt my anger flash at that. Cort had raised a moit of boys to the tradition of the Eld and the way of the gun. Those who were unworthy he had bested in combat and sent west with no weapons other than what remained of their wits. There, in Cressia and places even deeper in those anarchic kingdoms, many of those broken boys had joined with Farson, the Good Man. Who would in time overthrow everything my father’s line had stood for. Farson had armed them, sure. He had guns, and he had plans.

“Would you throw him on the dungheap, Father? Is that to be his reward for all his years of service? Who next, then? Vannay?”

“Never in this life, as you know. But done is done, Roland, as thee also knows. And thee doesn’t nurse him out of love. Thee knows that, too.”

“I nurse him out of respect!”

“If ’twas only respect, I think you’d visit him, and read to him-for you read well, your mother always said so, and about that she spoke true-but you’d not clean his shit and change his bed. You are scourging yourself for the death of your mother, which was not your fault.”

Part of me knew this was true. Part of me refused to believe it. The publishment of her death was simple: “Gabrielle Deschain, she of Arten, died while possessed of a demon which troubled her spirit.” It was always put so when someone of high blood committed suicide, and so the story of her death was given. It was accepted without question, even by those who had, either secretly or not so secretly, cast their lot with Farson. Because it became known-gods know how, not from me or my friends-that she had become the consort of Marten Broadcloak, the court magis and my father’s chief advisor, and that Marten had fled west. Alone.

“Roland, hear me very well. I know you felt betrayed by your lady mother. So did I. I know that part of you hated her. Part of me hated her, too. But we both also loved her, and love her still. You were poisoned by the toy you brought back from Mejis, and you were tricked by the witch. One of those things alone might not have caused what happened, but the pink ball and the witch together… aye.”

“Rhea.” I could feel tears stinging my eyes, and I willed them back. I would not weep before my father. Never again. “Rhea of the Coos.”

“Aye, she, the black-hearted cunt. It was she who killed your mother, Roland. She turned you into a gun… and then pulled the trigger.”

I said nothing.

He must have seen my distress, because he resumed shuffling his papers, signing his name here and there. Finally he raised his head again. “The ammies will have to see to Cort for a while. I’m sending you and one of your ka-mates to Debaria.”

“What? To Serenity?”

He laughed. “The retreat where your mother stayed?”

“Yes.”

“Not there, not at all. Serenity, what a joke. Those women are the black ammies. They’d flay you alive if you so much as trespassed their holy doors. Most of the sisters who bide there prefer the longstick to a man.”

I had no idea what he meant-remember I was still very young, and very innocent about many things, in spite of all I’d been through. “I’m not sure I’m ready for another mission, Father. Let alone a quest.”

He looked at me coldly. “I’ll be the judge of what you’re ready for. Besides, this is nothing like the mess you walked into in Mejis. There may be danger, it may even come to shooting, but at bottom it’s just a job that needs to be done. Partly so that people who’ve come to doubt can see that the White is still strong and true, but mostly because what’s wrong cannot be allowed to stand. Besides, as I’ve said, I won’t be sending you alone.”

“Who’ll go with me? Cuthbert or Alain?”

“Neither. I have work for Laughing Boy and Thudfoot right here. You go with Jamie DeCurry.”

I considered this and thought I would be glad to ride with Jamie Red-Hand. Although I would have preferred either Cuthbert or Alain. As my father surely knew.

“Will you go without argument, or will you annoy me further on a day when I have much to do?”

“I’ll go,” I said. In truth, it would be good to escape the palace-its shadowy rooms, its whispers of intrigue, its pervasive sense that darkness and anarchy were coming and nothing could stop them. The world would move on, but Gilead would not move on with it. That glittering, beautiful bubble would soon burst.

“Good. You’re a fine son, Roland. I may never have told you that, but it’s true. I hold nothing against you. Nothing.”

I lowered my head. When this meeting was finally over, I would go somewhere and let my heart free, but not just then. Not as I stood before him.

“Ten or twelve wheels beyond the hall of the women-Serenity, or whatever they call it-is the town of Debaria itself, on the edge of the alkali flats. Nothing serene about Debaria. It’s a dusty, hide-smelling railhead town where cattle and block salt are shipped south, east, and north-in every direction except the one where that bastard Farson’s laying his plans. There are fewer traildrive herds these days, and I expect Debaria will dry up and blow away like so many other places in Mid-World before long, but now it’s still a busy place, full of saloons, whoredens, gamblers, and confidence men. Hard as it might be to believe, there are even a few good people there. One is the High Sheriff, Hugh Peavy. It’s him that you and DeCurry will report to. Let him see your guns and a sigul which I will give to you. Do you ken everything I’ve told you so far?”

“Yes, Father,” I said. “What’s so bad there that it warrants the attention of gunslingers?” I smiled a little, a thing I had done seldom in the wake of my mother’s death. “Even baby gunslingers such as us?”

“According to the reports I have”-he lifted some of the papers and shook them at me-“there’s a skin-man at work. I have my doubts about that, but there’s no doubt the folk are terrified.”

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“Some sort of shape-changer, or so the old tales say. Go to Vannay when you leave me. He’s been collecting reports.”

“All right.”

“Do the job, find this lunatic who goes around wearing animal skins-that’s probably what it amounts to-but be not long about it. Matters far graver than this have begun to teeter. I’d have you back-you and all your ka-mates-before they fall.”

Two days later, Jamie and I led our horses onto the stable-car of a special two-car train that had been laid on for us. Once the Western Line ran a thousand wheels or more, all the way to the Mohaine Desert, but in the years before Gilead fell, it went to Debaria and no farther. Beyond there, many tracklines had been destroyed by washouts and ground-shakers. Others had been taken up by harriers and roving bands of outlaws who called themselves land-pirates, for that part of the world had fallen into bloody confusion. We called those far western lands Out-World, and they served John Farson’s purposes well. He was, after all, just a land-pirate himself. One with pretensions.

The train was little more than a steam-driven toy; Gilead folk called it Sma’ Toot and laughed to see it puffing over the bridge to the west of the palace. We could have ridden faster a-horseback, but the train saved the mounts. And the dusty velveteen seats of our car folded out into beds, which we felt was a fine thing. Until we tried to sleep in them, that was. At one particularly hard jounce, Jamie was thrown right off his makeshift bed and onto the floor. Cuthbert would have laughed and Alain would have cursed, but Jamie Red-Hand only picked himself up, stretched out again, and went back to sleep.

We spoke little that first day, only looked out the wavery isinglass windows, watching as Gilead’s green and forested land gave way to dirty scrub, a few struggling ranches, and herders’ huts. There were a few towns where folk-many of them muties-gaped at us as Sma’ Toot wheezed slowly past. A few pointed at the centers of their foreheads, as if at an invisible eye. It meant they stood for Farson, the Good Man. In Gilead, such folk would have been imprisoned for their disloyalty, but Gilead was now behind us. I was dismayed by how quickly the allegiance of these people, once taken for granted, had thinned.

On the first day of our journey, outside Beesford-on-Arten, where a few of my mother’s people still lived, a fat man threw a rock at the train. It bounced off the closed stable-car door, and I heard our horses whinny in surprise. The fat man saw us looking at him. He grinned, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and waddled away.

“Someone has eaten well in a poor land,” Jamie remarked as we watched his butters jounce in the seat of his old patched pants.

The following morning, after the servant had put a cold breakfast of porridge and milk before us, Jamie said, “I suppose you’d better tell me what it’s about.”

“Will you tell me something, first? If you know, that is?”

“Of course.”

“My father said that the women at the retreat in Debaria prefer the longstick to a man. Do you know what he meant?”

Jamie regarded me in silence for a bit-as if to make sure I wasn’t shaking his knee-and then his lips twitched at the corners. For Jamie this was the equivalent of holding his belly, rolling around the floor, and howling with glee. Which Cuthbert Allgood certainly would have done. “It must be what the whores in the low town call a diddlestick. Does that help?”

“Truly? And they… what? Use it on each other?”

“So ’tis said, but much talk is just la-la-la. You know more of women than I do, Roland; I’ve never lain with one. But never mind. Given time, I suppose I will. Tell me what we’re about in Debaria.”

“A skin-man is supposedly terrorizing the good folk. Probably the bad folk, as well.”

“A man who becomes some sort of animal?”

It was actually a little more complicated in this case, but he had the nub of it. The wind was blowing hard, flinging handfuls of alkali at the side of the car. After one particularly vicious gust, the little train lurched. Our empty porridge bowls slid. We caught them before they could fall. If we hadn’t been able to do such things, and without even thinking of them, we would not have been fit to carry the guns we wore. Not that Jamie preferred the gun. Given a choice (and the time to make it), he would reach for either his bow or his bah.

“My father doesn’t believe it,” I said. “But Vannay does. He-”

At that moment, we were thrown forward into the seats ahead of us. The old servant, who was coming down the center aisle to retrieve our bowls and cups, was flung all the way back to the door between the car and his little kitchen. His front teeth flew out of his mouth and into his lap, which gave me a start.

Jamie ran up the aisle, which was now severely tilted, and knelt by him. As I joined him, Jamie plucked up the teeth and I saw they were made of painted wood and held together by a cunning clip almost too small to see.

“Are you all right, sai?” Jamie asked.

The old fellow got slowly to his feet, took his teeth, and filled the hole behind his upper lip with them. “I’m fine, but this dirty bitch has derailed again. No more Debaria runs for me, I have a wife. She’s an old nag, and I’m determined to outlive her. You young men had better check your horses. With luck, neither of them will have broken a leg.”

Neither had, but they were nervous and stamping, anxious to get out of confinement. We lowered the ramp and tethered them to the connecting bar between the two cars, where they stood with their heads lowered and their ears flattened against the hot and gritty wind blowing out of the west. Then we clambered back inside the passenger car and collected our gunna. The engineer, a broad-shouldered, bowlegged plug of a man, came down the side of his listing train with the old servant in tow. When he reached us, he pointed to what we could see very well.

“Yonder on that ridge be Debaria high road-see the marking-posts? You can be at the place o’ the females in less than an hour, but don’t bother asking nothing o’ those bitches, because you won’t get it.” He lowered his voice. “They eat men, is what I’ve heard. Not just a way o’ speakin, boys: they… eat… the mens. ”

I found it easier to believe in the reality of the skin-man than in this, but I said nothing. It was clear that the enjie was shaken up, and one of his hands was as red as Jamie’s. But the enjie’s was only a little burn, and would go away. Jamie’s would still be red when he was sent down in his grave. It looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

“They may call to you, or make promises. They may even show you their titties, as they know a young man can’t take his eyes off such. But never mind. Turn yer ears from their promises and yer eyes from their titties. You just go on into the town. It’ll be less than another hour by horse. We’ll need a work crew to put this poxy whore upright. The rails are fine; I checked. Just covered with that damned alkali dust, is all. I suppose ye can’t pay men to come out, but if ye can write-as I suppose such gentle fellows as yerselves surely can-you can give em a premissary note or whatever it’s called-”

“We have specie,” I said. “Enough to hire a small crew.”

The enjie’s eyes widened at this. I supposed they would widen even more if I told him my father had given me twenty gold knuckles to carry in a special pocket sewn inside my vest.

“And oxes? Because we’ll need oxes if they’ve got em. Hosses if they don’t.”

“We’ll go to the livery and see what they have,” I said, mounting up. Jamie tied his bow on one side of his saddle and then moved to the other, where he slid his bah into the leather boot his father had made special for it.

“Don’t leave us stuck out here, young sai,” the enjie said. “We’ve no horses, and no weapons.”

“We won’t forget you,” I said. “Just stay inside. If we can’t get a crew out today, we’ll send a bucka to take you into town.”

“Thankee. And stay away from those women! They… eat… the mens! ”

The day was hot. We ran the horses for a bit because they wanted to stretch after being pent up, then pulled them down to a walk.

“Vannay,” Jamie said.

“Pardon?”

“Before the train derailed, you said your father didn’t believe there was a skin-man, but Vannay does.”

“He said that after reading the reports High Sheriff Peavy sent along, it was hard not to believe. You know what he says at least once in every class: ‘When facts speak, the wise man listens.’ Twenty-three dead makes a moit of facts. Not shot or stabbed, mind you, but torn to pieces.”

Jamie grunted.

“Whole families, in two cases. Large ones, almost clans. The houses turned all upsy-turvy and splashed with blood. Limbs ripped off the bodies and carried away, some found-partly eaten-some not. At one of those farms, Sheriff Peavy and his deputy found the youngest boy’s head stuck on a fencepole with his skull smashed in and his brains scooped out.”

“Witnesses?”

“A few. A sheepherder coming back with strays saw his partner attacked. The one who survived was on a nearby hill. The two dogs with him ran down to try and protect their other master, and were torn apart too. The thing came up the hill after the herder, but got distracted by the sheep instead, so the fellow struck lucky and got away. He said it was a wolf that ran upright, like a man. Then there was a woman with a gambler. He was caught cheating at Watch Me in one of the local pits. The two of them were given a bill of circulation and told to leave town by nightfall or be whipped. They were headed for the little town near the salt-mines when they were beset. The man fought. It gave the woman just enough time to get clear. She hid up in some rocks until the thing was gone. She’s said ’twas a lion.”

“On its back legs?”

“If so, she didn’t wait to see. Last, two cowpunchers. They were camped on Debaria Stream near a young Manni couple on marriage retreat, although the punchers didn’t know it until they heard the couple’s screams. As they rode toward the sound, they saw the killer go loping off with the woman’s lower leg in its jaws. It wasn’t a man, but they swore on watch and warrant that it ran upright like a man.”

Jamie leaned over the neck of his horse and spat. “Can’t be so.”

“Vannay says it can. He says there have been such before, although not for years. He believes they may be some sort of mutation that’s pretty much worked its way out of the true thread.”

“All these witnesses saw different animals?”

“Aye. The cowpokes described it as a tyger. It had stripes.”

“Lions and tygers running around like trained beasts in a traveling show. And out here in the dust. Are you sure we aren’t being tickled?”

I wasn’t old enough to be sure of much, but I did know the times were too desperate to be sending young guns even so far west as Debaria for a prank. Not that Steven Deschain could have been described as a prankster even in the best of times.

“I’m only telling what Vannay told me. The rope-swingers who came into town with the remains of those two Manni behind them on a travois had never even heard of such a thing as a tyger. Yet that is what they described. The testimony’s in here, green eyes and all.” I took the two creased sheets of paper I had from Vannay out of my inner vest pocket. “Care to look?”

“I’m not much of a reader,” Jamie said. “As thee knows.”

“Aye, fine. But take my word. Their description is just like the picture in the old story of the boy caught in the starkblast.”

“What old story is that?”

“The one about Tim Stoutheart-‘The Wind Through the Keyhole.’ Never mind. It’s not important. I know the punchers may have been drunk, they usually are if they’re near a town that has liquor, but if it’s true testimony, Vannay says the creature is a shape- shifter as well as a shape- changer. ”

“Twenty-three dead, you say. Ay-yi.”

The wind gusted, driving the alkali before it. The horses shied, and we raised our neckerchiefs over our mouths and noses.

“Boogery hot,” Jamie said. “And this damned dust. ”

Then, as if realizing he had been excessively chatty, he fell silent. That was fine with me, as I had much to think about.

A little less than an hour later, we breasted a hill and saw a sparkling white haci below us. It was the size of a barony estate. Behind it, tending down toward a narrow creek, was a large greengarden and what looked like a grape arbor. My mouth watered at the sight of it. The last time I’d had grapes, my armpits had still been smooth and hairless.

The walls of the haci were tall and topped with forbidding sparkles of broken glass, but the wooden gates stood open, as if in invitation. In front of them, seated on a kind of throne, was a woman in a dress of white muslin and a hood of white silk that flared around her head like gullwings. As we drew closer, I saw the throne was ironwood. Surely no other chair not made of metal could have borne her weight, for she was the biggest woman I had ever seen, a giantess who could have mated with the legendary outlaw prince David Quick.

Her lap was full of needlework. She might have been knitting a blanket, but held before that barrel of a body and breasts so big each of them could have fully shaded a baby from the sun, whatever it was looked no bigger than a handkerchief. She caught sight of us, laid her work aside, and stood up. There was six and a half feet of her, maybe a bit more. The wind was less in this dip, but there was enough to flutter her dress against her long thighs. The cloth made a sound like a sail in a running-breeze. I remembered the enjie saying they eat the mens, but when she put one large fist to the broad plain of her forehead and lifted the side of her dress to dip a curtsey with her free hand, I nonetheless reined up.

“Hile, gunslingers,” she called. She had a rolling voice, not quite a man’s baritone. “In the name of Serenity and the women who bide here, I salute thee. May your days be long upon the earth.”

We raised our own fists to our brows, and wished her twice the number.

“Have you come from In-World? I think so, for your duds aren’t filthy enough for these parts. Although they will be, if you bide longer than a day.” And she laughed. The sound was moderate thunder.

“We do,” I said. It was clear Jamie would say nothing. Ordinarily closemouthed, he was now stunned to silence. Her shadow rose on the whitewashed wall behind her, as tall as Lord Perth.

“And have you come for the skin-man?”

“Yes,” I said. “Have you seen him, or do you only know of him from the talk? If that’s the case, we’ll move on and say thankee.”

“Not a him, lad. Never think it.”

I only looked at her. Standing, she was almost tall enough to look into my eyes, although I sat on Young Joe, a fine big horse.

“An it, ” she said. “A monster from the Deep Cracks, as sure as you two serve the Eld and the White. It may have been a man once, but no more. Yes, I’ve seen it, and seen its work. Sit where you are, never move, and you shall see its work, too.”

Without waiting for any reply, she went through the open gate. In her white muslin she was like a sloop running before the wind. I looked at Jamie. He shrugged and nodded. This was what we had come for, after all, and if the enjie had to wait a bit longer for help putting Sma’ Toot back on the rails, so be it.

“ELLEN!” she bawled. Raised to full volume, it was like listening to a woman shouting into an electric megaphone. “CLEMMIE! BRIANNA! BRING FOOD! BRING MEAT AND BREAD AND ALE-THE LIGHT, NOT THE DARK! BRING A TABLE, AND MIND YOU DON’T FORGET THE CLOTH! SEND FORTUNA TO ME NOW! HIE TO IT! DOUBLE-QUICK!”

With these orders delivered she returned to us, delicately lifting her hem to keep it out of the alkali that puffed around the black boats she wore on her enormous feet.

“Lady-sai, we thank you for your offer of hospitality, but we really must-”

“You must eat is what you must do,” she said. “We’ll have it out here a-roadside, so your digestion will not be discomposed. For I know what stories they tell about us in Gilead, aye, so do we all. Men tell the same about any women who dare to live on their own, I wot. It makes em doubt the worth of their hammers.”

“We heard no stories about-”

She laughed and her bosom heaved like the sea. “Polite of you, young gunnie, aye, and very snick, but it’s long since I was weaned. We’ll not eat ye.” Her eyes, as black as her shoes, twinkled. “Although ye’d make a tasty snack, I think-one or both. I am Everlynne of Serenity. The prioress, by the grace of God and the Man Jesus.”

“Roland of Gilead,” I said. “And this is Jamie of same.”

Jamie bowed from his saddle.

She curtsied to us again, this time dropping her head so that the wings of her silken hood closed briefly around her face like curtains. As she rose, a tiny woman glided through the open gate. Or perhaps she was of normal size, after all. Perhaps she only looked tiny next to Everlynne. Her robe was rough gray cotton instead of white muslin; her arms were crossed over her scant bosom, and her hands were buried deep in her sleeves. She wore no hood, but we could still see only half of her face. The other half was hidden beneath a thick swath of bandagement. She curtsied to us, then huddled in the considerable shade of her prioress.

“Raise your head, Fortuna, and make your manners to these young gentlemen.”

When at last she looked up, I saw why she had kept her head lowered. The bandages could not fully conceal the damage to her nose; on the right side, a good part of it was gone. Where it had been was only a raw red channel.

“Hile,” she whispered. “May your days be long upon the earth.”

“May you have twice the number,” Jamie said, and I saw from the woeful glance she gave him with her one visible eye that she hoped this was not true.

“Tell them what happened,” Everlynne said. “What you remember, any-ro’. I know ’t isn’t much.”

“Must I, Mother?”

“Yes,” she said, “for they’ve come to end it.”

Fortuna peered doubtfully at us, just a quick snatch of a glance, and then back at Everlynne. “Can they? They look so young. ”

She realized what she had said must sound impolite, and a flush colored the cheek we could see. She staggered a little on her feet, and Everlynne put an arm around her. It was clear that she had been badly hurt, and her body was still far from complete recovery. The blood that had run to her face had more important work to do in other parts of her body. Chiefly beneath the bandage, I supposed, but given the voluminous robe she wore, it was impossible to tell where else she might have been wounded.

“They may still be a year or more from having to shave but once a week, but they’re gunslingers, Fortie. If they can’t set this cursed town right, then no one can. Besides, it will do you good. Horror’s a worm that needs to be coughed out before it breeds. Now tell them.”

She told. As she did, other Sisters of Serenity came out, two carrying a table, the others carrying food and drink to fill it. Better viands than any we’d had on Sma’ Toot, by the look and the smell, yet by the time Fortuna had finished her short, terrible story, I was no longer hungry. Nor, by the look of him, was Jamie.

It was dusk, a fortnight and a day gone. She and another, Dolores, had come out to close the gate and draw water for the evening chores. Fortuna was the one with the bucket, and so she was the one who lived. As Dolores began to swing the gate closed, a creature knocked it wide, grabbed her, and bit her head from her shoulders with its long jaws. Fortuna said that she saw it well, for the Peddler’s Moon had just risen full in the sky. Taller than a man it was, with scales instead of skin and a long tail that dragged behind it on the ground. Yellow eyes with slitted dark pupils glowed in its flat head. Its mouth was a trap filled with teeth, each as long as a man’s hand. They dripped with Dolores’s blood as it dropped her still-twitching body on the cobbles of the courtyard and ran on its stubby legs toward the well where Fortuna stood.

“I turned to flee… it caught me… and I remember no more.”

“I do,” Everlynne said grimly. “I heard the screams and came running out with our gun. It’s a great long thing with a bell at the end of the barrel. It’s been loaded since time out of mind, but none of us has ever fired it. For all I knew, it could have blown up in my hands. But I saw it tearing at poor Fortie’s face, and then something else, too. When I did, I never thought of the risk. I never even thought that I might kill her, poor thing, as well as it, should the gun fire.”

“I wish you had killed me,” Fortuna said. “Oh, I wish you had.” She sat in one of the chairs that had been brought to the table, put her face in her hands, and began to weep. Her one remaining eye did, at least.

“Never say so,” Everlynne told her, and stroked her hair on the side of her head not covered by the bandagement. “For ’tis blasphemy.”

“Did you hit it?” I asked.

“A little. Our old gun fires shot, and one of the pellets-or p’raps more than one-tore away some of the knobs and scales on its head. Black tarry stuff flew up. We saw it later on the cobbles, and sanded it over without touching it, for fear it might poison us right through our skin. The chary thing dropped her, and I think it had almost made up its mind to come for me. So I pointed the gun at it, though a gun like that can only be fired once, then must be recharged down its throat with powder and shot. I told it to come on. Told it I’d wait until it was good and close, so the shot wouldn’t spread.” She hawked back and spat into the dust. “It must have a brain of some sort even when it’s out of its human shape, because it heard me and ran. But before I lost sight of it round the wall, it turned and looked back at me. As if marking me. Well, let it. I have no more shot for the gun, and won’t unless a trader happens to have some, but I have this.”

She lifted her skirts to her knee, and we saw a butcher’s knife in a rawhide scabbard strapped to the outside of her calf.

“So let it come for Everlynne, daughter of Roseanna.”

“You said you saw something else,” I said.

She considered me with her bright black eyes, then turned to the women. “Clemmie, Brianna, serve out. Fortuna, you will say grace, and be sure to ask God forgiveness for your blasphemy and thank Him that your heart still beats.”

Everlynne grasped me above the elbow, drew me through the gate, and walked me to the well where the unfortunate Fortuna had been attacked. There we were alone.

“I saw its prick,” she said in a low voice. “Long and curved like a scimitar, twitching and full of the black stuff that serves it for blood… serves it for blood in that shape, any-ro’. It meant to kill her as it had Dolores, aye, right enough, but it meant to fuck her, too. It meant to fuck her as she died.”

Jamie and I ate with them-Fortuna even ate a little-and then we mounted up for town. But before we left, Everlynne stood by my horse and spoke to me again.

“When your business here is done, come and see me again. I have something for you.”

“What might that be, sai?”

She shook her head. “Now is not the time. But when the filthy thing is dead, come here.” She took my hand, raised it to her lips, and kissed it. “I know who you are, for does your mother not live in your face? Come to me, Roland, son of Gabrielle. Fail not.”

Then she stepped away before I could say another word, and glided in through the gate.

The Debaria high street was wide and paved, although the pavement was crumbling away to the hardpan beneath in many places and would be entirely gone before too many years passed. There was a good deal of commerce, and judging from the sound coming from the saloons, they were doing a fine business. We only saw a few horses and mules tied to the hitching-posts, though; in that part of the world, livestock was for trading and eating, not for riding.

A woman coming out of the mercantile with a basket over her arm saw us and stared. She ran back in, and several more people came out. By the time we reached the High Sheriff’s office-a little wooden building attached to the much larger stone-built town jail-the streets were lined with spectators on both sides.

“Have ye come to kill the skin-man?” the lady with the basket called.

“Those two don’t look old enough to kill a bottle of rye,” a man standing in front of the Cheery Fellows Saloon amp; Cafe called back. There was general laughter and murmurs of agreement at this sally.

“Town looks busy enough now,” Jamie said, dismounting and looking back at the forty or fifty men and women who’d come away from their business (and their pleasure) to have a gleep at us.

“It’ll be different after sundown,” I said. “That’s when such creatures as this skin-man do their marauding. Or so Vannay says.”

We went into the office. Hugh Peavy was a big-bellied man with long white hair and a droopy mustache. His face was deeply lined and careworn. He saw our guns and looked relieved. He noted our beardless faces and looked less so. He wiped off the nib of the pen he had been writing with, stood up, and held out his hand. No forehead-knocking for this fellow.

After we’d shaken with him and introduced ourselves, he said: “I don’t mean to belittle you, young fellows, but I was hoping to see Steven Deschain himself. And perhaps Peter McVries.”

“McVries died three years ago,” I said.

Peavy looked shocked. “Do you say so? For he was a trig hand with a gun. Very trig.”

“He died of a fever.” Very likely induced by poison, but this was nothing the High Sheriff of the Debaria Outers needed to know. “As for Steven, he’s otherwise occupied, and so he sent me. I am his son.”

“Yar, yar, I’ve heard your name and a bit of your exploits in Mejis, for we get some news even out here. There’s the dit-dah wire, and even a jing-jang.” He pointed to a contraption on the wall. Written on the brick beneath it was a sign reading DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMIZION. “It used to go all the way to Gilead, but these days only to Sallywood in the south, the Jefferson spread to the north, and the village in the foothills-Little Debaria, it’s called. We even have a few streetlamps that still work-not gas or kerosene but real sparklights, don’tcha see. Townfolk think such’ll keep the creature away.” He sighed. “I am less confident. This is a bad business, young fellows. Sometimes I feel the world has come loose of its moorings.”

“It has,” I said. “But what comes loose can be tied tight again, Sheriff.”

“If you say so.” He cleared his throat. “Now, don’t take this as disrespect, I know ye are who ye say ye are, but I was promised a sigul. If you’ve brought it, I’d have it, for it means special to me.”

I opened my swag-bag and brought out what I’d been given: a small wooden box with my father’s mark-the D with the S inside of it-stamped on the hinged lid. Peavy took it with the smallest of smiles dimpling the corners of his mouth beneath his mustache. To me it looked like a remembering smile, and it took years off his face.

“Do’ee know what’s inside?”

“No.” I had not been asked to look.

Peavy opened the box, looked within, then returned his gaze to Jamie and me. “Once, when I was still only a deputy, Steven Deschain led me, and the High Sheriff that was, and a posse of seven against the Crow Gang. Has your father ever spoken to you of the Crows?”

I shook my head.

“Not skin-men, no, but a nasty lot of work, all the same. They robbed what there was to rob, not just in Debaria but all along the ranchlands out this way. Trains, too, if they got word one was worth stopping. But their main business was kidnapping for ransom. A coward’s crime, sure-I’m told Farson favors it-but it paid well.

“Your da’ showed up in town only a day after they stole a rancher’s wife-Belinda Doolin. Her husband called on the jing-jang as soon as they left and he was able to get himself untied. The Crows didn’t know about the jing-jang, and that was their undoing. Accourse it helped that there was a gunslinger doing his rounds in this part of the world; in those days, they had a knack of turning up when and where they were needed.”

He eyed us. “P’raps they still do. Any-ro’, we got out t’ranch while the crime was still fresh. There were places where any of us would have lost the trail-it’s mostly hardpan out north of here, don’tcha see-but your father had eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Hawks ain’t even in it, dear, or eagles, either.”

I knew of my father’s sharp eyes and gift for trailing. I also knew that this story probably had nothing to do with our business, and I should have told him to move along. But my father never talked about his younger days, and I wanted to hear this tale. I was hungry to hear it. And it turned out to have a little more to do with our business in Debaria than I at first thought.

“The trail led in the direction of the mines-what Debaria folk call the salt-houses. The workings had been abandoned in those days; it was before the new plug was found twenty year ago.”

“Plug?” Jamie asked.

“Deposit,” I said. “He means a fresh deposit.”

“Aye, as you say. But all that were abandoned then, and made a fine hideout for such as those beastly Crows. Once the trail left the flats, it went through a place of high rocks before coming out on the Low Pure, which is to say the foothill meadows below the salt-houses. The Low is where a sheepherder was killed just recent, by something that looked like a-”

“Like a wolf,” I said. “This we know. Go on.”

“Well-informed, are ye? Well, that’s all to the good. Where was I, now? Ah, I know-those rocks that are now known in these parts as Ambush Arroyo. It’s not an arroyo, but I suppose people like the sound. That’s where the tracks went, but Deschain wanted to go around and come in from the east. From the High Pure. The sheriff, Pea Anderson it was back then, didn’t want none o’ that. Eager as a bird with its eye on a worm he was, mad to press on. Said it would take em three days, and by then the woman might be dead and the Crows anywhere. He said he was going the straight way, and he’d go alone if no one wanted to go with him. ‘Or unless you order me in the name of Gilead to do different,’ he says to your da’.

“‘Never think it,’ Deschain says, ‘for Debaria is your fill; I have my own.’

“The posse went. I stayed with your da’, lad. Sheriff Anderson turned to me in the saddle and said, ‘I hope they’re hiring at one of the ranches, Hughie, because your days of wearing tin on your vest are over. I’m done with’ee.’

“Those were the last words he ever said to me. They rode off. Steven of Gilead squatted on his hunkers and I hunkered with him. After half an hour of quiet-might have been longer-I says to him, ‘I thought we were going to hook around… unless you’re done with me, too.’

“‘No,’ he says. ‘Your hire is not my business, Deputy.’

“‘Then what are we waitin for?’

“‘Gunfire,’ says he, and not five minutes later we heard it. Gunfire and screams. It didn’t last long. The Crows had seen us coming-probably nummore’n a glint of sun on a bootcap or bit o’ saddle brightwork was enough to attract their attention, for Pa Crow was powerful trig-and doubled back. They got up in those high rocks and poured down lead on Anderson and his possemen. There were more guns in those days, and the Crows had a good share. Even a speed-shooter or two.

“So we went around, all right? Took us only two days, because Steven Deschain pushed hard. On the third day, we camped downslope and rose before dawn. Now, if ye don’t know, and no reason ye should, salt-houses are just caverns in the cliff faces up there. Whole families lived in em, not just the miners themselves. The tunnels go down into the earth from the backs of em. But as I say, in those days all were deserted. Yet we saw smoke coming from the vent on top of one, and that was as good as a kinkman standing out in front of a carnival tent and pointing at the show inside, don’tcha see it.

“‘This is the time,’ Steven says, ‘because they will have spent the last nights, once they were sure they were safe, deep in drink. They’ll still be sleeping it off. Will you stand with me?’

“‘Aye, gunslinger, that I will,’ I tells him.”

When Peavy said this, he unconsciously straightened his back. He looked younger.

“We snuck the last fifty or sixty yards, yer da’ with his gun drawn in case they’d posted a guard. They had, but he was only a lad, and fast asleep. The Deschain holstered his gun, swotted him with a rock, and laid him out. I later saw that young fellow standing on a trapdoor with tears running out of his eyes, a mess in his pants, and a rope around his neck. He wasn’t but fourteen, yet he’d taken his turn at sai Doolin-the kidnapped woman, don’tcha know, and old enough to be his grandmother-just like the rest of them, and I shed no tears when the rope shut off his cries for mercy. The salt ye take is the salt ye must pay for, as anyone from these parts will tell you.

“The gunslinger crep’ inside, and I right after him. They was all lying around, snoring like dogs. Hell, boys, they were dogs. Belinda Doolin was tied to a post. She saw us, and her eyes widened. Steven Deschain pointed to her, then to himself, then cupped his hands together, then pointed to her again. You’re safe, he meant. I never forgot the look of gratitude in her face as she nodded to him that she understood. You’re safe — that’s the world we grew up in, young men, the one that’s almost gone now.

“Then the Deschain says, ‘Wake up, Allan Crow, unless you’d go into the clearing at the end of the path with your eyes shut. Wake up, all.’

“They did. He never meant to try and bring them all in alive-’twould have been madness, that I’m sure you must see-but he wouldn’t shoot them as they slept, either. They woke up to varying degrees, but not for long. Steven drew his guns so fast I never saw his hands move. Lightning ain’t in it, dear. At one moment those revolvers with their big sandalwood grips were by his sides; at the next he was blazing away, the noise like thunder in that closed-in space. But that didn’t keep me from drawing my own gun. It was just an old barrel-shooter I had from my granda’, but I put two of them down with it. The first two men I ever killed. There have been plenty since, sad to say.

“The only one who survived that first fusillade was Pa Crow himself-Allan Crow. He was an old man, all snarled up and frozen on one side of his face from a stroke or summat, but he moved fast as the devil just the same. He was in his longjohns, and his gun was stuck in the top of one of his boots there at the end of his bedroll. He grabbed it up and turned toward us. Steven shot him, but the old bastard got off a single round. It went wild, but…”

Peavy, who could have been no older in those days than we two young men standing before him, opened the box on its cunning hinges, mused a moment at what he saw inside, then looked up at me. That little remembering smile still touched the corners of his mouth. “Have you ever seen a scar on your father’s arm, Roland? Right here?” He touched the place just above the crook of his elbow, where a man’s yanks begin.

My father’s body was a map of scars, but it was a map I knew well. The scar above his inner elbow was a deep dimple, almost like the ones not quite hidden by Sheriff Peavy’s mustache when he smiled.

“Pa Crow’s last shot hit the wall above the post where the woman was tied, and richocheted.” He turned the box and held it out to me. Inside was a smashed slug, a big one, a hard caliber. “I dug this out of your da’s arm with my skinning knife, and gave it to him. He thanked me, and said someday I should have it back. And here it is. Ka is a wheel, sai Deschain.”

“Have you ever told this story?” I asked. “For I have never heard it.”

“That I dug a bullet from the flesh of Arthur’s true descendant? Eld of the Eld? No, never until now. For who would believe it?”

“I do,” I said, “and I thank you. It could have poisoned him.”

“Nar, nar,” Peavy said with a chuckle. “Not him. The blood of Eld’s too strong. And if I’d been laid low… or too squeamy… he would have done it himself. As it was, he let me take most of the credit for the Crow Gang, and I’ve been sheriff ever since. But not much longer. This skin-man business has done for me. I’ve seen enough blood, and have no taste for mysteries.”

“Who’ll take your place?” I asked.

He seemed surprised by the question. “Probably nobody. The mines will play out again in a few years, this time for good, and such rail lines as there are won’t last much longer. The two things together will finish Debaria, which was once a fine little city in the time of yer grandfathers. That holy hencoop I’m sure ye passed on the way in may go on; nothing else.”

Jamie looked troubled. “But in the meantime?”

“Let the ranchers, drifters, whoremasters, and gamblers all go to hell in their own way. It’s none o’ mine, at least for much longer. But I’ll not leave until this business is settled, one way or another.”

I said, “The skin-man was at one of the women at Serenity. She’s badly disfigured.”

“Been there, have ye?”

“The women are terrified.” I thought this over, and remembered a knife strapped to a calf as thick as the trunk of a young birch. “Except for the prioress, that is.”

He chuckled. “Everlynne. That one’d spit in the devil’s face. And if he took her down to Nis, she’d be running the place in a month.”

I said, “Do you have any idea who this skin-man might be when he’s in his human shape? If you do, tell us, I beg. For, as my father told your Sheriff Anderson that was, this is not our fill.”

“I can’t give ye a name, if that’s what you mean, but I might be able to give ye something. Follow me.”

He led us through the archway behind his desk and into the jail, which was in the shape of a T. I counted eight big cells down the central aisle and a dozen small ones on the cross-corridor. All were empty except for one of the smaller ones, where a drunk was snoozing away the late afternoon on a straw pallet. The door to his cell stood open.

“Once all of these cells would have been filled on Efday and Ethday,” Peavy said. “Loaded up with drunk cowpunchers and farmhands, don’tcha see it. Now most people stay in at night. Even on Efday and Ethday. Cowpokes in their bunkhouses, farmhands in theirs. No one wants to be staggering home drunk and meet the skin-man.”

“The salt-miners?” Jamie asked. “Do you pen them, too?”

“Not often, for they have their own saloons up in Little Debaria. Two of em. Nasty places. When the whores down here at the Cheery Fellows or the Busted Luck or the Bider-Wee get too old or too diseased to attract custom, they end up in Little Debaria. Once they’re drunk on White Blind, the salties don’t much care if a whore has a nose as long as she still has her sugar-purse.”

“Nice,” Jamie muttered.

Peavy opened one of the large cells. “Come on in here, boys. I haven’t any paper, but I do have some chalk, and here’s a nice smooth wall. It’s private, too, as long as old Salty Sam down there doesn’t wake up. And he rarely does until sundown.”

From the pocket of his twill pants the sheriff took a goodish stick of chalk, and on the wall he drew a kind of long box with jags all across the top. They looked like a row of upside-down V ’s.

“Here’s the whole of Debaria,” Peavy said. “Over here’s the rail line you came in on.” He drew a series of hashmarks, and as he did so I remembered the enjie and the old fellow who’d served as our butler.

“Sma’ Toot is off the rails,” I said. “Can you put together a party of men to set it right? We have money to pay for their labor, and Jamie and I would be happy to work with them.”

“Not today,” Peavy said absently. He was studying his map. “Enjie still out there, is he?”

“Yes. Him and another.”

“I’ll send Kellin and Vikka Frye out in a bucka. Kellin’s my best deputy-the other two ain’t worth much-and Vikka’s his son. They’ll pick em up and bring em back in before dark. There’s time, because the days is long this time o’ year. For now, just pay attention, boys. Here’s the tracks and here’s Serenity, where that poor girl you spoke to was mauled. On the High Road, don’tcha see it.” He drew a little box for Serenity, and put an X in it. North of the women’s retreat, up toward the jags at the top of his map, he put another X. “This is where Yon Curry, the sheepherder, was killed.”

To the left of this X, but pretty much on the same level-which is to say, below the jags-he put another.

“The Alora farm. Seven killed.”

Farther yet to the left and little higher, he chalked another X.

“Here’s the Timbersmith farm on the High Pure. Nine killed. It’s where we found the little boy’s head on a pole. Tracks all around it.”

“Wolf?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Nar, some kind o’ big cat. At first. Before we lost the trail, they changed into what looked like hooves. Then…” He looked at us grimly. “Footprints. First big-like a giant’s, almost-but then smaller and smaller until they were the size of any man’s tracks. Any-ro’, we lost em in the hardpan. Mayhap your father wouldn’t’ve, sai.”

He went on marking the map, and when he was done, stepped away so we could see it clearly.

“Such as you are supposed to have good brains as well as fast hands, I was always told. So what do you make of this?”

Jamie stepped forward between the rows of pallets (for this cell must have been for many guests, probably brought in on drunk-and-disorderly), and traced the tip of his finger over the jags at the top of the map, blurring them a little. “Do the salt-houses run all along here? In all the foothills?”

“Yar. The Salt Rocks, those hills’re called.”

“Little Debaria is where?”

Peavy made another box for the salt-miners’ town. It was close to the X he’d made to mark the place where the woman and the gambler had been killed… for it was Little Debaria they’d been headed for.

Jamie studied the map a bit more, then nodded. “Looks to me like the skin-man could be one of the miners. Is that what you think?”

“Aye, a saltie, even though a couple of them has been torn up, too. It makes sense-as much as anything in a crazy business like this can make sense. The new plug’s a lot deeper than the old ones, and everyone knows there are demons in the earth. Mayhap one of the miners struck on one, wakened it, and was done a mischief by it.”

“There are also leftovers from the Great Old Ones in the ground,” I said. “Not all are dangerous, but some are. Perhaps one of those old things… those what-do-you-callums, Jamie?”

“Artyfax,” he said.

“Yes, those. Perhaps one of those is responsible. Mayhap the fellow will be able to tell us, if we take him alive.”

“Sma’ chance of that,” Peavy growled.

I thought there was a good chance. If we could identify him and close on him in the daytime, that was.

“How many of these salties are there?” I asked.

“Not s’many as in the old days, because now it’s just the one plug, don’tcha see it. I sh’d say no more’n… two hundred.”

I met Jamie’s eyes, and saw a glint of humor in them. “No fret, Roland,” said he. “I’m sure we can interview em all by Reaptide. If we hurry.”

He was exaggerating, but I still saw several weeks ahead of us in Debaria. We might interview the skin-man and still not be able to pick him out, either because he was a masterful liar or because he had no guilt to cover up; his day-self might truly not know what his night-self was doing. I wished for Cuthbert, who could look at things that seemed unrelated and spot the connections, and I wished for Alain, with his power to touch minds. But Jamie wasn’t so bad, either. He had, after all, seen what I should have seen myself, what was right in front of my nose. On one matter I was in complete accord with Sheriff Hugh Peavy: I hated mysteries. It’s a thing that has never changed in this long life of mine. I’m not good at solving them; my mind has never run that way.

When we trooped back into the office, I said, “I have some questions I must ask you, Sheriff. The first is, will you open to us, if we open to you? The second-”

“The second is do I see you for what you are and accept what you do. The third is do I seek aid and succor. Sheriff Peavy says yar, yar, and yar. Now for gods’ sake set your brains to working, fellows, for it’s over two weeks since this thing showed up at Serenity, and that time it didn’t get a full meal. Soon enough it’ll be out there again.”

“It only prowls at night,” Jamie said. “You’re sure of that much?”

“I am.”

“Does the moon have any effect on it?” I asked. “Because my father’s advisor-and our teacher that was-says that in some of the old legends…”

“I’ve heard the legends, sai, but in that they’re wrong. At least for this particular creatur’ they are. Sometimes the moon’s been full when it strikes-it was Full Peddler when it showed up at Serenity, all covered with scales and knobs like an alligator from the Long Salt Swamps-but it did its work at Timbersmith when the moon was dark. I’d like to tell you different, but I can’t. I’d also like to end this without having to pick anyone else’s guts out of the bushes or pluck some other kiddie’s head off’n a fencepost. Ye’ve been sent here to help, and I hope like hell you can… although I’ve got my doubts.”

When I asked Peavy if there was a good hotel or boardinghouse in Debaria, he chuckled.

“The last boardinghouse was the Widow Brailley’s. Two year ago, a drunk saddletramp tried to rape her in her own outhouse, as she sat at business. But she was always a trig one. She’d seen the look in his eye, and went in there with a knife under her apron. Cut his throat for him, she did. Stringy Bodean, who used to be our Justice Man before he decided to try his luck at raising horses in the Crescent, declared her not guilty by reason of self-defense in about five minutes, but the lady decided she’d had enough of Debaria and trained back to Gilead, where she yet bides, I’ve no doubt. Two days after she left, some drunken buffoon burned the place to the ground. The hotel still stands. It’s called the Delightful View. The view ain’t delightful, young fellows, and the beds is full of bugs as big as toads’ eyeballs. I wouldn’t sleep in one without putting on a full suit of Arthur Eld’s armor.”

And so we ended up spending our first night in Debaria in the large drunk-and-disorderly cell, beneath Peavy’s chalked map. Salty Sam had been set free, and we had the jail to ourselves. Outside, a strong wind had begun to blow off the alkali flats to the west of town. The moaning sound it made around the eaves caused me to think again of the story my mother used to read to me when I was just a sma’ toot myself-the story of Tim Stoutheart and the starkblast Tim had to face in the Great Woods north of New Canaan. Thinking of the boy alone in those woods has always chilled my heart, just as Tim’s bravery has always warmed it. The stories we hear in childhood are the ones we remember all our lives.

After one particularly strong gust-the Debaria wind was warm, not cold like the starkblast-struck the side of the jail and puffed alkali grit in through the barred window, Jamie spoke up. It was rare for him to start a conversation.

“I hate that sound, Roland. It’s apt to keep me awake all night.”

I loved it myself; the sound of the wind has always made me think of good times and far places. Although I confess I could have done without the grit.

“How are we supposed to find this thing, Jamie? I hope you have some idea, because I don’t.”

“We’ll have to talk to the salt-miners. That’s the place to start. Someone may have seen a fellow with blood on him creeping back to where the salties live. Creeping back naked. For he can’t come back clothed, unless he takes them off beforehand.”

That gave me a little hope. Although if the one we were looking for knew what he was, he might take his clothes off when he felt an attack coming on, hide them, then come back to them later. But if he didn’t know…

It was a small thread, but sometimes-if you’re careful not to break it-you can pull on a small thread and unravel a whole garment.

“Goodnight, Roland.”

“Goodnight, Jamie.”

I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. I often did that year, but for once they weren’t thoughts of how she had looked dead, but of how beautiful she had been in my early childhood, as she sat beside me on my bed in the room with the colored glass windows, reading to me. “Look you, Roland,” she’d say, “here are the billy-bumblers sitting all a-row and scenting the air. They know, don’t they?”

“Yes,” I would say, “the bumblers know.”

“And what is it they know?” the woman I would kill asked me. “What is it they know, dear heart?”

“They know the starkblast is coming,” I said. My eyes would be growing heavy by then, and minutes later I would drift off to the music of her voice.

As I drifted off now, with the wind outside blowing up a strong gale.

I woke in the first thin light of morning to a harsh sound: BRUNG! BRUNG! BRUNNNNG!

Jamie was still flat on his back, legs splayed, snoring. I took one of my revolvers from its holster, went out through the open cell door, and shambled toward that imperious sound. It was the jing-jang Sheriff Peavy had taken so much pride in. He wasn’t there to answer it; he’d gone home to bed, and the office was empty.

Standing there bare-chested, with a gun in my hand and wearing nothing but the swabbies and slinkum I’d slept in-for it was hot in the cell-I took the listening cone off the wall, put the narrow end in my ear, and leaned close to the speaking tube. “Yes? Hello?”

“Who the hell’s this?” a voice screamed, so loud that it sent a nail of pain into the side of my head. There were jing-jangs in Gilead, perhaps as many as a hundred that still worked, but none spoke so clear as this. I pulled the cone away, wincing, and could still hear the voice coming out of it.

“Hello? Hello? Gods curse this fucking thing! HELLO?”

“I hear you,” I said. “Lower thy voice, for your father’s sake.”

“Who is this?” There was just enough drop in volume for me to put the listening cone a little closer to my ear. But not in it; I would not make that mistake twice.

“A deputy.” Jamie DeCurry and I were the farthest things in the world from that, but simplest is usually best. Always best, I wot, when speaking with a panicky man on a jing-jang.

“Where’s Sheriff Peavy?”

“At home with his wife. It isn’t yet five o’ the clock, I reckon. Now tell me who you are, where you’re speaking from, and what’s happened.”

“It’s Canfield of the Jefferson. I-”

“Of the Jefferson what?” I heard footsteps behind me and turned, half-raising my revolver. But it was only Jamie, with his hair standing up in sleep-spikes all over his head. He was holding his own gun, and had gotten into his jeans, although his feet were yet bare.

“The Jefferson Ranch, ye great grotting idiot! You need to get the sheriff out here, and jin-jin. Everyone’s dead. Jefferson, his fambly, the cookie, all the proddies. Blood from one end t’other.”

“How many?” I asked.

“Maybe fifteen. Maybe twenty. Who can tell?” Canfield of the Jefferson began to sob. “They’re all in pieces. Whatever it was did for em left the two dogs, Rosie and Mozie. They was in there. We had to shoot em. They was lapping up the blood and eating the brains.”

It was a ten-wheel ride, straight north toward the Salt Hills. We went with Sheriff Peavy, Kellin Frye-the good deputy-and Frye’s son, Vikka. The enjie, whose name turned out to be Travis, also came along, for he’d spent the night at the Fryes’ place. We pushed our mounts hard, but it was still full daylight by the time we got to the Jefferson spread. At least the wind, which was still strengthening, was at our backs.

Peavy thought Canfield was a pokie-which is to say a wandering cowboy not signed to any particular ranch. Some such turned outlaw, but most were honest enough, just men who couldn’t settle down in one place. When we rode through the wide stock gate with JEFFERSON posted over it in white birch letters, two other cowboys-his mates-were with him. The three of them were bunched together by the shakepole fence of the horse corral, which stood near to the big house. A half a mile or so north, standing atop a little hill, was the bunkhouse. From this distance, only two things looked out of place: the door at the south end of the bunkie was unlatched, swinging back and forth in the alkali-wind, and the bodies of two large black dogs lay stretched on the dirt.

We dismounted and Sheriff Peavy shook with the men, who looked mightily glad to see us. “Aye, Bill Canfield, see you very well, pokie-fella.”

The tallest of them took off his hat and held it against his shirt. “I ain’t no pokie nummore. Or maybe I am, I dunno. For a while here I was Canfield of the Jefferson, like I told whoever answered the goddam speakie, because I signed on just last month. Old man Jefferson himself oversaw my mark on the wall, but now he’s dead like the rest of em.”

He swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. The stubble on his face looked very black, because his skin was very white. There was drying vomit on the front of his shirt.

“His wife and daughters’ve gone into the clearing, too. You can tell em by their long hair and their… their… ay, ay, Man Jesus, you see a thing like that and it makes you wish you were born blind.” He raised his hat to his face to hide it and began to weep.

One of Canfield’s mates said, “Is those gunslingers, Sheriff? Mighty young to be hauling iron, ain’t they?”

“Never mind them,” said Peavy. “Tell me what brought you here.”

Canfield lowered his hat. His eyes were red and streaming. “The three of us was camped out on the Pure. Roundin strays, we were, and camped for the night. Then we heard screamin start from the east. Woke us from a sound sleep, because we was that tired. Then gunshots, two or three of em. They quit and there was more screamin. And somethin-somethin big — roarin and snarlin.”

One of the others said, “It sounded like a bear.”

“No, it didn’t,” said the third. “Never at all.”

Canfield said, “Knew it was comin from the ranch, whatever it was. Had to’ve been four wheels from where we were, maybe six, but sound carries on the Pure, as ye know. We mounted up, but I got here way ahead of these two, because I was signed and they’re yet pokies.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Canfield turned to me. “I had a ranch horse, didn’t I? A good ’un. Snip and Arn there had nothing but mules. Put em in there, with the others.” He pointed into the corral. A big gust of wind blew through just then, driving dust before it, and all the livestock galloped away like a wave.

“They’re still spooked,” Kellin Frye said.

Looking toward the bunkhouse, the enjie-Travis-said, “They en’t the only ones.”

By the time Canfield, the Jefferson Ranch’s newest proddie-which is to say hired hand-reached the home place, the screaming had stopped. So had the roaring of the beast, although there was still a good deal of snarling going on. That was the two dogs, fighting over the leavings. Knowing which side of the biscuit his honey went on, Canfield bypassed the bunkhouse-and the dogs snarling within-for the big house. The front door was wide open and there were lit ’seners in both the hall and the kitchen, but no one answered his hail.

He found Jefferson’s lady-sai in the kitchen with her body under the table and her half-eaten head rolled up against the pantry door. There were tracks going out the stoop door, which was banging in the wind. Some were human; some were the tracks of a monstrous great bear. The bear tracks were bloody.

“I took the ’sener off o’ sink-side where it’d been left and followed the tracks outside. The two girls was a-layin in the dirt between the house and the barn. One had gotten three or four dozen running steps ahead of her sissa, but they were both just as dead, with their nightdresses tore off em and their backs carved open right down to the spines.” Canfield shook his head slowly from side to side, his large eyes-swimming with tears, they were-never leaving High Sheriff Peavy’s face. “I never want to see the claws that could do a thing like that. Never, never, never in my life. I seen what they done, and that’s enough.”

“The bunkhouse?” Peavy asked.

“Aye, there I went next. You can see what’s inside for yourself. The womenfolk too, for they’re still where I found em. I won’t take ye. Snip and Arn might-”

“Not me,” said Snip.

“Me, neither,” said Arn. “I’ll see ’un all in my dreams, and that’ll do me fine.”

“I don’t think we need a guide,” Peavy said. “You three boys stay right here.”

Sheriff Peavy, closely followed by the Fryes and Travis the enjie, started toward the big house. Jamie put a hand on Peavy’s shoulder, and spoke almost apologetically when the High Sheriff turned to look at him. “Mind the tracks. They’ll be important.”

Peavy nodded. “Yar. We’ll mind em very well. Especially those headed off to wherever the thing went.”

The women were as sai Canfield had told us. I had seen bloodshed before-aye, plenty of it, both in Mejis and in Gilead-but I had never seen anything like this, and neither had Jamie. He was as pale as Canfield, and I could only hope he would not discredit his father by passing out. I needn’t have worried; soon he was down on his knees in the kitchen, examining several enormous blood-rimmed animal tracks.

“These really are bear tracks,” he said, “but there was never one so big, Roland. Not even in the Endless Forest.”

“There was one here last night, cully,” Travis said. He looked toward the body of the rancher’s wife and shivered, even though she, like her unfortunate daughters, had been covered with blankets from upstairs. “I’ll be glad to get back to Gilead, where such things are just legends.”

“What do the tracks tell otherwise?” I asked Jamie. “Anything?”

“Yes. It went to the bunkhouse first, where the most… the most food was. The rumpus would have wakened the four of them here in the house… were there only four, Sheriff?”

“Aye,” Peavy said. “There are two sons, but Jefferson would have sent em to the auctions in Gilead, I expect. They’ll find a sack of woe when they return.”

“The rancher left his womenfolk and went running for the bunkhouse. The gun Canfield and his mates heard must have been his.”

“Much good it did him,” Vikka Frye said. His father hit him on the shoulder and told him to hush.

“Then the thing came up here,” Jamie went on. “The lady-sai Jefferson and the two girls were in the kitchen by then, I think. And I think the sai must have told her daughters to run.”

“Aye,” Peavy said. “And she’d try to keep it from coming after them long enough for them to get away. That’s how it reads. Only it didn’t work. If they’d been at the front of the house-if they’d seen how big it was-she’d have known better, and we would have found all three of em out there in the dirt.” He fetched a deep sigh. “Come on, boys, let’s see what’s in the bunkhouse. Waiting won’t make it any prettier.”

“I think I might just stay out by the corral with those saddletramps,” Travis said. “I’ve seen enough.”

Vikka Frye blurted: “Can I do that too, Pa?”

Kellin looked at his son’s haunted face and said he could. Before he let the boy go, he put a kiss on his cheek.

Ten feet or so in front of the bunkhouse, the bare earth had been scuffed into a bloody churn of bootprints and clawed animal tracks. Nearby, in a clump of jugweed, was an old short-arm four-shot with its barrel bent to one side. Jamie pointed from the confusion of tracks, to the gun, to the open bunkhouse door. Then he raised his eyebrows, silently asking me if I saw it. I saw it very well.

“This is where the thing-the skin-man wearing the shape of a bear-met the rancher,” I said. “He got off a few rounds, then dropped the gun-”

“No,” Jamie said. “The thing took it from him. That’s why the barrel’s bent. Maybe Jefferson turned to run. Maybe he stood his ground. Either way, it did no good. His tracks stop here, so the thing picked him up and threw him through that door and into the bunkhouse. It went to the big house next.”

“So we’re backtracking it,” Peavy said.

Jamie nodded. “We’ll front-track it soon enough,” he said.

The thing had turned the bunkhouse into an abattoir. In the end, the butcher’s bill came to eighteen: sixteen proddies, the cook-who had died beside his stove with his rent and bloodstained apron thrown over his face like a shroud-and Jefferson himself, who had been torn limbless. His severed head stared up at the rafters with a fearful grin that showed only his top teeth. The skin-man had ripped the rancher’s lower jaw right out of his mouth. Kellin Frye found it under a bunk. One of the men had tried to defend himself with a saddle, using it as a shield, but it had done him no good; the thing had torn it in half with its claws. The unfortunate cowboy was still holding onto the pommel with one hand. He had no face; the thing had eaten it off his skull.

“Roland,” Jamie said. His voice was strangled, as if his throat had closed up to no more than a straw. “We have to find this thing. We have to.”

“Let’s see what the outward tracks say before the wind wipes them out,” I replied.

We left Peavy and the others outside the bunkhouse and circled the big house to where the covered bodies of the two girls lay. The tracks beyond them had begun to blur at the edges and around the claw-points, but they would have been hard to miss even for someone not fortunate enough to have had Cort of Gilead as a teacher. The thing that made them must have weighed upwards of eight hundred pounds.

“Look here,” Jamie said, kneeling beside one. “See how it’s deeper at the front? It was running.”

“And on its hind legs,” I said. “Like a man.”

The tracks went past the pump house, which was in shambles, as if the thing had given it a swipe out of pure malice as it went by. They led us onto an uphill lane that headed north, toward a long unpainted outbuilding that was either a tack shed or a smithy. Beyond this, perhaps twenty wheels farther north, were the rocky badlands below the salt hills. We could see the holes that led to the worked-out mines; they gaped like empty eyesockets.

“We may as well give this up,” I said. “We know where the tracks go-up to where the salties live.”

“Not yet,” Jamie said. “Look here, Roland. You’ve never seen anything like this.”

The tracks began to change, the claws merging into the curved shapes of large unshod hooves.

“It lost its bear-shape,” I said, “and became… what? A bull?”

“I think so,” Jamie said. “Let’s go a little further. I have an idea.”

As we approached the long outbuilding, the hoofprints became pawprints. The bull had become some kind of monstrous cat. These tracks were large at first, then started to grow smaller, as if the thing were shrinking from the size of a lion to that of a cougar even as it ran. When they veered off the lane and onto the dirt path leading to the tack shed, we found a large patch of jugweed grass that had been beaten down. The broken stalks were bloody.

“It fell,” Jamie said. “I think it fell… and then thrashed.” He looked up from the bed of matted weed. His face was thoughtful. “I think it was in pain.”

“Good,” I said. “Now look there.” I pointed to the path, which was imprinted with the hooves of many horses. And other signs, as well.

Bare feet, going to the doors of the building, which were run back on rusty metal tracks.

Jamie turned to me, wide-eyed. I put my finger to my lips, and drew one of my revolvers. Jamie did likewise, and we moved toward the shed. I waved him around to the far side. He nodded and split off to the left.

I stood outside the open doors, gun held up, giving Jamie time to get to the other end of the building. I heard nothing. When I judged my pard must be in place, I bent down, picked up a good-size stone with my free hand, and tossed it inside. It thumped, then rolled across wood. There was still nothing else to hear. I swung inside, crouched low, gun at the ready.

The place seemed empty, but there were so many shadows it was at first hard to tell for sure. It was already warm, and by noonday would be an oven. I saw a pair of empty stalls on either side, a little smithy-stove next to drawers full of rusty shoes and equally rusty shoe-nails, dust-covered jugs of liniment and stinkum, branding irons in a tin sleeve, and a large pile of old tack that needed either to be mended or thrown out. Above a couple of benches hung a fair assortment of tools on pegs. Most were as rusty as the shoes and nails. There were a few wooden hitching hooks and a pedestal pump over a cement trough. The water in the trough hadn’t been changed for a while; as my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I could see bits of straw floating on the surface. I kenned that this had once been more than a tack shed. It had also been a kind of hostelry where the ranch’s working stock was seen to. Likely a jackleg veterinary, as well. Horses could be led in at one end, dealt with, and led out the other. But it looked in disrepair, abandoned.

The tracks of the thing that had by then been human led up the center aisle to other doors, also open, at the far end. I followed them. “Jamie? It’s me. Don’t shoot me, for your father’s sake.”

I stepped outside. Jamie had holstered his gun, and now pointed at a large heap of horseapples. “He knows what he is, Roland.”

“You know this from a pile of horseshit?”

“As happens, I do.”

He didn’t tell me how, but after a few seconds I saw it for myself. The hostelry had been abandoned, probably in favor of one built closer in to the main house, but the horseapples were fresh. “If he came a-horseback, he came as a man.”

“Aye. And left as one.”

I squatted on my hunkers and thought about this. Jamie rolled a smoke and let me. When I looked up, he was smiling a little.

“Do you see what it means, Roland?”

“Two hundred salties, give or take,” I said. I’ve ever been slow, but in the end I usually get there.

“Aye.”

“ Salties, mind, not pokies or proddies. Diggers, not riders. As a rule.”

“As you say.”

“How many of em up there have horses, do you suppose? How many even know how to ride?”

His smile broadened. “There might be twenty or thirty, I suppose.”

“It’s better than two hundred,” I said. “Better by a long stride. We’ll go up as soon as-”

I never finished what I was going to say, because that’s when the moaning started. It was coming from the tack shed I’d dismissed as empty. How glad I was at that moment Cort wasn’t there. He would have cuffed my ear and sent me sprawling. At least in his prime, he would have.

Jamie and I looked into each other’s startled eyes, then ran back inside. The moaning continued, but the place looked as empty as before. Then that big heap of old tack-busted hames, bridles, cinch straps and reins-started to heave up and down, as if it were breathing. The tangled bunches of leather began to tumble away to either side and from them a boy was born. His white-blond hair was sticking up in all directions. He wore jeans and an old shirt that hung open and unbuttoned. He didn’t look hurt, but in the shadows it was hard to tell.

“Is it gone?” he asked in a trembling voice. “Please, sais, say it is. Say it’s gone.”

“It is,” I said.

He started to wade his way out of the pile, but a strip of leather had gotten wound around one of his legs and he fell forward. I caught him and saw a pair of eyes, bright blue and utterly terrified, looking up into my face.

Then he passed out.

I carried him to the trough. Jamie pulled off his bandanna, dipped it in the water, and began to wipe the boy’s dirt-streaked face with it. He might have been eleven; he might have been a year or two younger. He was so thin it was hard to tell. After a bit his eyes fluttered open. He looked from me to Jamie and then back to me again. “Who are you?” he asked. “You don’t b’long to the ranch.”

“We’re friends of the ranch,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Bill Streeter,” he said. “The proddies call me Young Bill.”

“Aye, do they? And is your father Old Bill?”

He sat up, took Jamie’s bandanna, dipped it in the trough, and squeezed it out so the water ran down his thin chest. “No, Old Bill’s my granther, went into the clearing two years ago. My da’, he’s just plain Bill.” Something about speaking his father’s name made his eyes widen. He grasped my arm. “He ain’t dead, is he? Say he ain’t, sai!”

Jamie and I exchanged another look, and that scared him worse than ever.

“Say he ain’t! Please say my daddy ain’t dead!” He started to cry.

“Hush and go easy now,” I said. “What is he, your da’? A proddie?”

“Nay, no, he’s the cook. Say he ain’t dead! ”

But the boy knew he was. I saw it in his eyes as clearly I’d seen the bunkhouse cook with his bloodstained apron thrown over his face.

There was a willa-tree on one side of the big house, and that was where we questioned Young Bill Streeter-just me, Jamie, and Sheriff Peavy. The others we sent back to wait in the shade of the bunkhouse, thinking that to have too many folks around him would only upset the boy more. As it happened, he could tell us very little of what we needed to know.

“My da’ said to me that it was going to be a warm night and I should go up to the graze t’other side of the corral and sleep under the stars,” Young Bill told us. “He said it’d be cooler and I’d sleep better. But I knew why. Elrod’d got a bottle somewhere-again-and he was in drink.”

“That’d be Elrod Nutter?” Sheriff Peavy asked.

“Aye, him. Foreman of the boys, he is.”

“I know him well,” Peavy said to us. “Ain’t I had him locked up half a dozen times and more? Jefferson keeps him on because he’s a helluva rider and roper, but he’s one mean whoredog when he’s in drink. Ain’t he, Young Bill?”

Young Bill nodded earnestly and brushed his long hair, still all dusty from the tack he’d hidden in, out of his eyes. “Yessir, and he had a way of takin after me. Which my father knew.”

“Cook’s apprentice, were ye?” Peavy asked. I knew he was trying to be kind, but I wished he’d mind his mouth and stop talking in the way that says once, but no more.

But the boy didn’t seem to notice. “Bunkhouse boy. Not cook’s boy.” He turned to Jamie and me. “I make the bunks, coil the rope, cinch the bedrolls, polish the saddles, set the gates at the end of the day after the horses is turned in. Tiny Braddock taught me how to make a lasso, and I throw it pretty. Roscoe’s teaching me the bow. Freddy Two-Step says he’ll show me how to brand, come fall.”

“Do well,” I said, and tapped my throat.

That made him smile. “They’re good fellas, mostly.” The smile went away as fast as it had come, like the sun going behind a cloud. “Except for Elrod. He’s just grouchy when he’s sober, but when he’s in drink, he likes to tease. Mean teasing, if you do ken it.”

“Ken it well,” I said.

“Aye, and if you don’t laugh and act like it’s all a joke-even if it’s twisting on your hand or yanking you around on the bunkhouse floor by your hair-he gets uglier still. So when my da’ told me to sleep out, I took my blanket and my shaddie and I went. A word to the wise is sufficient, my da’ says.”

“What’s a shaddie?” Jamie asked the sheriff.

“Bit o’ canvas,” Peavy said. “Won’t keep off rain, but it’ll keep you from getting damp after dewfall.”

“Where did you roll in?” I asked the boy.

He pointed beyond the corral, where the horses were still skitty from the rising wind. Above us and around us, the willa sighed and danced. Pretty to hear, prettier still to look at. “I guess my blanket n shaddie must still be there.”

I looked from where he had pointed, to the tack-shed hostelry where we’d found him, then to the bunkhouse. The three places made the corners of a triangle probably a quarter-mile on each side, with the corral in the middle.

“How did you get from where you slept to hiding under that pile of tack, Bill?” Sheriff Peavy asked.

The boy looked at him for a long time without speaking. Then the tears began to fall again. He covered them with his fingers so we wouldn’t see them. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I don’t remember nuffink. ” He didn’t exactly lower his hands; they seemed to drop into his lap, as if they’d grown too heavy for him to hold up. “I want my da’.”

Jamie got up and walked away, with his hands stuffed deep in his back pockets. I tried to say what needed saying, and couldn’t. You have to remember that although Jamie and I wore guns, they weren’t yet the big guns of our fathers. I’d never again be so young as before I met Susan Delgado, and loved her, and lost her, but I was still too young to tell this boy that his father had been torn to pieces by a monster. So I looked to Sheriff Peavy. I looked to the grownup.

Peavy took off his hat and laid it aside on the grass. Then he took the boy’s hands. “Son,” he said, “I’ve got some very hard news for you. I want you to pull in a deep breath and be a man about it.”

But Young Bill Streeter had only nine or ten summers behind him, eleven at most, and he couldn’t be a man about anything. He began to wail. When he did it, I saw my mother’s pale dead face as clear as if she had been lying next to me under that willa, and I couldn’t stand it. I felt like a coward, but that didn’t stop me from getting up and walking away.

The lad either cried himself to sleep or into unconsciousness. Jamie carried him into the big house and put him in one of the beds upstairs. He was just the son of a bunkhouse cook, but there was no one else to sleep in them, not now. Sheriff Peavy used the jing-jang to call his office where one of the not-so-good deputies had been ordered to wait for his ring. Soon enough, Debaria’s undertaker-if there was one-would organize a little convoy of wagons to come and pick up the dead.

Sheriff Peavy went into sai Jefferson’s little office and plunked himself down in a chair on rollers. “What’s next, boys?” he asked. “The salties, I reckon… and I suppose you’ll want to get up there before this wind blows into a simoom. Which it certainly means t’do.” He sighed. “The boy’s no good to ye, that’s certain. Whatever he saw was evil enough to scrub his mind clean.”

Jamie began, “Roland has a way of-”

“I’m not sure what’s next,” I said. “I’d like to talk it over a little with my pard. We might take a little pasear back up to that tack shed.”

“Tracks’ll be blown away by now,” Peavy said, “but have at it and may it do ya well.” He shook his head. “Telling that boy was hard. Very hard.”

“You did it the right way,” I said.

“Do ya think so? Aye? Well, thankya. Poor little cullie. Reckon he can stay with me n the wife for a while. Until we figure what comes next for him. You boys go on and palaver, if it suits you. I think I’ll just sit here and try to get back even wi’ myself. No hurry about anything now; that damned thing ate well enough last night. It’ll be a good while before it needs to go hunting again.”

Jamie and I walked two circuits around the shed and corral while we talked, the strengthening wind rippling our pantlegs and blowing back our hair.

“Is it all truly erased from his mind, Roland?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Because ‘Is it gone?’ was the first thing he asked.”

“And he knew his father was dead. Even when he asked us, it was in his eyes.”

Jamie walked without replying for a while, his head down.

We’d tied our bandannas over our mouths and noses because of the blowing grit. Jamie’s was still wet from the trough. Finally he said, “When I started to tell the sheriff you have a way of getting at things that are buried-buried in people’s minds-you cut me off.”

“He doesn’t need to know, because it doesn’t always work.”

It had with Susan Delgado, in Mejis, but part of Susan had wanted badly to tell me what the witch, Rhea, had tried to hide from Susan’s front-mind, where we hear our own thoughts very clearly. She’d wanted to tell me because we were in love.

“But will you try? You will, won’t you?”

I didn’t answer him until we had started our second circuit of the corral. I was still putting my thoughts in order. As I may have said, that has always been slow work for me.

“The salties don’t live in the mines anymore; they have their own encampment a few wheels west of Little Debaria. Kellin Frye told me about it on the ride out here. I want you to go up there with Peavy and the Fryes. Canfield, too, if he’ll go. I think he will. Those two pokies-Canfield’s trailmates-can stay here and wait for the undertaker.”

“You mean to take the boy back to town?”

“Yes. Alone. But I’m not sending you up there just to get you and the others away. If you travel fast enough, and they have a remuda, you may still be able to spot a horse that’s been rode hard.”

Under the bandanna, he might have smiled. “I doubt it.”

I did, too. It would have been more likely but for the wind-what Peavy had called the simoom. It would dry the sweat on a horse, even one that had been ridden hard, in short order. Jamie might spot one that was dustier than the rest, one with burdocks and bits of jugweed in its tail, but if we were right about the skin-man knowing what he was, he would have given his mount a complete rubdown and curry, from hooves to mane, as soon as he got back.

“Someone may have seen him ride in.”

“Yes… unless he went to Little Debaria first, cleaned up, and came back to the saltie encampment from there. A clever man might do that.”

“Even so, you and the sheriff should be able to find out how many of them own horses.”

“And how many of them can ride, even if they don’t own,” Jamie said. “Aye, we can do that.”

“Round that bunch up,” I told him, “or as many of them as you can, and bring them back to town. Any who protests, remind them that they’ll be helping to catch the monster that’s been terrorizing Debaria… Little Debaria… the whole Barony. You won’t have to tell them that any who still refuse will be looked at with extra suspicion; even the dumbest of them will know.”

Jamie nodded, then grabbed the fencerail as an especially strong gust of wind blasted us. I turned to face him.

“And one other thing. You’re going to pull a cosy, and Kellin’s son, Vikka, will be your cat’s-paw. They’ll believe a kid might run off at the mouth, even if he’s been told not to. Especially if he’s been told not to.”

Jamie waited, but I felt sure he knew what I was going to say, for his eyes were troubled. It was a thing he’d never have done himself, even if he thought of it. Which was why my father had put me in charge. Not because I’d done well in Mejis-I hadn’t, not really-and not because I was his son, either. Although in a way, I suppose that was it. My mind was like his: cold.

“You’ll tell the salties who know about horses that there was a witness to the murders at the ranch. You’ll say you can’t tell them who it was-naturally-but that he saw the skin-man in his human form.”

“You don’t know that Young Bill actually saw him, Roland. And even if he did, he might not have seen the face. He was hiding in a pile of tack, for your father’s sake.”

“That’s true, but the skin-man won’t know it’s true. All the skin-man will know is that it might be true, because he was human when he left the ranch.”

I began to walk again, and Jamie walked beside me.

“Now here’s where Vikka comes in. He’ll get separated from you and the others a bit and whisper to someone-another kid, one his own age, would be best-that the survivor was the cook’s boy. Bill Streeter by name.”

“The boy just lost his father and you want to use him as bait.”

“It may not come to that. If the story gets to the right ears, the one we’re looking for may bolt on the way to town. Then you’ll know. And none of it matters if we’re wrong about the skin-man being a saltie. We could be, you know.”

“What if we’re right, and the fellow decides to face it out?”

“Bring them all to the jail. I’ll have the boy in a cell-a locked one, you ken-and you can walk the horsemen past, one by one. I’ll tell Young Bill to say nothing, one way or the other, until they’re gone. You’re right, he may not be able to pick our man out, even if I can help him remember some of what happened last night. But our man won’t know that, either.”

“It’s risky,” said Jamie. “Risky for the kid.”

“Small risk,” I said. “It’ll be daylight, with the skin-man in his human shape. And Jamie…” I grasped his arm. “I’ll be in the cell, too. The bastard will have to go through me if he wants to get to the boy.”

Peavy liked my plan better than Jamie had. I wasn’t a bit surprised. It was his town, after all. And what was Young Bill to him? Only the son of a dead cook. Not much in the great scheme of things.

Once the little expedition to Saltie Town was on its way, I woke the boy and told him we were going to Debaria. He agreed without asking questions. He was distant and dazed. Every now and then he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. As we walked out to the corral, he asked me again if I was sure his da’ was dead. I told him I was. He fetched a deep sigh, lowered his head, and put his hands on his knees. I gave him time, then asked if he’d like me to saddle a horse for him.

“If it’s all right to ride Millie, I can saddle her myself. I feed her, and she’s my special friend. People say mules ain’t smart, but Millie is.”

“Let’s see if you can do it without getting kicked,” I said.

It turned out he could, and smartly. He mounted up and said, “I guess I’m ready.” He even tried to give me a smile. It was awful to look at. I was sorry for the plan I’d set in motion, but all I had to do was think of the carnage we were leaving behind and Sister Fortuna’s ruined face to remind myself of what the stakes were.

“Will she skit in the wind?” I asked, nodding at the trim little mule. Sitting on her back, Young Bill’s feet came almost down to the ground. In another year, he’d be too big for her, but of course in another year, he’d probably be far from Debaria, just another wanderer on the face of a fading world. Millie would be a memory.

“Not Millie,” he said. “She’s as solid as a dromedary.”

“Aye, and what’s a dromedary?”

“Dunno, do I? It’s just something my da’ says. One time I asked him, and he didn’t know, either.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “The sooner we get to town, the sooner we’ll get out of this grit.” But I intended to make one stop before we got to town. I had something to show the boy while we were still alone.

About halfway between the ranch and Debaria, I spied a deserted sheepherder’s lean-to, and suggested we shelter in there for a bit and have a bite. Bill Streeter agreed willingly enough. He had lost his da’ and everyone else he’d known, but he was still a growing boy and he’d had nothing to eat since his dinner the night before.

We tethered our mounts away from the wind and sat on the floor inside the lean-to with our backs against the wall. I had dried beef wrapped in leaves in my saddlebag. The meat was salty, but my waterskin was full. The boy ate half a dozen chunks of the meat, tearing off big bites and washing them down with water.

A strong gust of wind shook the lean-to. Millie blatted a protest and fell silent.

“It’ll be a full-going simoom by dark,” Young Bill said. “You watch and see if it ain’t.”

“I like the sound of the wind,” I said. “It makes me think of a story my mother read to me when I was a sma’ one. ‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’ it was called. Does thee know it?”

Young Bill shook his head. “Mister, are you really a gunslinger? Say true?”

“I am.”

“Can I hold one of your guns for a minute?”

“Never in life,” I said, “but you can look at one of these, if you’d like.” I took a shell from my belt and handed it to him.

He examined it closely, from brass base to lead tip. “Gods, it’s heavy! Long, too! I bet if you shot someone with one of these, he’d stay down.”

“Yes. A shell’s a dangerous thing. But it can be pretty, too. Would you like to see a trick I can do with this one?”

“Sure.”

I took it back and began to dance it from knuckle to knuckle, my fingers rising and falling in waves. Young Bill watched, wide-eyed. “How does thee do it?”

“The same way anyone does anything,” I said. “Practice.”

“Will you show me the trick?”

“If you watch close, you may see it for yourself,” I said. “Here it is… and here it isn’t.” I palmed the shell so fast it disappeared, thinking of Susan Delgado, as I supposed I always would when I did this trick. “Now here it is again.”

The shell danced fast… then slow… then fast again.

“Follow it with your eyes, Bill, and see if you can make out how I get it to disappear. Don’t take your eyes off it.” I dropped my voice to a lulling murmur. “Watch… and watch… and watch. Does it make you sleepy?”

“A little,” he said. His eyes slipped slowly closed, then the lids rose again. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Did you not? Watch it go. Watch it slow. See it disappear and then… see it as it speeds up again.”

Back and forth the shell went. The wind blew, as lulling to me as my voice was to him.

“Sleep if you want, Bill. Listen to the wind and sleep. But listen to my voice, too.”

“I hear you, gunslinger.” His eyes closed again and this time didn’t reopen. His hands were clasped limply in his lap. “I hear you very well.”

“You can still see the shell, can’t you? Even with your eyes closed.”

“Yes… but it’s bigger now. It flashes like gold.”

“Do you say so?”

“Yes…”

“Go deeper, Bill, but hear my voice.”

“I hear.”

“I want you to turn your mind back to last night. Your mind and your eyes and your ears. Will you do that?”

A frown creased his brow. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s safe. All that’s happened, and besides, I’m with you.”

“You’re with me. And you have guns.”

“So I do. Nothing will happen to you as long as you can hear my voice, because we’re together. I’ll keep thee safe. Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“Your da’ told you to sleep out under the stars, didn’t he?”

“Aye. It was to be a warm night.”

“But that wasn’t the real reason, was it?”

“No. It was because of Elrod. Once he twirled the bunkhouse cat by her tail, and she never came back. Sometimes he pulls me around by my hair and sings ‘The Boy Who Loved Jenny.’ My da’ can’t stop him, because Elrod’s bigger. Also, he has a knife in his boot. He could cut with it. But he couldn’t cut the beast, could he?” His clasped hands twitched. “Elrod’s dead and I’m glad. I’m sorry about all the others… and my da’, I don’t know what I’ll do wi’out my da’… but I’m glad about Elrod. He won’t tease me nummore. He won’t scare me nummore. I seen it, aye.”

So he did know more than the top of his mind had let him remember.

“Now you’re out on the graze.”

“On the graze.”

“Wrapped up in your blanket and shinnie.”

“Shaddie.”

“Your blanket and shaddie. You’re awake, maybe looking up at the stars, at Old Star and Old Mother-”

“No, no, asleep,” Bill said. “But the screams wake me up. The screams from the bunkhouse. And the sounds of fighting. Things are breaking. And something’s roaring. ”

“What do you do, Bill?”

“I go down. I’m afraid to, but my da’… my da’s in there. I look in the window at the far end. It’s greasepaper, but I can see through it well enough. More than I want to see. Because I see… I see… mister, can I wake up?”

“Not yet. Remember that I’m with you.”

“Have you drawn your guns, mister?” He was shivering.

“I have. To protect you. What do you see?”

“Blood. And a beast.”

“What kind, can you tell?”

“A bear. One so tall its head reaches the ceiling. It goes up the middle of the bunkhouse… between the cots, ye ken, and on its back legs… and it grabs the men… it grabs the men and pulls them to pieces with its great long claws.” Tears began to escape his closed lids and roll down his cheeks. “The last one was Elrod. He ran for the back door… where the woodpile is just outside, ye ken… and when he understood it would have him before he could open the door and dash out, he turned around to fight. He had his knife. He went to stab it…”

Slowly, as if underwater, the boy’s right hand rose from his lap. It was curled into a fist. He made a stabbing motion with it.

“The bear grabbed his arm and tore it off his shoulder. Elrod screamed. He sounded like a horse I saw one time, after it stepped in a gompa hole and broke its leg. The thing… it hit Elrod in the face with ’is own arm. The blood flew. There was gristle that flapped and wound around the skin like strings. Elrod fell against the door and started to slide down. The bear grabbed him and lifted him up and bit into his neck and there was a sound… mister, it bit Elrod’s head right off his neck. I want to wake up now. Please. ”

“Soon. What did you do then?”

“I ran. I meant to go to the big house, but sai Jefferson… he… he…”

“He what?”

“He shot at me! I don’t think he meant to. I think he just saw me out of the corner of his eye and thought… I heard the bullet go by me. Wishhh! That’s how close it was. So I ran for the corral instead. I went between the poles. While I was crossing, I heard two more shots. Then there was more screaming. I didn’t look to see, but I knew it was sai Jefferson screaming that time.”

This part we knew from the tracks and leavings: how the thing had come charging out of the bunkhouse, how it had grabbed away the four-shot pistol and bent the barrel, how it had unzipped the rancher’s guts and thrown him into the bunkhouse with his proddies. The shot Jefferson had thrown at Young Bill had saved the boy’s life. If not for that, he would have run straight to the big house and been slaughtered with the Jefferson womenfolk.

“You go into the old hostelry where we found you.”

“Aye, so I do. And hide under the tack. But then I hear it… coming.”

He had gone back to the now way of remembering, and his words came more slowly. They were broken by bursts of weeping. I knew it was hurting him, remembering terrible things always hurts, but I pressed on. I had to, for what happened in that abandoned hostelry was the important part, and Young Bill was the only one who had been there. Twice he tried to come back to the then way of remembering, the ago. This was a sign that he was trying to struggle free of his trance, so I took him deeper. In the end I got it all.

The terror he’d felt as the grunting, snuffling thing approached. The way the sounds had changed, blurring into the snarls of a cat. Once it had roared, Young Bill said, and when he heard that sound, he’d let loose water in his trousers. He hadn’t been able to hold it. He waited for the cat to come in, knowing it would scent him where he lay-from the urine-only the cat didn’t. There was silence… silence… and then more screaming.

“At first it’s the cat screaming, then it changes into a human screaming. High to begin with, it’s like a woman, but then it starts to go down until it’s a man. It screams and screams. It makes me want to scream. I thought-”

“Think,” I said. “You think, Bill, because it’s happening now. Only I’m here to protect you. My guns are drawn.”

“I think my head will split open. Then it stops… and it comes in.”

“It walks up the middle to the other door, doesn’t it?”

He shook his head. “Not walks. Shuffles. Staggers. Like it’s hurt. It goes right past me. He. Now it’s he. He almost falls down, but grabs one of the stall doors and stays up. Then he goes on. He goes on a little better now.”

“Stronger?”

“Aye.”

“Do you see his face?” I thought I already knew the answer to that.

“No, only his feet, through the tack. The moon’s up, and I see them very well.”

Perhaps so, but we wouldn’t be identifying the skin-man from his feet, I felt quite sure. I opened my mouth, ready to start bringing him up from his trance, when he spoke again.

“There’s a ring around one of his ankles.”

I leaned forward, as if he could see me… and if he was deep enough, mayhap he could, even with his eyes closed. “What kind of ring? Was it metal, like a manacle?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Like a bridle-ring? You know, a hoss-clinkum?”

“No, no. Like on Elrod’s arm, but that’s a picture of a nekkid woman, and you can hardly make it out nummore.”

“Bill, are you talking about a tattoo?”

In his trance, the boy smiled. “Aye, that’s the word. But this one wasn’t a picture, just a blue ring around his ankle. A blue ring in his skin.”

I thought, We have you. You don’t know it yet, sai skin-man, but we have you.

“Mister, can I wake up now? I want to wake up.”

“Is there anything else?”

“The white mark?” He seemed to be asking himself.

“What white mark?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side, and I decided to let it go. He’d had enough.

“Come to the sound of my voice. As you come, you’ll leave everything that happened last night behind, because it’s over. Come, Bill. Come now.”

“I’m coming.” His eyes rolled back and forth behind his closed lids.

“You’re safe. Everything that happened at the ranch is ago. Isn’t it?”

“Yes…”

“Where are we?”

“On Debaria high road. We’re going to town. I ain’t been there but once. My da’ bought me candy.”

“I’ll buy you some, too,” I said, “for you’ve done well, Young Bill of the Jefferson. Now open your eyes.”

He did, but at first he only looked through me. Then his eyes cleared and he gave an uncertain smile. “I fell asleep.”

“You did. And now we should push for town before the wind grows too strong. Can you do that, Bill?”

“Aye,” he said, and as he got up he added, “I was dreaming of candy.”

The two not-so-good deputies were in the sheriff’s office when we got there, one of them-a fat fellow wearing a tall black hat with a gaudy rattlesnake band-taking his ease behind Peavy’s desk. He eyed the guns I was wearing and got up in a hurry.

“You’re the gunslinger, ain’tcha?” he said. “Well-met, well-met, we both say so. Where’s t’other one?”

I escorted Young Bill through the archway and into the jail without answering. The boy looked at the cells with interest but no fear. The drunk, Salty Sam, was long gone, but his aroma lingered.

From behind me, the other deputy asked, “What do you think you’re doing, young sai?”

“My business,” I said. “Go back to the office and bring me the keyring to these cells. And be quick about it, if you please.”

None of the smaller cells had mattresses on their bunks, so I took Young Bill to the drunk-and-disorderly cell where Jamie and I had slept the night before. As I put the two straw pallets together to give the boy a little more comfort-after what he’d been through, I reckoned he deserved all the comfort he could get-Bill looked at the chalked map on the wall.

“What is it, sai?”

“Nothing to concern you,” I said. “Now listen to me. I’m going to lock you in, but you’re not to be afraid, for you’ve done nothing wrong. ’Tis but for your own safety. I have an errand that needs running, and when it’s done, I’m going to come in there with you.”

“And lock us both in,” said he. “You’d better lock us both in. In case it comes back.”

“Do you remember it now?”

“A little,” said he, looking down. “It wasn’t a man… then it was. It killed my da’.” He put the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Poor Da’.”

The deputy with the black hat returned with the keys. The other was right behind him. Both were gawking at the boy as if he were a two-headed goat in a roadshow.

I took the keys. “Good. Now back to the office, both of you.”

“Seems like you might be throwing your weight around a little, youngster,” Black Hat said, and the other-a little man with an undershot jaw-nodded vigorously.

“Go now,” I said. “This boy needs rest.”

They looked me up and down, then went. Which was the correct thing. The only thing, really. My mood was not good.

The boy kept his eyes covered until their bootheels faded back through the arch, then he lowered his hands. “Will you catch him, sai?”

“Yes.”

“And will you kill him?”

“Does thee want me to kill him?”

He considered this, and nodded. “Aye. For what he did to my da’, and to sai Jefferson, and all the others. Even Elrod.”

I closed the door of the cell, found the right key, and turned it. The keyring I hung over my wrist, for it was too big for my pocket. “I’ll make you a promise, Young Bill,” I said. “One I swear to on my father’s name. I won’t kill him, but you shall be there when he swings, and with my own hand I’ll give you the bread to scatter beneath his dead feet.”

In the office, the two not-so-good deputies eyed me with caution and dislike. That was nothing to me. I hung the keyring on the peg next to the jing-jang and said, “I’ll be back in an hour, maybe a little less. In the meantime, no one goes into the jail. And that includes you two.”

“High-handed for a shaveling,” the one with the undershot jaw remarked.

“Don’t fail me in this,” I said. “It wouldn’t be wise. Do you understand?”

Black Hat nodded. “But the sheriff will hear how you done with us.”

“Then you’ll want to have a mouth still capable of speech when he gets back,” I said, and went out.

The wind had continued to strengthen, blowing clouds of gritty, salt-flavored dust between the false-fronted buildings. I had Debaria high street entirely to myself except for a few hitched horses that stood with their hindquarters turned to the wind and their heads unhappily lowered. I would not leave my own so-nor Millie, the mule the boy had ridden-and led them down to the livery stable at the far end of the street. There the hostler was glad to take them, especially when I split him off half a gold knuck from the bundle I carried in my vest.

No, he said in answer to my first question, there was no jeweler in Debaria, nor ever had been in his time. But the answer to my second question was yar, and he pointed across the street to the blacksmith’s shop. The smith himself was standing in the doorway, the hem of his tool-filled leather apron flapping in the wind. I walked across and he put his fist to his forehead. “Hile.”

I hiled him in return and told him what I wanted-what Vannay had said I might need. He listened closely, then took the shell I handed him. It was the very one I’d used to entrance Young Bill. The blackie held it up to the light. “How many grains of powder does it blow, can’ee say?”

Of course I could. “Fifty-seven.”

“As many as that? Gods! It’s a wonder the barrel of your revolver don’t bust when’ee pull the trigger!”

The shells in my father’s guns-the ones I might someday carry-blew seventy-six, but I didn’t say so. He’d likely not have believed it. “Can you do what I ask, sai?”

“I think so.” He considered, then nodded. “Aye. But not today. I don’t like to run my smithhold hot in the wind. One loose ember and the whole town might catch ablaze. We’ve had no fire department since my da’ was a boy.”

I took out my bag of gold knuckles and shook two into the palm of my hand. I considered, then added a third. The smith stared at them with wonder. He was looking at two years’ wages.

“It has to be today,” I said.

He grinned, showing teeth of amazing whiteness within the forest of his ginger beard. “Tempting devil, get not aside! For what you’re showin me, I’d risk burning Gilead herself to her foundations. You’ll have it by sundown.”

“I’ll have it by three.”

“Aye, three’s what I meant. To the shaved point of the minute.”

“Good. Now tell me, which restaurant cooks the best chow in town?”

“There’s only two, and neither of em’ll make you remember your mother’s bird puddin, but neither’ll poison’ee. Racey’s Cafe is probably the better.”

That was good enough for me; I thought a growing boy like Bill Streeter would take quantity over quality any day. I headed for the cafe, now working against the wind. It’ll be a full-going simoom by dark, the boy had told me, and I thought he was right. He had been through a lot, and needed time to rest. Now that I knew about the ankle tattoo, I might not need him at all… but the skin-man wouldn’t know that. And in the jail, Young Bill was safe. At least I hoped so.

It was stew, and I could have sworn it had been seasoned with alkali grit instead of salt, but the kid ate all of his and finished mine as well when I put it aside. One of the not-so-good deputies had made coffee, and we drank that from tin cups. We made our meal right there in the cell, sitting cross-legged on the floor. I listened for the jing-jang, but it stayed quiet. I wasn’t surprised. Even if Jamie and the High Sheriff came near one at their end, the wind had probably taken the wires down.

“I guess you know all about these storms you call simooms,” I said to Young Bill.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “This is the season for em. The proddies hate em and the pokies hate em even more, because if they’re out on the range, they have to sleep rough. And they can’t have a fire at night, accourse, because of-”

“Because of the embers,” I said, remembering the blacksmith.

“Just as you say. Stew all gone, is it?”

“So it is, but there’s one more thing.”

I handed over a little sack. He looked inside it and lit up. “Candy! Rollers and chocker-twists!” He extended the bag. “Here, you have the first.”

I took one of the little chocolate twists, then pushed the bag back to him. “You have the rest. If it won’t make your belly sick, that is.”

“It won’t!” And he dived in. It did me good to see him. After the third roller went into his gob, he cheeked it-which made him look like a squirrel with a nut-and said, “What’ll happen to me, sai? Now that my da’s gone?”

“I don’t know, but there’ll be water if God wills it.” I already had an idea where that water might be. If we could put paid to the skin-man, a certain large lady named Everlynne would owe us a good turn, and I doubt if Bill Streeter would be the first stray she’d taken in.

I returned to the subject of the simoom. “How much will it strengthen?”

“It’ll blow a gale tonight. Probably after midnight. And by noon tomorrow, it’ll be gone.”

“Does thee know where the salties live?”

“Aye, I’ve even been there. Once with my da’, to see the races they sometimes have up there, and once with some proddies looking for strays. The salties take em in, and we pay with hard biscuit for the ones that have the Jefferson brand.”

“My trailmate’s gone there with Sheriff Peavy and a couple of others. Think they have any chance of getting back before nightfall?”

I felt sure he would say no, but he surprised me. “Being as it’s all downhill from Salt Village-which is on this side of Little Debaria-I’d say they could. If they rode hard.”

That made me glad I’d told the blacksmith to hurry, although I knew better than to trust the reckoning of a mere boy.

“Listen to me, Young Bill. When they come back, I expect they’ll have some of the salties with em. Maybe a dozen, maybe as many as twenty. Jamie and I may have to walk em through the jail for you to look at, but you needn’t be afraid, because the door of this cell will be locked. And you don’t have to say anything, just look.”

“If you’re thinking I can tell which one killed my da’, I can’t. I don’t even remember if I saw him.”

“You probably won’t have to see them at all,” I said. This I truly believed. We’d have them into the sheriff’s office by threes, and have them hike their pants. When we found the one with the blue ring tattooed around his ankle, we’d have our man. Not that he was a man. Not anymore. Not really.

“Wouldn’t you like another chocker, sai? There’s three left, and I can’t eat nummore.”

“Save them for later,” I said, and got up.

His face clouded. “Will you come back? I don’t want to be in here on my own.”

“Aye, I’ll come back.” I stepped out, locked the cell door, then tossed the keys to him through the bars. “Let me in when I do.”

The fat deputy with the black hat was Strother. The one with the undershot jaw was Pickens. They looked at me with care and mistrust, which I thought a good combination, coming from the likes of them. I could work with care and mistrust.

“If I asked you fellows about a man with a blue ring tattooed on his ankle, would it mean anything to you?”

They exchanged a glance and then Black Hat-Strother-said, “The stockade.”

“What stockade would that be?” Already I didn’t like the sound of it.

“Beelie Stockade,” Pickens said, looking at me as if I were the utterest of utter idiots. “Does thee not know of it? And thee a gunslinger?”

“Beelie Town’s west of here, isn’t it?” I asked.

“Was,” Strother said. “It’s Beelie Ghost Town now. Harriers tore through it five year ago. Some say John Farson’s men, but I don’t believe that. Never in life. ’Twas plain old garden-variety outlaws. Once there was a militia outpost-back in the days when there was a militia-and Beelie Stockade was their place o’ business. It was where the circuit judge sent thieves and murderers and card cheats.”

“Witches n warlocks, too,” Pickens volunteered. He wore the face of a man remembering the good old days, when the railroad trains ran on time and the jing-jang no doubt rang more often, with calls from more places. “Practicers of the dark arts.”

“Once they took a cannibal,” Strother said. “He ate his wife.” This caused him to give out with a foolish giggle, although whether it was the eating or the relationship that struck him funny I couldn’t say.

“He was hung, that fellow,” Pickens said. He bit off a chunk of chew and worked it with his peculiar jaw. He still looked like a man remembering a better, rosier past. “There was lots of hangings at Beelie Stockade in those days. I went several times wi’ my da’ and my marmar to see em. Marmar allus packed a lunch.” He nodded slowly and thoughtfully. “Aye, many and many-a. Lots o’ folks came. There was booths and clever people doing clever things such as juggling. Sometimes there was dogfights in a pit, but accourse it was the hangins that was the real show.” He chuckled. “I remember this one fella who kicked a regular commala when the drop didn’t break ’is-”

“What’s this to do with blue ankle tattoos?”

“Oh,” Strother said, recalled to the initial subject. “Anyone who ever did time in Beelie had one of those put on, y’see. Although I disremember if it was for punishment or just identification in case they ran off from one o’ the work gangs. All that stopped ten year ago, when the stockade closed. That’s why the harriers was able to have their way with the town, you know-because the militia left and the stockade closed. Now we have to deal with all the bad element and riffraff ourselves.” He eyed me up and down in the most insolent way. “We don’t get much help from Gilead these days. Nawp. Apt to get more from John Farson, and there’s some that’d send a parlay-party west to ask him.” Perhaps he saw something in my eyes, because he sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, “Not me, accourse. Never. I believe in the straight law and the Line of Eld.”

“So do we all,” Pickens said, nodding vigorously.

“Would you want to guess if some of the salt-miners did time in Beelie Stockade before it was decommissioned?” I asked.

Strother appeared to consider, then said: “Oh, probably a few. Nummore’n four in every ten, I should say.”

In later years I learned to control my face, but those were early times, and he must have seen my dismay. It made him smile. I doubt if he knew how close that smile brought him to suffering. I’d had a difficult two days, and the boy weighed heavily on my mind.

“Who did’ee think would take a job digging salt blocks out of a miserable hole in the ground for penny wages?” Strother asked. “Model citizens?”

It seemed that Young Bill would have to look at a few of the salties, after all. We’d just have to hope the fellow we wanted didn’t know the ring tattoo was the only part of him the kid had seen.

When I went back to the cell, Young Bill was lying on the pallets, and I thought he’d gone to sleep, but at the sound of my bootheels he sat up. His eyes were red, his cheeks wet. Not sleeping, then, but mourning. I let myself in, sat down beside him, and put an arm around his shoulders. This didn’t come naturally to me-I know what comfort and sympathy are, but I’ve never been much good at giving such. I knew what it was to lose a parent, though. Young Bill and Young Roland had that much in common.

“Did you finish your candy?” I asked.

“Don’t want the rest,” he said, and sighed.

Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided.

“I hate that sound,” he said-just what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. “And I hate being in here. It’s like I did something wrong.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“Maybe not, but it already seems like I’ve been here forever. Cooped up. And if they don’t get back before nightfall, I’ll have to stay longer. Won’t I?”

“I’ll keep you company,” I said. “If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up.”

“For babies,” said he, morosely.

“Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those?”

He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again.

“I’ll teach thee. We’ll play for matchsticks.”

“I’d rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppie’s lay-by. I don’t remember the name.”

“‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’” I said. “But it’s a long one, Bill.”

“We have time, don’t we?”

I couldn’t argue that. “There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I was-sitting up in his bed with his mother beside him-but after what you’ve been through…”

“Don’t care,” he said. “Stories take a person away. If they’re good ones, that is. It is a good one?”

“Yes. I always thought so, anyway.”

“Then tell it.” He smiled a little. “I’ll even let you have two of the last three chockers.”

“Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke.” I thought about how to begin. “Do you know stories that start, ‘Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born’?”

“They all start that way. At least, the ones my da’ told me. Before he said I was too old for stories.”

“A person’s never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them.”

“Do you say so?”

“I do.”

I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my liking-one with the draw end tapered to a pinhole-I struck a match on the wall. Bill sat cross-legged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as I’d rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek.

I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didn’t come naturally to me in those days… although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mother’s voice. It began to speak through my own mouth: every rise, dip, and pause.

I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased me-it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother’s voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I’ve found. You wouldn’t think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say-the world’s tilted, and there’s an end to it.

“Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little…”