At the crossroads the intersecting streets widened out, creating a town square which had been overrun by grass and weeds. In the center was an eroded stone marker. Above it, a metal box hung on a sagging length of rusty cable.
Roland, with Jake by his side, walked toward the marker. Eddie pushed Susannah’s chair after. Grass whispered in its spokes and the wind tickled a lock of hair against her cheek. Further along the street, the shutter banged and the hinge squealed. She shivered and brushed the hair away.
“I wish he’d hurry up,” Eddie said in a low voice. “This place gives me the creeps.”
Susannah nodded. She looked around the square and again she could almost see how it must have been on market-day-the sidewalks thronged with people, a few of them town ladies with their baskets over their arms, most of them waggoners and roughly-dressed bargemen (she did not know why she was so sure of the barges and bargemen, but she was); the wagons passing through the town square, the ones on the unpaved road raising choking clouds of yellow dust as the drivers flogged their carthorses
(oxen they were oxen)
along. She could see those carts, dusty swatches of canvas tied down over bales of cloth on some and pyramids of tarred barrels on others; could see the oxen, double-yoked and straining patiently, flicking their ears at the flies buzzing around their huge heads; could hear voices, and laughter, and the piano in the saloon pounding out a lively tune like “Buffalo Gals” or “Darlin’ Katy.”
It’s as if I lived here in another life, she thought.
The gunslinger bent over the inscription on the marker. “Great Road,” he read. “Lud, one hundred and sixty wheels.”
“Wheels?” Jake asked.
“An old form of measurement.”
“Have you heard of Lud?” Eddie asked.
“Perhaps,” the gunslinger said. “When I was very small.”
“It rhymes with crud,” Eddie said. “Maybe not such a good sign.”
Jake was examining the east side of the stone. “River Road. It’s written funny, but that’s what it says.”
Eddie looked at the west side of the marker. “It says Jimtown, forty wheels. Isn’t that the birthplace of Wayne Newton, Roland?”
Roland looked at him blankly.
“Shet ma mouf,” Eddie said, and rolled his eyes.
On the southwest corner of the square was the town’s only stone building-a squat, dusty cube with rusty bars on the windows. Combination county jail and courthouse, Susannah thought. She had seen similar ones down south; add a few slant parking spaces in front and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Something had been daubed across the facade of the building in fading yellow paint. She could read it, and although she couldn’t understand it, it made her more anxious than ever to get out of this town. PUBES DIE, it said.
“Roland!” When she had his attention, she pointed at the graffito. “What does that mean?”
He read it, then shook his head. “Don’t know.”
She looked around again. The square now seemed smaller, and the buildings seemed to be leaning over them. “Can we get out of here?”
“Soon.” He bent down and pried a small chunk of cobble out of the roadbed. He bounced it thoughtfully in his left hand as he looked up at the metal box which hung over the marker. He cocked his arm and Susannah realized, an instant too late, what he meant to do.
“No, Roland!” she cried, then cringed back at the sound of her own horrified voice.
He took no notice of her but fired the stone upward. His aim was as true as ever, and it struck the box dead center with a hollow, metallic bang. There was a whir of clockwork from within, and a rusty green flag unfolded from a slot in the side. When it locked in place, a bell rang briskly. Written in large black letters on the side of the flag was the word GO.
“I’ll be damned,” Eddie said. “It’s a Keystone Kops traffic-light. If you hit it again, does it say STOP?”
“We have company,” Roland said quietly, and pointed toward the building Susannah thought of as the county courthouse. A man and a woman had emerged from it and were descending the stone steps. You win the kewpie doll, Roland, Susannah thought. They’re older n God, the both of em.
The man was wearing bib overalls and a huge straw sombrero. The woman walked with one hand clamped on his naked sunburned shoulder. She wore homespun and a poke bonnet, and as they drew closer to the marker, Susannah saw she was blind, and that the accident which had taken her sight must have been exceedingly horrible. Where her eyes had been there were now only two shallow sockets filled with scar-tissue. She looked both terrified and confused.
“Be they harriers, Si?” she cried in a cracked, quavering voice. “You’ll have us killed yet, I’ll warrant!”
“Shut up, Mercy,” he replied. Like the woman, he spoke with a thick accent Susannah could barely understand. “They ain’t harriers, not these. There’s a Pube with em, I told you that-ain’t no harrier ever been travellin’ with a Pube.”
Blind or not, she tried to pull away from him. He cursed and caught her arm. “Quit it, Mercy! Quit it, I say! You’ll fall down and do y’self evil, dammit!”
“We mean you no harm,” the gunslinger called. He used the High Speech, and at the sound of it the man’s eyes lit up with incredulity. The woman turned back, swinging her blind face in their direction.
“A gunslinger!” the man cried. His voice cracked and wavered with excitement. “Fore God! I knew it were! I knew!””He began to run across the square toward them, pulling the woman after. She stumbled along helplessly, and Susannah waited for the inevitable moment when she must fall. But the man fell first, going heavily to his knees, and she sprawled painfully beside him on the cobbles of the Great Road.
5
JAKE FELT SOMETHING FURRY against his ankle and looked down. Oy was crouched beside him, looking more anxious than ever. Jake reached down and cautiously stroked his head, as much to receive comfort as to give it. Its fur was silky, incredibly soft. For a moment he thought the bumbler was going to run, but it only looked up at him, licked his hand, and then looked back at the two new people. The man was trying to help the woman to her feet and not succeeding very well. Her head craned this way and that in avid confusion.
The man named Si had cut his palms on the cobblestones, but he took no notice. He gave up trying to help the woman, swept off his sombrero, and held it over his chest. To Jake the hat looked as big as a bushel basket. “We bid ye welcome, gunslinger!” he cried. “Welcome indeed! I thought all your land had perished from the earth, so I did!”
“I thank you for your welcome,” Roland said in the High Speech. He put his hands gently on the blind woman’s upper arms. She cringed for a moment, then relaxed and allowed him to help her up. “Put on your hat, old-timer. The sun is hot.”
He did, then just stood there, looking at Roland with shining eyes. After a moment or two, Jake realized what that shine was. Si was crying.
“A gunslinger! I told you, Mercy! I seen the shooting-iron and told you!”
“No harriers?” she asked, as if unable to believe it. “Are you sure they ain’t harriers, Si?”
Roland turned to Eddie. “Make sure of the safety and then give her Jake’s gun.”
Eddie pulled the Ruger from his waistband, checked the safety, and then put it gingerly in the blind woman’s hands. She gasped, almost dropped it, then ran her hands over it wonderingly. She turned the empty sockets where her eyes had been up to the man. “A gun!” she whispered. “My sainted hat!”
“Ay, some kind,” the old man replied dismissively, taking it from her and giving it back to Eddie, “but the gunslinger’s got a real one, and there’s a woman got another. She’s got a brown skin, too, like my da’ said the people of Garlan had.”
Oy gave his shrill, whistling bark. Jake turned and saw more people coming up the street-five or six in all. Like Si and Mercy, they were all old, and one of them, a woman hobbling over a cane like a witch in a fairy-tale, looked positively ancient. As they neared, Jake realized that two of the men were identical twins. Long white hair spilled over the shoulders of their patched homespun shirts. Their skin was as white as fine linen, and their eyes were pink. Albinos, he thought.