“All right, all right, same message.” Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to Hambry. “Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time.”

The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon’s leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. “Hile!”

It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark shape against the deepening sky.

Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.

“Roland?”

“Hmmm?” Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.

“I’ll unsaddle him, if you want.” He nodded at Rusher. “And rub him down.”

No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, “No. I’ll do it. In a minute or two.” And went back to looking at the sunset.

Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.

Alain passed over what he had plucked from Roland’s collar. Although it was almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert’s eyes were gunslinger’s eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.

It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert’s, face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, they’d met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys’ eyes met. In Bert’s Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.

Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the trigger.

Alain nodded.

Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying sunset with dreaming eyes.

Chapter VIII

BENEATH THE PEDDLER’S MOON

1

The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler’s Moon- called Late-summer’s Moon by some-came full, and left it a day later.

Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile amp; Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.

Ritzy was like an ugly lowered head between a pair of huge shrugged shoulders-the foothills. Above town to the south were the clapped-out shacks where the Company housed its miners; each puff of breeze brought the stench of their unlimed communal privies. To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit.

Once there had been freehold mines up there, but they were all gone, regulated out by the Vi Castis Company. Depape knew all about it, because the Big Coffin Hunters had been a part of that little spin and raree. Just after he’d hooked up with Jonas and Reynolds, that had been. Why, they had gotten those coffins tattooed on their hands not fifty miles from here, in the town of Wind, a mudpen even less ritzy than Ritzy. How long ago? He couldn’t rightly say, although it seemed to him that he should be able to. But when it came to reckoning times past, Depape often felt lost. It was hard even to remember how old he was. Because the world had moved on, and time was different, now. Softer.

One thing he had no trouble remembering at all-his recollection was refreshed by the miserable flare of pain he suffered each time he bumped his wounded finger. That one thing was a promise to himself that he would see Dearborn, Stockworth, and Heath laid out dead in a row, hand to outstretched hand like a little girl’s paper dolls. He intended to unlimber the part of him which had longed so bootlessly for Her Nibs these last three weeks and use it to hose down their dead faces. The majority of his squirt would be saved for Arthur Heath of Gilead, New Canaan. That laughing chatterbox motherfucker had a serious hosing-down coming.

Depape rode out the sunrise end of Ritzy’s only street, trotted his horse up the flank of the first hill, and paused at the top for a single look back. Last night, when he’d been talking to the old bastard behind Hattigan’s, Ritzy had been roaring. This morning at seven, it looked as ghostly as the Peddler’s Moon, which still hung in the sky above the rim of the plundered hills. He could hear the mines tink-tonking away, though. You bet. Those babies tink-tonked away seven days a week. No rest for the wicked… and he supposed that included him. He dragged his horse’s head around with his usual unthinking and ham-handed force, booted its flanks, and headed east, thinking of the old bastard as he went. He had treated the old bastard passing fair, he reckoned. A reward had been promised, and had been paid for information given.

“Yar,” Depape said, his glasses flashing in the new sun (it was a rare morning when he had no hangover, and he felt quite cheerful), “I reckon the old bugger can’t complain.”

Depape had had no trouble following the young culls’ backtrail; they had come east on the Great Road the whole way from New Canaan, it appeared, and at every town where they had stopped, they had been marked. In most they were marked if they did no more than pass through. And why not? Young men on good horses, no scars on their faces, no regulator tattoos on their hands, good clothes on their backs, expensive hats on their heads. They were remembered especially well at the inns and saloons, where they had stopped to refresh themselves but had drunk no hard liquor. No beer or graf, either, for that matter. Yes, they were remembered. Boys on the road, boys that seemed almost to shine. As if they had come from an earlier, better time.

Piss in their faces, Depape thought as he rode. One by one. Mr. Arthur “Ha-Ha” Heath last. I’ll save enough so it ’d drown you, were you not already at the end of the path and into the clearing.

They had been noticed, all right, but that wasn’t good enough-if he went back to Hambry with no more than that, Jonas would likely shoot his nose off. And he would deserve it. They may be rich boys, but that’s not all they are. Depape had said that himself. The question was, what else were they? And finally, in the shit-and-sulfur stench of Ritzy, he had found out. Not everything, perhaps, but enough to allow him to turn his horse around before he found himself all the way back in fucking New Canaan.

He had hit two other saloons, sipping watered beer in each, before rolling into Hattigan’s. He ordered yet another watered beer, and prepared to engage the bartender in conversation. Before he even began to shake the tree, however, the apple he wanted fell off and dropped into his hand, neat as you please.