York and his career as a student at Piper was like looking into the wrong end of a telescope.
Eddie took the clip, examined it, rammed it home, checked the safety, then stuck the Ruger in his own belt.
“Listen closely and heed me well,” Roland said. “If there are people, they’ll likely be old and much more frightened of us than we are of them. The younger folk will be long gone. It’s unlikely that those left will have firearms—in fact, ours may be the first guns many of them have ever seen, except maybe for a picture or two in the old books. Make no threatening gestures. And the childhood rule is a good one: speak only when spoken to.”
“What about bows and arrows?” Susannah asked.
“Yes, they may have those. Spears and clubs, as well.”
“Don’t forget rocks,” Eddie said bleakly, looking down at the cluster of wooden buildings. The place looked like a ghost-town, but who knew for sure? “And if they’re hard up for rocks, there’s always the cobbles from the road.”
“Yes, there’s always something,” Roland agreed. “But we’ll start no trouble ourselves—is that clear?”
They nodded.
“Maybe it would be easier to detour around,” Susannah said.
Roland nodded, eyes never leaving the simple geography ahead. Another road crossed the Great Road at the center of the town, making the dilapidated buildings look like a target centered in the telescopic sight of a high-powered rifle. “It would, but we won’t. Detouring’s a bad habit that’s easy to get into. It’s always better to go straight on, unless there’s a good visible reason not to. I see no reason not to here. And if there are people, well, that might be a good thing. We could do with a little palaver.”
Susannah reflected that Roland seemed different now, and she didn’t think it was simply because the voices in his mind had ceased. This is the way he was when he still had wars to fight and men to lead and his old friends around him, she thought. How he was before the world moved on and he moved on with it, chasing that man Walter. This is how he was before the Big Empty turned him inward on himself and made him strange.
“They might know what those drum sounds are,” Jake suggested.
Roland nodded again. “Anything they know—particularly about the city—would come in handy, but there’s no need to think ahead too much about people who may not even be there.”
“Tell you what,” Susannah said, “I wouldn’t come out if I saw us. Four people, three of them armed? We probably look like a gang of those old-time outlaws in your stories, Roland—what do you call them?”
“Harriers.” His left hand dropped to the sandalwood grip of his remaining revolver and he pulled it a little way out of the holster. “But no harrier ever born carried one of these, and if there are old-timers in yon village, they’ll know it. Let’s go.”
Jake glanced behind them and saw the bumbler lying in the road with his muzzle between his short front paws, watching them closely. “Oy!” Jake called.
“Oy!” the bumbler echoed, and scrambled to its feet at once.
They started down the shallow knoll toward the town with Oy trotting along behind them.
4
TWO BUILDINGS ON THE outskirts had been burned; the rest of the town appeared dusty but intact. They passed an abandoned livery stable on the left, a building that might have been a market on the right, and then they were in the town proper—such as it was. There were perhaps a dozen rickety buildings standing on either side of the road. Alleys ran between some of them. The other road, this one a dirt track mostly overgrown with plains grass, ran northeast to southwest.
Susannah looked at its northeast arm and thought: Once there were barges on the river, and somewhere down that road there was a landing, and probably another shacky little town, mostly saloons and cribs, built up around it. That was the last point of trade before the barges went on down to the city. The wagons came through this place going to that place and then back again. How long ago was that?
She didn’t know—but a long time, from the look of this place.
Somewhere a rusty hinge squalled monotonously. Somewhere else one shutter clapped lonesomely to and fro in the plains wind.
There were hitching rails, most of them broken, in front of the buildings. Once there had been board sidewalks, but now most of the boards were gone and grass