Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,276

cowardly, sneaking excuse for a man!” She looked at the party of ranchers and vaqs, all of them staring at her now. “There he is, Fran Lengyll, head of the Horsemen’s Association, as low a sneak as ever walked! Low as coyote shit! Low as—”

“That’s enough,” Jonas said, watching with some interest as Lengyll scuttled back to his men—and yes, Susan was bitterly delighted to see, it was a full-fledged scuttle—with his shoulders hunched. Rhea was cackling, rocking from side to side and making a sound like fingernails on a piece of slate. The sound shocked Susan, but she wasn’t a bit surprised by Rhea’s presence in this company.

“It could never be enough,” she said, looking from Jonas to Lengyll with an expression of contempt so deep it seemed bottomless. “For him it could never be enough.”

“Well, perhaps, but you did quite well in the time you had, lady-sai. Few could have done better. And listen to the witch cackle! Like salt in his wounds, I wot . . . but we’ll shut her up soon enough.” Then, turning his head: “Clay!”

Reynolds rode up.

“Think you can get Sunbeam back to Seafront all right?”

“I think so.” Reynolds tried not to show the relief he felt at being sent back east instead of west. He had begun to have a bad feeling about Hanging Rock, Latigo, the tankers . . . about the whole show, really. God knew why. “Now?”

“Give it another minute,” Jonas said. “Mayhap there’s going to be a spot of killing right here. Who knows? But it’s the unanswered questions that makes it worthwhile getting up in the morning, even when a man’s leg aches like a tooth with a hole in it. Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I don’t know, Eldred.”

“Sai Renfrew, watch our pretty Sunbeam a minute. I have a piece of property to take back.”

His voice carried well—he had meant that it should—and Rhea’s cackles cut off suddenly, as if severed out of her throat with a hooking-knife. Smiling, Jonas walked his horse toward the black cart with its jostling show of gold symbols. Reynolds rode on his left, and Jonas sensed rather than saw Depape fall in on his right. Roy was a good enough boy, really; his head was a little soft, but his heart was in the right place, and you didn’t have to tell him everything.

For every step forward Jonas’s horse took, Rhea shrank back a little in the cart. Her eyes shifted from side to side in their deep sockets, looking for a way out that wasn’t there.

“Keep away from me, ye charry man!” she cried, raising a hand toward him. With the other she clutched the sack with the ball in it ever more tightly. “Keep away, or I’ll bring the lightning and strike ye dead where ye sit yer horse! Yer harrier friends, too!”

Jonas thought Roy hesitated briefly at that, but Clay never did, nor did Jonas himself. He guessed there was a great lot she could do . . . or that there had been, at one time. But that was before the hungry glass had entered her life.

“Give it up to me,” he said. He reached the side of her wagon and held his hand out for the bag. “It’s not yours and never was. One day you’ll doubtless have the Good Man’s thanks for keeping it so well as you have, but now you must give it up.”

She screamed—a sound of such piercing intensity that several of the vaqueros dropped their tin coffee-cups and clapped their hands over their ears. At the same time she knotted her hand through the drawstring and raised the bag over her head. The curved shape of the ball swung back and forth at the bottom of it like a pendulum.

“I’ll not!” she howled. “I’ll smash it on the ground before I give it up to the likes o’ you!”

Jonas doubted if the ball would break, not hurled by her weak arms onto the trampled, springy mat of the Bad Grass, but he didn’t think he would have occasion to find out, one way or the other.

“Clay,” he said. “Draw your gun.”

He didn’t need to look at Clay to see that he’d done it; he saw the frantic way her eyes shifted to the left, where Clay sat his horse.

“I’m going to have a count,” Jonas said. “Just a short one; if I get to three and she hasn’t passed that bag over, blow her ugly head off.”

“Aye.”

“One,” Jonas said, watching the ball