Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,284

or perhaps jigging to one side or the other. He had, in fact, no thoughts at all. The fever had descended over his mind and he burned with it like a torch inside a glass sleeve. Screaming through the reins caught in his teeth, he galloped toward Hash Renfrew and the three men behind him.

23

Jonas had no clear idea of what was happening until he heard Will Dearborn screaming

(Hile! To me! No prisoners!)

a battle-cry he knew of old. Then it fell into place and the rattle of gunfire made sense. He reined around, aware of Roy doing the same beside him . . . but most aware of the ball in its bag, a thing both powerful and fragile, swinging back and forth against the neck of his horse.

“It’s those kids!” Roy exclaimed. His total surprise made him look more stupid than ever.

“Dearborn, you bastard!” Hash Renfrew spat, and the gun in his hand thundered a single time.

Jonas saw Dearborn’s sombrero rise from his head, its brim chewed away. Then the kid was firing, and he was good—better than anyone Jonas had ever seen in his life. Renfrew was hammered back out of his saddle with both legs kicking, still holding onto his monster gun, firing it twice at the dusty-blue sky before hitting the ground on his back and rolling, dead, on his side.

Lengyll’s hand dropped away from the elusive wire stock of his speed-shooter and he only stared, unable to believe the apparition bearing down on him out of the dust. “Get back!” he cried. “In the name of the Horsemen’s Association, I tell you—” Then a large black hole appeared in the center of his forehead, just above the place where his eyebrows tangled together. His hands flew up to his shoulders, palms out, as if he were declaring surrender. That was how he died.

“Son of a bitch, oh you little sister-fucking son of a bitch!” Depape howled. He tried to draw and his revolver got caught in his serape. He was still trying to pull it free when a bullet from Roland’s gun opened his mouth in a red scream almost all the way down to his adam’s apple.

This can’t be happening, Jonas thought stupidly. It can’t, there are too many of us.

But it was happening. The In-World boys had struck unerringly at the fracture-line; were performing what amounted to a textbook example of how gunslingers were supposed to attack when the odds were bad. And Jonas’s coalition of ranchers, cowboys, and town tough-boys had shattered. Those not dead were fleeing to every point of the compass, spurring their horses as if a hundred devils paroled from hell were in pursuit. They were far from a hundred, but they fought like a hundred. Bodies were scattered in the dust everywhere, and as Jonas watched, he saw the one serving as their back door—Stockworth—ride down another man, bump him out of his saddle, and put a bullet in his head as he fell. Gods of the earth, he thought, that was Croydon, him that owns the Piano Ranch!

Except he didn’t own it anymore.

And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.

Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.

“Come any closer and I’ll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you are!”

Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror . . . or a wizard’s glass.

Jonas thought: Gods, it’s him! It’s Arthur Eld himself come to take me!

And as the barrel of Roland’s gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.

I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But surely he won’t risk the ball . . . he can’t risk the ball, he’s the dinh of this ka-tet and he can’t risk it . . .

“To me!” Jonas screamed. “To me, boys! They’re only three, for gods’ sake! To me, you cowards!”

But he