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The Tale of Gray Dick

By STEPHEN KING

They had looked everywhere for protection from their most

devastating foe—except to the murderous know-how of

their old wives’ tales.

When evening came, Roland Deschain returned on horseback from the Manni village to Eisenhart’s Lazy B. He’d spent the afternoon in a long palaver with Henchick, the dinh of the Manni. Only here in Calla Bryn Sturgis, the head of clan was called the heart-stone. In the case of Henchick, Roland thought the term fit very well. Yet the man understood that trouble was on the way. Stony-hearted he might be; stupid he was not.

Roland sat behind the ranch house, listening to the boys shout and the dog bark. Back in Gilead (where the gunslinger had come from a thousand years before), this sort of porch, facing the barns, stock-well, and fields, would have been called the work-stoop.

“Boys!” Eisenhart bawled. “What in the name of the Man Jesus am I going to tell yer mothers if you kill yer sad selfs jumpin out of that barn?”

“We’re okay!” Benny Slightman called. He was the son of Eisenhart’s foreman. Dressed in bib overalls and barefooted, he was standing in the open bay of the barn, just above the carved letters which said LAZY B. “Unless . . . do you really want us to stop, sai?”

Eisenhart glanced toward Roland, who saw his own boy, Jake, standing just behind Benny, impatiently waiting his chance to risk his bones. Jake was also dressed in bib overalls—a pair of his new friend’s, no doubt—and the look of them made Roland smile. Jake wasn’t the sort of boy you imagined in such clothes.

“It’s nil to me, one way or the other, if that’s what you want to know,” Roland said.

“Garn, then!” the rancher called. Then he turned his attention to the bits and pieces of hardware spread out on the boards. “What do’ee think? Will any of ’em shoot?”

Eisenhart had produced all three of his guns for Roland’s inspection. The best was the rifle. The other two were pistols of the sort Roland and his friends had called “barrel-shooters” as children, because of the oversized cylinders which had to be revolved with the side of the hand after each shot. Roland had disassembled Eisenhart’s shooting irons with no initial comment. Once again he had set out gun oil, this time in a bowl instead of a saucer.

“I said—”

“I heard you, sai,” Roland said. “Your rifle is as good as I’ve seen this side of Lud, the great city. The barrel-shooters . . .” He shook his head. “That one with the nickel plating might fire. The other you might as well stick in the ground. Maybe it’ll grow something better.”

“Hate to hear you speak so,” Eisenhart said. “These were from my da’ and his da’ before him and on back at least this many.” He raised four fingers and both thumbs. “They was always kept together and passed to the likeliest son by dead-letter. When I got ’em instead of my elder brother, I was some pleased.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say thankya.”

The sun was going down red in the west, turning the yard the color of blood. There was a line of rockers on the porch. Eisenhart was settled in one of them. Roland sat cross-legged on the boards, housekeeping Eisenhart’s inheritance. That the pistols would probably never fire meant nothing to the gunslinger’s hands, which had been trained to this work long ago and still found it soothing.

Now, with a speed that made the rancher blink, Roland put the weapons back together in a rapid series of clicks and clacks. He set them aside on a square of sheepskin, wiped his fingers on a rag, and sat in the rocker next to Eisenhart’s. He guessed that on more ordinary evenings, Eisenhart and his wife sat out here side by side, watching the sun abandon the day.

The wife had been part of his palaver that afternoon, more important because of what was not said than because of what was.

Roland rummaged through his purse for his tobacco pouch, found it, and built himself a cigarette with the priest’s fresh, sweet tobacco. The Pere’s housekeeper, Rosalita,