The gunslinger - Stephen King [42]
“I thought it got you, that it got you. I thought—”
“It didn’t. Nothing got me.” He held the boy to him, feeling his face, hot against his chest, and his hands, dry against his ribcage. He could feel the rapid beating of the boy’s heart. It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy—which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along. Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?
“Was it a demon?” The voice was muffled.
“Yes. A speaking-demon. We don’t have to go back there anymore. Come on. Let’s shake a mile.”
They went to the stable, and the gunslinger made a rough pack from the blanket he’d slept under—it was hot and prickly, but there was nothing else. That done, he filled the waterbags from the pump.
“You carry one of the waterbags,” the gunslinger said. “Wear it around your shoulders—see?”
“Yes.” The boy looked up at him worshipfully, the look quickly masked. He slung one of the bags over his shoulders.
“Is it too heavy?”
“No. It’s fine.”
“Tell me the truth, now. I can’t carry you if you get a sunstroke.”
“I won’t have a sunstroke. I’ll be okay.”
The gunslinger nodded.
“We’re going to the mountains, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as the swing of the gunslinger’s elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead, the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his body. In his right hand was his pack, his poke, and the rest of his gunna.
They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the titanic space of the desert.
“Goodbye!” Jake cried. “Goodbye!” Then he turned back to the gunslinger, looking troubled. “I feel like something’s watching us.”
“Something or someone,” the gunslinger agreed.
“Was someone hiding there? Hiding there all along?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Should we go back? Go back and—”
“No. We’re done with that place.”
“Good,” Jake said fervently.
They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when the gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was the desert, and that only.
VII
They were three days out of the way station; the mountains were deceptively clear now. They could see the smooth, stepped rise of the desert into foothills, the first naked slopes, the bedrock bursting through the skin of the earth in sullen, eroded triumph. Further up, the land gentled off briefly again, and for the first time in months or years the gunslinger could see real, living green. Grass, dwarf spruces, perhaps even willows, all fed by snow runoff from further up. Beyond that the rock took over again, rising in cyclopean, tumbled splendor all the way to the blinding snowcaps. Off to the left, a huge slash showed the way to the smaller, eroded sandstone cliffs and mesas and buttes on the far side. This draw was obscured in the almost continual gray membrane of showers. At night, Jake would sit fascinated for the few minutes before he fell into sleep, watching the brilliant swordplay of the far-off lightning, white and purple, startling in the clarity of the night air.
The boy was fine on the trail. He was tough, but more than that, he seemed to fight exhaustion with a calm reservoir of will which the gunslinger appreciated and admired. He didn’t talk much and he didn’t ask questions, not even about the jawbone, which the gunslinger turned over and over in his hands during his evening smoke. He caught a sense that the boy felt highly flattered by the gunslinger’s companionship—perhaps even exalted by it—and this disturbed him. The boy had been placed in his path—While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket—and the fact that Jake was not slowing him down only