The gunslinger - Stephen King [43]
They passed the symmetrical campfire leavings of the man in black at regular intervals, and it seemed to the gunslinger that these leavings were much fresher now. On the third night, the gunslinger was sure that he could see the distant spark of another campfire, somewhere in the first rising swell of the foothills. This did not please him as much as he once might have believed. One of Cort’s sayings occurred to him: ’Ware the man who fakes a limp.
Near two o’clock on the fourth day out from the way station, Jake reeled and almost fell.
“Here, sit down,” the gunslinger said.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Sit down.”
The boy sat obediently. The gunslinger squatted close by, so Jake would be in his shadow.
“Drink.”
“I’m not supposed to until—”
“Drink.”
The boy drank, three swallows. The gunslinger wet the tail of the blanket, which held a good deal less now, and applied the damp fabric to the boy’s wrists and forehead, which were fever-dry.
“From now on we rest every afternoon at this time. Fifteen minutes. Do you want to sleep?”
“No.” The boy looked at him with shame. The gunslinger looked back blandly. In an abstracted way he withdrew one of the bullets from his belt and began to twirl it howken between his fingers. The boy watched, fascinated.
“That’s neat,” he said.
The gunslinger nodded. “Yar!” He paused. “When I was your age, I lived in a walled city, did I tell you that?”
The boy shook his head sleepily.
“Sure. And there was an evil man—”
“The priest?”
“Well, sometimes I wonder about that, tell you true,” the gunslinger said. “If they were two, I think now they must have been brothers. Maybe even twins. But did I ever see ’em together? No, I never did. This bad man . . . this Marten . . . he was a wizard. Like Merlin. Do they ken Merlin where you come from?”
“Merlin and Arthur and the knights of the Round Table,” Jake said dreamily.
The gunslinger felt a nasty jolt go through him. “Yes,” he said. “Arthur Eld, you say true, I say thank ya. I was very young . . .”
But the boy was asleep sitting up, his hands folded neatly in his lap.
“Jake.”
“Yar!”
The sound of this word from the boy’s mouth startled him badly, but the gunslinger wouldn’t let his voice show it. “When I snap my fingers, you’ll wake up. You’ll be rested and fresh. Do you kennit?”
“Yes.”
“Lie over, then.”
The gunslinger got makings from his poke and rolled a cigarette. There was something missing. He searched for it in his diligent, careful way and located it. The missing thing was his previous maddening sense of hurry, the feeling that he might be left behind at any time, that the trail would die out and he would be left with only a last fading footprint. All that was gone now, and the gunslinger was slowly becoming sure that the man in black wanted to be caught. ’Ware the man who fakes a limp.
What would follow?
The question was too vague to catch his interest. Cuthbert would have found interest in it, lively interest (and probably a joke), but Cuthbert was as gone as the Horn o’ Deschain, and the gunslinger could only go forward in the way he knew.
He watched the boy as he smoked, and his mind turned back on Cuthbert, who had always laughed (to his death he had gone laughing), and Cort, who never laughed, and on Marten, who sometimes smiled—a thin, silent smile that had its own disquieting gleam . . . like an eye that slips open in the dark and discloses blood. And there had been the falcon, of course. The falcon was named David, after the legend of the boy with the sling. David, he was quite sure, knew nothing but the need for murder, rending, and terror. Like the gunslinger himself. David was no dilettante; he played the center of the court.
Except maybe at the end.
The gunslinger’s stomach seemed to rise painfully against his heart, but his face didn’t change. He watched the smoke of his cigarette rise into the hot desert air and disappear, and his mind went back.
VIII
The sky was white, perfectly white, the smell of rain strong in the air. The smell of hedges and growing green was