Wizard and glass - Stephen King [103]
“Let em stay there, right under the floor where they’re happy,” Cuthbert agreed, still gazing down at the harbor with his arms folded over his chest.
Avery gave him a brief, uncertain glance, his smile flickering a bit at the corners. Then he turned back to Roland, and the smile shone out strongly once more. “There’s no holes in the roof, lad, and if it rains, ye’ll be dry. What think ye of that? Does it sound well to ye?”
“Better than we deserve. I think that you’ve been very efficient and Mayor Thorin’s been far too kind.” And he did think that. The question was why. “But we appreciate his thoughtfulness. Don’t we, boys?”
Cuthbert and Alain made vigorous assent.
“And we accept with thanks.”
Avery nodded. “I’ll tell him. Go safely, boys.”
They had reached the hitching rail. Avery once more shook hands all around, this time saving his keenest looks for their horses.
“Until tomorrow night, then, young gents?”
“Tomorrow night,” Roland agreed.
“Will ye be able to find the Bar K on your own, do yer think?”
Again Roland was struck by the man’s unspoken contempt and unconscious condescension. Yet perhaps it was to the good. If the High Sheriff thought they were stupid, who knew what might come of it?
“We’ll find it,” Cuthbert said, mounting up. Avery was looking suspiciously at the rook’s skull on the horn of Cuthbert’s saddle. Cuthbert saw him looking, but for once managed to keep his mouth shut. Roland was both amazed and pleased by this unexpected reticence. “Fare you well, Sheriff.”
“And you, boy.”
He stood there by the hitching post, a large man in a khaki shirt with sweat-stains around the armpits and black boots that looked too shiny for a working sheriff’s feet. And where’s the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding? Roland thought. I’d like to see the cut of that Cayuse.
Avery waved to them as they went. The other deputies came down the walk, Deputy Dave in the forefront. They waved, too.
3
The moment the Affliation brats mounted on their fathers’ expensive horseflesh were around the corner and headed downhill to the High Street, the sheriff and the deputies stopped waving. Avery turned to Dave Hollis, whose expression of slightly stupid awe had been replaced by one marginally more intelligent.
“What think ye, Dave?”
Dave lifted his monocle to his mouth and began to nibble nervously at its brass edging, a habit about which Sheriff Avery had long since ceased to nag him. Even Dave’s wife, Judy, had given up on that score, and Judy Hollis—Judy Wertner that was—was a fair engine when it came to getting her own way.
“Soft,” Dave said. “Soft as eggs just dropped out of a chicken’s ass.”
“Mayhap,” Avery said, putting his thumbs in his belt and rocking enormously back and forth, “but the one did most of the talking, him in the flathead hat, he doesn’t think he’s soft.”
“Don’t matter what he thinks,” Dave said, still nibbling at his eyeglass. “He’s in Hambry, now. He may have to change his way of thinking to our’n.”
Behind him, the other deputies laughed. Even Avery smiled. They would leave the rich boys alone if the rich boys left them alone—those were orders, straight from Mayor’s House—but Avery had to admit that he wouldn’t mind a little dust-up with them, so he wouldn’t. He would enjoy putting his boot into the balls of the one with that idiotic bird’s skull on his saddle-horn—standing there and mocking him, he’d been, thinking all the while that Herk Avery was too country-dumb to know what he was up to—but the thing he’d really enjoy would be beating the cool look from the eyes of the boy in the flathead preacher