Wizard and glass - Stephen King [208]
Beneath one of these pillows he found a small bonus: paper strips and a storage-pen, undoubtedly kept for the composition of messages. He broke the pen and flung it across the room. The strips he put in his own pocket. Paper always came in handy.
With the pigeons seen to, he could hear better. He began walking slowly back and forth on the board floor, head cocked, listening.
4
When Alain came riding up to him at a gallop, Roland ignored the boy’s strained white face and burning, frightened eyes. “I make it thirty-one on my side,” he said, “all with the Barony brand, crown and shield. You?”
“We have to go back,” Alain said. “Something’s wrong. It’s the touch. I’ve never felt it so clear.”
“Your count?” Roland asked again. There were times, such as now, when he found Alain’s ability to use the touch more annoying than helpful.
“Forty. Or forty-one, I forget. And what does it matter? They’ve moved what they don’t want us to count. Roland, didn’t you hear me? We have to go back! Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong at our place!”
Roland glanced toward Bert, riding peaceably some five hundred yards away. Then he looked back at Alain, his eyebrows raised in a silent question.
“Bert? He’s numb to the touch and always has been—you know it. I’m not. You know I’m not! Roland, please! Whoever it is will see the pigeons! Maybe find our guns!” The normally phlegmatic Alain was nearly crying in his excitement and dismay. “If you won’t go back with me, give me leave to go back by myself! Give me leave, Roland, for your father’s sake!”
“For your father’s sake, I give you none,” Roland said. “My count is thirty-one. Yours is forty. Yes, we’ll say forty. Forty’s a good number—good as any, I wot. Now we’ll change sides and count again.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Alain almost whispered. He was looking at Roland as if Roland had gone mad.
“Nothing.”
“You knew! You knew when we left this morning!”
“Oh, I might have seen something,” Roland said. “A reflection, perhaps, but . . . do you trust me, Al? That’s what matters, I think. Do you trust me, or do you think I lost my wits when I lost my heart? As he does?” He jerked his head in Cuthbert’s direction. Roland was looking at Alain with a faint smile on his lips, but his eyes were ruthless and distant—it was Roland’s over-the-horizon look. Alain wondered if Susan Delgado had seen that expression yet, and if she had, what she made of it.
“I trust you.” By now Alain was so confused that he didn’t know for sure if that was a lie or the truth.
“Good. Then switch sides with me. My count is thirty-one, mind.”
“Thirty-one,” Alain agreed. He raised his hands, then dropped them back to his thighs with a slap so sharp his normally stolid mount laid his ears back and jigged a bit under him. “Thirty-one.”
“I think we may go back early today, if that’s any satisfaction to you,” Roland said, and rode away. Alain watched him. He’d always wondered what went on in Roland’s head, but never more than now.
5
Creak. Creak-creak.
Here was what he’d been listening for, and just as Jonas was about to give up the hunt. He had expected to find their hidey-hole a little closer to their beds, but they were trig, all right.
He went to one knee and used the blade of his knife to pry up the board which had creaked. Under it were three bundles, each swaddled in dark strips of cotton cloth. These strips were damp to the touch and smelled fragrantly of gun-oil. Jonas took the bundles out and unwrapped each, curious to see what sort of calibers the youngsters had brought. The answer turned out to be serviceable but undistinguished. Two of the bundles contained single five-shot revolvers of a type then called (for no reason I know) “carvers.” The third contained two guns, six-shooters of higher quality than the carvers. In fact, for one