Wizard and glass - Stephen King [308]
12
Latigo had set pickets a mile out from Hanging Rock, but the blond boy Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain encountered as they closed in on the tankers looked confused and unsure of himself, no danger to anyone. He had scurvy-blossoms around his mouth and nose, suggesting that the men Farson had sent on this duty had ridden hard and fast, with little in the way of fresh supplies.
When Cuthbert gave the Good Man’s sigul—hands clasped to the chest, left above right, then both held out to the person being greeted—the blond picket did the same, and with a grateful smile.
“What spin and raree back there?” he asked, speaking with a strong In-World accent—to Roland, the boy sounded like a Nordite.
“Three boys who killed a couple of big bugs and then hied for the hills,” Cuthbert replied. He was an eerily good mimic, and gave the boy back his own accent faultlessly. “There were a fight. It be over now, but they did fight fearful.”
“What—”
“No time,” Roland said brusquely. “We have dispatches.” He crossed his hands on his chest, then held them out. “Hile! Farson!”
“Good Man!” the blond returned smartly. He gave back the salute with a smile that said he would have asked Cuthbert where he was from and who he was related to, if there had been more time. Then they were past him and inside Latigo’s perimeter. As easy as that.
“Remember that it’s hit-and-run,” Roland said. “Slow down for nothing. What we don’t get must be left—there’ll be no second pass.”
“Gods, don’t even suggest such a thing,” Cuthbert said, but he was smiling. He pulled his sling out of its rudimentary holster and tested its elastic draw with a thumb. Then he licked the thumb and hoisted it to the wind. Not much problem there, if they came in as they were; the wind was strong, but at their backs.
Alain unslung Lengyll’s machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. “I don’t know about this, Roland. It’s loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but—”
“Then use it,” Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their serapes. “This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Roland.”
“Bert?”
“Aye,” Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, “so I am, so I am.”
Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.
Roland drew both revolvers. “Gilead!” he cried. “Hile! Gilead!”
He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.
The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.
13
Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Susan’s heart sank.
The one on Reynolds’s left—he wore a stained white drover’s hat and had a lazily cocked eye—she didn’t know, but the one on the right, who looked like a stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, after smiling at Susan.
“Why, Las and I couldn’t even get us a drink to send his late brother, the Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with a word,” Reynolds said. “We hadn’t hardly hit town before we got persuaded out here. I wasn’t going to go, but . . . damn! That old lady’s something. Could talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you’ll pardon the crudity. I think your aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She—”
“Your friends are dead,” Susan