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world we grew up in, young men, the one that’s almost gone now.
“Then the Deschain says, ‘Wake up, Allan Crow, unless you’d go into the clearing at the end of the path with your eyes shut. Wake up, all.’
“They did. He never meant to try and bring them all in alive—’twould have been madness, that I’m sure you must see—but he wouldn’t shoot them
as they slept, either. They woke up to varying degrees, but not for long. Steven drew his guns so fast I never saw his hands move. Lightning ain’t in
it, dear. At one moment those revolvers with their big sandalwood grips were by his sides; at the next he was blazing away, the noise like thunder in
that closed-in space. But that didn’t keep me from drawing my own gun. It was just an old barrel-shooter I had from my granda’, but I put two of them
down with it. The first two men I ever killed. There have been plenty since, sad to say.
“The only one who survived that first fusillade was Pa Crow himself—Allan Crow. He was an old man, all snarled up and frozen on one side of his
face from a stroke or summat, but he moved fast as the devil just the same. He was in his longjohns, and his gun was stuck in the top of one of his
boots there at the end of his bedroll. He grabbed it up and turned toward us. Steven shot him, but the old bastard got off a single round. It went wild,
but . . .”
Peavy, who could have been no older in those days than we two young men standing before him, opened the box on its cunning hinges, mused a
moment at what he saw inside, then looked up at me. That little remembering smile still touched the corners of his mouth. “Have you ever seen a
scar on your father’s arm, Roland? Right here?” He touched the place just above the crook of his elbow, where a man’s yanks begin.
My father’s body was a map of scars, but it was a map I knew well. The scar above his inner elbow was a deep dimple, almost like the ones not
quite hidden by Sheriff Peavy’s mustache when he smiled.
“Pa Crow’s last shot hit the wall above the post where the woman was tied, and richocheted.” He turned the box and held it out to me. Inside was
a smashed slug, a big one, a hard caliber. “I dug this out of your da’s arm with my skinning knife, and gave it to him. He thanked me, and said
someday I should have it back. And here it is. Ka is a wheel, sai Deschain.”
“Have you ever told this story?” I asked. “For I have never heard it.”
“That I dug a bullet from the flesh of Arthur’s true descendant? Eld of the Eld? No, never until now. For who would believe it?”
“I do,” I said, “and I thank you. It could have poisoned him.”
“Nar, nar,” Peavy said with a chuckle. “Not him. The blood of Eld’s too strong. And if I’d been laid low . . . or too squeamy . . . he would have done
it himself. As it was, he let me take most of the credit for the Crow Gang, and I’ve been sheriff ever since. But not much longer. This skin-man
business has done for me. I’ve seen enough blood, and have no taste for mysteries.”
“Who’ll take your place?” I asked.
He seemed surprised by the question. “Probably nobody. The mines will play out again in a few years, this time for good, and such rail lines as
there are won’t last much longer. The two things together will finish Debaria, which was once a fine little city in the time of yer grandfathers. That holy
hencoop I’m sure ye passed on the way in may go on; nothing else.”
Jamie looked troubled. “But in the meantime?”
“Let the ranchers, drifters, whoremasters, and gamblers all go to hell in their own way. It’s none o’ mine, at least for much longer. But I’ll not leave
until this business is settled, one way or another.”
I said, “The skin-man was at one of the women at Serenity. She’s badly disfigured.”
“Been there, have ye?”
“The women are terrified.” I thought this over, and remembered a knife strapped to a calf as thick as the trunk of a young birch. “Except for the
prioress, that is.”
He chuckled. “Everlynne. That one’d spit in the devil’s face. And if he took her down to Nis, she’d be running the place in a month.”
I said, “Do you have any idea who this skin-man might be when he’s in his human shape? If you do, tell us, I beg. For, as my father told your
Sheriff Anderson that was, this is not our fill.”
“I can’t give ye a name, if that’s what you mean, but I might be able to give ye something. Follow me.”
* * *
He led us through the archway behind his desk and into the jail, which was in the shape of a T. I counted eight big cells down the central aisle and a
dozen small ones on the cross-corridor. All were empty except for one of the smaller ones, where a drunk was snoozing away the late afternoon on
a straw pallet. The door to his cell stood open.
“Once all of these cells would have been filled on Efday and Ethday,” Peavy said. “Loaded up with drunk cowpunchers and farmhands, don’tcha
see it. Now most people stay in at night. Even on Efday and Ethday. Cowpokes in their bunkhouses, farmhands in theirs. No one wants to be
staggering home drunk and meet the skin-man.”
“The salt-miners?” Jamie asked. “Do you pen them, too?”
“Not often, for they have their own saloons up in Little Debaria. Two of em. Nasty places. When the whores down here at the Cheery Fellows or
the Busted Luck or the Bider-Wee get too old or too diseased to attract custom, they end up in Little Debaria. Once they’re drunk on White Blind,
the salties don’t much care if a whore has a nose as long as she still has her sugar-purse.”
“Nice,” Jamie muttered.
Peavy opened one of the large cells. “Come on in here, boys. I haven’t any paper, but I do have some chalk, and here’s a nice smooth wall. It’s
private, too, as long as old Salty Sam down there doesn’t wake up. And he rarely does until sundown.”
From the pocket of his twill pants the sheriff took a goodish stick of chalk, and on the wall he drew a kind of long box with jags all across the top.
They looked like a row of upside-down V ’s.
“Here’s the whole of Debaria,” Peavy said. “Over here’s the rail line you came in on.” He drew a series of hashmarks, and as he did so I
remembered the enjie and the old fellow who’d served as our butler.
“Sma’ Toot is off the rails,” I said. “Can you put together a party of men to set it right? We have money to pay for their labor, and Jamie and I
would be happy to work with them.”
“Not today,” Peavy said absently. He was studying his map. “Enjie still out there, is he?”
“Yes. Him and another.”
“I’ll send Kellin and Vikka Frye out in a bucka. Kellin’s my best deputy—the other two ain’t worth much—and Vikka’s his son. They’ll pick em up
and bring em back in before dark. There’s time, because the days is long this time o’ year. For now, just pay attention, boys. Here’s the tracks and
here’s Serenity, where that poor girl you spoke to was mauled. On the High Road, don’tcha see it.” He drew a little box for Serenity, and put an X in
it. North of the women’s retreat, up toward the jags at the top of his map, he put another X. “This is where Yon Curry, the sheepherder, was killed.”
To the left of this X, but pretty much on the same level—which is to say, below the jags—he put another.
“The Alora farm. Seven killed.”
Farther yet to the left and little higher, he chalked another X.