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“She told him not to look at what was left inside—the body of his steppa, you ken—and he said he wouldn’t. Nor did he, but he picked up the gun,
and put it in his belt—”
“The four-shot the widow-woman gave him,” Young Bill Streeter said. He was sitting against the cell wall below the chalked map of Debaria with
his chin on his chest, he had said little, and in truth, I thought the lad had fallen asleep and I was telling the tale only to myself. But he had been
listening all along, it seemed. Outside, the rising wind of the simoom rose to a brief shriek, then settled back to a low and steady moan.
“Aye, Young Bill. He picked up the gun, put it in his belt on the left side, and carried it there for the next ten years of his life. After that he carried
bigger ones—six-shooters.” That was the story, and I ended it just as my mother had ended all the stories she read me when I was but a sma’ one
in my tower room. It made me sad to hear those words from my own mouth. “And so it happened, once upon a bye, long before your grandfather’s
grandfather was born.”
Outside, the light was beginning to fail. I thought it would be tomorrow after all before the deputation that had gone up to the foothills would return
with the salties who could sit a horse. And really, did it matter so much? For an uncomfortable thought had come to me while I was telling Young Bill
the story of Young Tim. If I were the skin-man, and if the sheriff and a bunch of deputies (not to mention a young gunslinger all the way from Gilead)
came asking if I could saddle, mount, and ride, would I admit it? Not likely. Jamie and I should have seen this right away, but of course we were still
new to the lawman’s way of thinking.
“Sai?”
“Yes, Bill.”
“Did Tim ever become a real gunslinger? He did, didn’t he?”
“When he was twenty-one, three men carrying hard calibers came through Tree. They were bound for Tavares and hoping to raise a posse, but
Tim was the only one who would go with them. They called him ‘the lefthanded gun,’ for that was the way he drew.
“He rode with them, and acquitted himself well, for he was both fearless and a dead shot. They called him tet-fa, or friend of the tet. But there
came a day when he became ka-tet, one of the very, very few gunslingers not from the proven line of Eld. Although who knows? Don’t they say that
Arthur had many sons from three wives, and moity-more born on the dark side of the blanket?”
“I dunno what that means.”
With that I could sympathize; until two days before, I hadn’t known what was meant by “the longstick.”
“Never mind. He was known first as Lefty Ross, then—after a great battle on the shores of Lake Cawn—as Tim Stoutheart. His mother finished
her days in Gilead as a great lady, or so my mother said. But all those things are—”
“—a tale for another day,” Bill finished. “That’s what my da’ always says when I ask for more.” His face drew in on itself and his mouth trembled at
the corners as he remembered the bloody bunkhouse and the cook who had died with his apron over his face. “What he said.”
I put my arm around his shoulders again, a thing that felt a little more natural this time. I’d made my mind up to take him back to Gilead with us if
Everlynne of Serenity refused to take him in . . . but I thought she would not refuse. He was a good boy.
Outside the wind whined and howled. I kept an ear out for the jing-jang, but it stayed silent. The lines were surely down somewhere.
“Sai, how long was Maerlyn caged as a tyger?”
“I don’t know, but a very long time, surely.”
“What did he eat?”
Cuthbert would have made something up on the spot, but I was stumped.
“If he was shitting in the hole, he must have eaten,” Bill said, and reasonably enough. “If you don’t eat, you can’t shit.”
“I don’t know what he ate, Bill.”
“P’raps he had enough magic left—even as a tyger—to make his own dinner. Out of thin air, like.”
“Yes, that’s probably it.”
“Did Tim ever reach the Tower? For there are stories about that, too, aren’t there?”
Before I could answer, Strother—the fat deputy with the rattlesnake hatband—came into the jail. When he saw me sitting with my arm around the
boy, he gave a smirk. I considered wiping it off his face—it wouldn’t have taken long—but forgot the idea when I heard what he had to say.
“Riders comin. Must be a moit, and wagons, because we can hear em even over the damn beastly wind. People is steppin out into the grit to
see.”
I got up and let myself out of the cell.
“Can I come?” Bill asked.
“Better that you bide here yet awhile,” I said, and locked him in. “I won’t be long.”
“I hate it here, sai!”
“I know,” I told him. “It’ll be over soon enough.”
I hoped I was right about that.
* * *