“Nothing special!” Avery said, laughing. His belly, Roland noticed, did not shake as one might have expected it to do; it was harder than it looked. The same might be true of its owner. “Nothing special, he says! Five hundred mile or more from the In-World they’ve come, our first official visitors from the Affiliation since a gunslinger passed through on the Great Road four year ago, and yet he says they’re nothing special! Would ye sit, my boys? I’ve got graf, which ye won’t want so early in the day—p’raps not at all, given your ages (and if you’ll forgive me for statin so bald the obvious fact of yer youth, for youth’s not a thing to be ashamed of, so it’s not, we were all young once), and I also have white iced tea, which I recommend most hearty, as Dave’s wife makes it and she’s a dab hand with most any potable.”

Roland looked at Cuthbert and Alain, who nodded and smiled (and tried not to look all at sea), then back at Sheriff Avery. White tea would go down a treat in a dusty throat, he said.

One of the deputies went to fetch it, chairs were produced and set in a row at one side of Sheriff Avery’s rolltop, and the business of the day commenced.

“You know who ye are and where ye hail from, and I know the same,” Sheriff Avery said, sitting down in his own chair (it uttered a feeble groan beneath his bulk but held steady). “I can hear In-World in yer voices, but more important, I can see it in yer faces.

“Yet we hold to the old ways here in Hambry, sleepy and rural as we may be; aye, we hold to our course and remember the faces of our fathers as well’s we can. So, although I’d not keep yer long from yer duties, and if ye’ll forgive me for the impertinence, I’d like a look at any papers and documents of passage ye might just happen to’ve brought into town with ye.”

They just “happened” to have brought all of their papers into town with them, as Roland was sure Sheriff Avery well knew they would. He went through them quite slowly for a man who’d promised not to hold them from their duties, tracing the well-folded sheets (the linen content so high that the documents were perhaps closer to cloth than paper) with one pudgy finger, his lips moving. Every now and then the finger would reverse as he reread a line. The two other deputies stood behind him, looking sagely down over his large shoulders. Roland wondered if either could actually read.

William Dearborn. Drover’s son.

Richard Stockworth. Rancher’s son.

Arthur Heath. Stockline breeder’s son.