“How can you do this?” Roland asked curiously. It was Lengyll to whom he spoke. “Mejis is your home place; I’ve seen the line of your fathers in the town cemetery. How can you do this to your home place, sai Lengyll?”

“I’ve no intention of standing out here and making palaver with ye,” Lengyll said. He glanced over Roland’s shoulder. “Alvarez! Get his horse! Boys as trig as this bunch should have no problem riding with their hands behind their—”

“No, tell me,” Roland interposed. “Don’t hold back, sai Lengyll—these are your friends you’ve come with, and not a one who isn’t inside your circle. How can you do it? Would you rape your own mother if you came upon her sleeping with her dress up?”

Lengyll’s mouth twitched—not with shame or embarrassment but momentary prudish distaste, and then the old rancher looked at Avery. “They teach em to talk pretty in Gilead, don’t they?”

Avery had a rifle. Now he stepped toward the handcuffed gunslinger with the butt raised. “I’ll teach ’im how to talk proper to a man of the gentry, so I will! Knock the teef straight out of his head, if you say aye, Fran!”

Lengyll held him back, looking tired. “Don’t be a fool. I don’t want to bring him back laying over a saddle unless he’s dead.”

Avery lowered his gun. Lengyll turned to Roland.

“Ye’re not going to live long enough to profit from advice, Dearborn,” he said, “but I’ll give’ee some, anyway: stick with the winners in this world. And know how the wind blows, so ye can tell when it changes direction.”

“You’ve forgotten the face of your father, you scurrying little maggot,” Cuthbert said clearly.

This got to Lengyll in a way Roland’s remark about his mother had not—it showed in the sudden bloom of color in his weathered cheeks.

“Get em mounted!” he said. “I want em locked up tight within the hour!”

5

Roland was boosted into Rusher’s saddle so hard he almost flew off on the other side—would have, if Dave Hollis had not been there to steady him and then to wedge Roland’s boot into the stirrup. Dave offered the gunslinger a nervous, half-embarrassed smile.

“I’m sorry to see you here,” Roland said gravely.

“It’s sorry I am to be here,” the deputy said. “If murder was your business, I wish you’d gotten to it sooner. And your friend shouldn’t have been so arrogant as to leave his calling-card.” He nodded toward Cuthbert.