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The Debaria high street was wide and paved, although the pavement was crumbling away to the hardpan beneath in many places and would be entirely gone before too many years passed. There was a good deal of commerce, and judging from the sound coming from the saloons, they were doing a fine business. We only saw a few horses and mules tied to the hitching-posts, though; in that part of the world, livestock was for trading and eating, not for riding.
A woman coming out of the mercantile with a basket over her arm saw us and stared. She ran back in, and several more people came out. By the time we reached the High Sheriff's office--a little wooden building attached to the much larger stone-built town jail--the streets were lined with spectators on both sides.
"Have ye come to kill the skin-man?" the lady with the basket called.
"Those two don't look old enough to kill a bottle of rye," a man standing in front of the Cheery Fellows Saloon & Cafe called back. There was general laughter and murmurs of agreement at this sally.
"Town looks busy enough now," Jamie said, dismounting and looking back at the forty or fifty men and women who'd come away from their business (and their pleasure) to have a gleep at us.
"It'll be different after sundown," I said. "That's when such creatures as this skin-man do their marauding. Or so Vannay says."
We went into the office. Hugh Peavy was a big-bellied man with long white hair and a droopy mustache. His face was deeply lined and careworn. He saw our guns and looked relieved. He noted our beardless faces and looked less so. He wiped off the nib of the pen he had been writing with, stood up, and held out his hand. No forehead-knocking for this fellow.
After we'd shaken with him and introduced ourselves, he said: "I don't mean to belittle you, young fellows, but I was hoping to see Steven Deschain himself. And perhaps Peter McVries."
"McVries died three years ago," I said.
Peavy looked shocked. "Do you say so? For he was a trig hand with a gun. Very trig."
"He died of a fever." Very likely induced by poison, but this was nothing the High Sheriff of the Debaria Outers needed to know. "As for Steven, he's otherwise occupied, and so he sent me. I am his son."
"Yar, yar, I've heard your name and a bit of your exploits in Mejis, for we get some news even out here. There's the dit-dah wire, and even a jing-jang." He pointed to a contraption on the wall. Written on the brick beneath it was a sign reading DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT PERMIZION. "It used to go all the way to Gilead, but these days only to Sallywood in the south, the Jefferson spread to the north, and the village in the foothills--Little Debaria, it's called. We even have a few streetlamps that still work--not gas or kerosene but real sparklights, don'tcha see. Townfolk think such'll keep the creature away." He sighed. "I am less confident. This is a bad business, young fellows. Sometimes I feel the world has come loose of its moorings."
"It has," I said. "But what comes loose can be tied tight again, Sheriff."
"If you say so." He cleared his throat. "Now, don't take this as disrespect, I know ye are who ye say ye are, but I was promised a sigul. If you've brought it, I'd have it, for it means special to me."
I opened my swag-bag and brought out what I'd been given: a small wooden box with my father's mark--the D with the S inside of it--stamped on the hinged lid. Peavy took it with the smallest of smiles dimpling the corners of his mouth beneath his mustache. To me it looked like a remembering smile, and it took years off his face.
"Do'ee know what's inside?"
"No." I had not been asked to look.
Peavy opened the box, looked within, then returned his gaze to Jamie and me. "Once, when I was still only a deputy, Steven Deschain led me, and the High Sheriff that was, and a posse of seven against the Crow Gang. Has your father ever spoken to you of the Crows?"
I shook my head.
"Not skin-men, no, but a nasty lot of work, all the same. They robbed what there was to rob, not just in Debaria but all along the ranchlands out this way. Trains, too, if they got word one was worth stopping. But their main business was kidnapping for ransom. A coward's crime, sure--I'm told Farson favors it--but it paid well.
"Your da' showed up in town only a day after they stole a rancher's wife--Belinda Doolin. Her husband called on the jing-jang as soon as they left and he was able to get himself untied. The Crows didn't know about the jing-jang, and that was their undoing. Accourse it helped that there was a gunslinger doing his rounds in this part of the world; in those days, they had a knack of turning up when and where they were needed."
He eyed us. "P'raps they still do. Any-ro', we got out t'ranch while the crime was still fresh. There were places where any of us would have lost the trail--it's mostly hardpan out north of here, don'tcha see--but your father had eyes like you wouldn't believe. Hawks ain't even in it, dear, or eagles, either."
I knew of my father's sharp eyes and gift for trailing. I also knew that this story probably had nothing to do with our business, and I should have told him to move along. But my father never talked about his younger days, and I wanted to hear this tale. I was hungry to hear it. And it turned out to have a little more to do with our business in Debaria than I at first thought.
"The trail led in the direction of the mines--what Debaria folk call the salt-houses. The workings had been abandoned in those days; it was before the new plug was found twenty year ago."
"Plug?" Jamie asked.
"Deposit," I said. "He means a fresh deposit."
"Aye, as you say. But all that were abandoned then, and made a fine hideout for such as those beastly Crows. Once the trail left the flats, it went through a place of high rocks before coming out on the Low Pure, which is to say the foothill meadows below the salt-houses. The Low is where a sheepherder was killed just recent, by something that looked like a--"
"Like a wolf," I said. "This we know. Go on."
"Well-informed, are ye? Well, that's
all to the good. Where was I, now? Ah, I know--those rocks that are now known in these parts as Ambush Arroyo. It's not an arroyo, but I suppose people like the sound. That's where the tracks went, but Deschain wanted to go around and come in from the east. From the High Pure. The sheriff, Pea Anderson it was back then, didn't want none o' that. Eager as a bird with its eye on a worm he was, mad to press on. Said it would take em three days, and by then the woman might be dead and the Crows anywhere. He said he was going the straight way, and he'd go alone if no one wanted to go with him. 'Or unless you order me in the name of Gilead to do different,' he says to your da'.
"'Never think it,' Deschain says, 'for Debaria is your fill; I have my own.'
"The posse went. I stayed with your da', lad. Sheriff Anderson turned to me in the saddle and said, 'I hope they're hiring at one of the ranches, Hughie, because your days of wearing tin on your vest are over. I'm done with'ee.'
"Those were the last words he ever said to me. They rode off. Steven of Gilead squatted on his hunkers and I hunkered with him. After half an hour of quiet--might have been longer--I says to him, 'I thought we were going to hook around . . . unless you're done with me, too.'
"'No,' he says. 'Your hire is not my business, Deputy.'
"'Then what are we waitin for?'
"'Gunfire,' says he, and not five minutes later we heard it. Gunfire and screams. It didn't last long. The Crows had seen us coming--probably nummore'n a glint of sun on a bootcap or bit o' saddle brightwork was enough to attract their attention, for Pa Crow was powerful trig--and doubled back. They got up in those high rocks and poured down lead on Anderson and his possemen. There were more guns in those days, and the Crows had a good share. Even a speed-shooter or two.
"So we went around, all right? Took us only two days, because Steven Deschain pushed hard. On the third day, we camped downslope and rose before dawn. Now, if ye don't know, and no reason ye should, salt-houses are just caverns in the cliff faces up there. Whole families lived in em, not just the miners themselves. The tunnels go down into the earth from the backs of em. But as I say, in those days all were deserted. Yet we saw smoke coming from the vent on top of one, and that was as good as a kinkman standing out in front of a carnival tent and pointing at the show inside, don'tcha see it.
