Roland looked alarmed. "Does anyone know you saw?"
Alain shrugged impatiently. "I don't think so. There were drovers about - three, maybe four - "
"Four, aye," Cuthbert said quietly.
" - but they paid no attention to us. Even when we see things, they think we don't."
"And that's the way it must stay." Roland's eyes swept them, but there was a kind of absence in his face, as if his thoughts were far away. He turned to look toward the sunset, and Alain saw something on the collar of his shirt. He plucked it, a move made so quickly and nimbly that not even Roland felt it. Bert couldn't have done that, Alain thought with some pride.
"Aye, but - "
"Same message," Roland said. He sat down on the top step and looked off toward the evening redness in the west. "Patience, Mr. Richard Stock-worth and Mr. Arthur Heath. We know certain things and we believe certain other things. But would John Farson come all this way simply to resupply horses? I don't think so. I'm not sure, horses are valuable, aye, so they are . . . but I'm not sure. So we wait."
"All right, all right, same message." Cuthbert smoothed the scrap of paper flat on the porch rail, then made a small series of symbols on it. Alain could read this message; he had seen the same sequence several times since they had come to Hambry. "Message received. We are fine. Nothing to report at this time."
The message was put in the capsule and attached to the pigeon's leg. Alain went down the steps, stood beside Rusher (still waiting patiently to be unsaddled), and held the bird up toward the fading sunset. "Hile!"
It was up and gone in a flutter of wings. For a moment only they saw it, a dark shape against the deepening sky.
Roland sat looking after. The dreamy expression was still on his face. Alain found himself wondering if Roland had made the right decision this evening. He had never in his life had such a thought. Nor expected to have one.
"Roland?"
"Hmmm?" Like a man half-awakened from some deep sleep.
"I'll unsaddle him, if you want." He nodded at Rusher. "And rub him down."
No answer for a long time. Alain was about to ask again when Roland said, "No. I'll do it. In a minute or two." And went back to looking at the sunset.
Alain climbed the porch steps and sat down in his rocker. Bert had resumed his place on the box-seat. They were behind Roland now, and Cuthbert looked at Alain with his eyebrows raised. He pointed to Roland and then looked at Alain again.
Alain passed over what he had plucked fromroland's collar. although it was almost too fine to be seen in this light, Cuthbert's eyes were gunslinger's eyes, and he took it easily, with no fumbling.
It was a long strand of hair, the color of spun gold. He could see from Bert's, face that Bert knew whose head it had come from. Since arriving in Hambry, they'd met only one girl with long blonde hair. The two boys' eyes met. In Bert's Alain saw dismay and laughter in equal measure.
Cuthbert Allgood raised his forefinger to his temple and mimed pulling the trigger.
Alain nodded.
Sitting on the steps with his back to them, Roland looked toward the dying sunset with dreaming eyes.
CHAPTERVIII BENEATH THE PEDDLER’S MOON
1
The town of Ritzy, nearly four hundred miles west of Mejis, was anything but. Roy Depape reached it three nights before the Peddler's Moon - called Late-summer's Moon by some - came full, and left it a day later.
Ritzy was, in fact, a miserable little mining village on the eastern slope of the Vi Castis Mountains, about fifty miles from Vi Castis Cut. The town had but one street; it was engraved with iron-hard wheelruts now, and would become a lake of mud roughly three days after the storms of autumn set in. There was the Bear and Turtle Mercantile & Sundrie Items, where miners were forbidden by the Vi Castis Company to shop, and a company store where no one but grubbies would shop; there was a combined jailhouse and Town Gathering Hall with a windmill-cum-gallows out front; there were six roaring barrooms, each more sordid, desperate, and dangerous than the last.