Next he climbed the hill, walking beside the pipeline and pausing more and more frequently to rest; by the time he reached the rotting gate between the slope and the oilpatch, his bad leg was paining him severely. He studied the gate, frowning over the smudges he saw on the top rung. They might mean nothing, but Jonas thought someone might have climbed over the gate rather than risk opening it and having it fall off its hinges.
He spent the next hour strolling around the derricks, paying especially close attention to those that still worked, looking for sign. He found plenty of tracks, but it was impossible (especially after a week of wet weather) to read them with any degree of accuracy. The In-World boys might have been out here; that ugly little band of brats from town might have been out here; Arthur Eld and the whole company of his knights might have been out here. The ambiguity put Jonas in a foul temper, as ambiguity (other than on a Castles board) always did.
He started back the way he'd come, meaning to descend the slope to his horse and ride back to town. His leg was aching like fury, and he wanted a stiff drink to quiet it down. The bunkhouse at the Bar K could wait another day.
He got halfway to the gate, saw the weedy spur track tying Citgo to the Great Road, and sighed. There would be nothing on that little strip of road to see, but now that he'd come all the way out here, he supposed he should finish the job.
Bugger finishing the job, I want a damned drink.
But Roland wasn't the only one who sometimes found his wishes overruled by training. Jonas sighed, rubbed at his leg, then walked back to the weedy twin ruts. Where, it seemed, there was something to find after all.
It lay in the grassy ditch less than a dozen paces from the place where the old road joined the Great Road. At first he saw only a smooth white shape in the weeds and thought it was a stone. Then he saw a black round-ness that could only be an eyehole. Not a stone, then; a skull.
Grunting, Jonas knelt and fished it out while the few living derricks continued to squeal and thump behind him. A rook's skull. He had seen it before. Hell, he suspected most of the town had. It belonged to the showoff, Arthur Heath ... who, like all showoffs, needed his little props.
"He called it the lookout," Jonas murmured. "Put it on the horn of his saddle sometimes, didn't he? And sometimes wore it around his neck like a pendant." Yes. The youngster had been wearing it so that night in the Travellers' Rest, when -
Jonas turned the bird's skull. Something rattled inside like a last lonely thought. Jonas tilted it, shook it over his open palm, and a fragment of gold chain dropped out. That was how the boy had been wearing it. At some point the chain had broken, the skull had fallen in the ditch, and sai Heath had never troubled to go looking for it. The thought that someone might find it had probably never crossed his mind. Boys were careless. It was a wonder any ever grew up to be men.
Jonas's face remained calm as he knelt there examining the bird's skull, but behind the unlined brow he was as furious as he had ever been in his life. They had been out here, all right - it was another thing he would have scoffed at just yesterday. He had to assume they had seen the tankers, camouflage or no camouflage, and if not for the chance of finding this skull, he never would have known for sure, one way or the other.
"When I finish with em, their eyesockets'll be as empty as yours. Sir Rook. I'll gouge em clean myself."
He started to throw the skull away, then changed his mind. It might come in handy. Carrying it in one hand, he started back to where he'd left his horse.
7
Coral Thorin walked down High Street toward the Travellers' Rest, her head thumping rustily and her heart sour in her breast. She had been up only an hour, but her hangover was so miserable it felt like a day already. She was drinking too much of late and she knew it - almost every night now - but she was very careful not to take more than one or two (and always light ones) where folks could see. So far, she thought no one suspected. And as long as no one suspected, she supposed she would keep on. How else to bear her idiotic brother? This idiotic town? And, of course, the knowledge that all of the ranchers in the Horsemen's Association and at least half of the large landowners were traitors? "Fuck the Affiliation," she whispered. "Better a bird in the hand."
But did she really have a bird in the hand? Did any of them? Would 1-arson keep his promises - promises made by a man named Latigo and passed on by their own inimitable Kimba Rimer? Coral had her doubts; despots had such a convenient way of forgetting their promises, and birds in the hand such an irritating way of pecking your fingers, shitting in your palm, and then flying away. Not that it mattered now; she had made her bed. Besides, folks would always want to drink and gamble and rut, regardless of who they bowed their knees to or in whose name their taxes were collected.
Still, when the voice of old demon conscience whispered, a few drinks helped to still its lips.