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No! Da
“No,” the camp-boss growled, and hammered the table with his fist. Crippled in a fall, and survivor of one horse already, Lyle Wesson might ride when he had to go any distance and he might use a stick when he had to cross between two tables in the tavern, but the strength in the man and the force of mind in old Dart made the skittery, jittery feelings in the air subside instantly, and let a scared junior sink gladly back into his seat with his objection unmade, at the same time the Hallanslakers sat down, sullen-minded and angry and not giving in.
A junior hadn’tany right to speak ahead of the seniors, except he was Shamesey-born, and they were Shamesey townsfolk who’d shot Guil Stuart tonight, calling Stuart a threat, which wasn’t at all the truth, the way Stuart’s horse wasn’t a rogue. He knewit wasn’t, but more surely, Cloud knew, the rest of the horses knew, and the boss-man knew, so the whole camp had to know. They were here to talk about the rogue that had spooked a convoy off the road on Rogers Peak, and here were Harper and his friends talking as if Stuart was the real threat, right here in Shamesey. The whole camp had lost their minds. Or it was the spooked riders, the ones that had come in with the news. Theywere here, and maybe the source of what Harper thought he felt. Fear of a rogue had gotten loose in the camp, and after that, it came from everywhere. But a junior couldn’t stand up and say his seniors were all being fooled.
Fact was, half the riders in the meeting weren’t wholly sober, some were surly—a couple were unconscious, face down on the tables, though a whole lot had sobered when the gunfire went off, and more when the boss-man had said there was Meeting, now, fast.
He was one who had sobered mightily, even before Wesson’s call—and he’d tried, well knowing that he wasn’t at his sharpest, and far from experienced in a situation like this, to do exactly what the boss had said, namely to keep his mind quiet, because even with the whole Gate Tavern yard and the open commons for the Meeting, even with all the horses except Dart requested out of the gate area so that humans had to say things aloud to each other and not image at all, he wasn’t sure things didn’t leak out and get back and forth to horses and humans anyway, the way they’d certainly done a couple of hours ago, when the horses had all caught the same image at once.
Ancel Harper said he’d seen a rogue once. He said he’d seen a dozen riders go with it. He said it was like what they’d just felt, only a hundred times worse… he said a rogue could send over an entire valley, and trick you into seeing things where they weren’t, and make you want it bad until it killed you, because that was what it would do when you got close to it.
Harper said there was one cure, an ounce of lead.
Harper and the Hallanslakers—Da
But by the time he’d figured out what Harper and his lot stood for, there were more moderate voices, older riders, to stand up one by one and severally and demand that the camp-boss should deal with Shamesey town and negotiate Stuart’s right to come back when he was indisputably sane, as riders could clearly judge better than townsmen.
“Now wait,” another rider stood up to say, now, Yeats, a senior Shamesey rider. “Now, I don’t agree with the Hallanslakers, that we need go shooting at shadows—but I don’t hold we should take Stuart’s side against the town, either. It sets a bad precedent, a badprecedent, backing a rider who breaks the major rules.”
“Now, wait a minute,” a woman said.
“Rules,” Yeats said, raising his voice, “as seem clear enough to us. Stuart stayed on in the area, Stuart came near the walls. The watch hadn’t a right to shoot, but they were skittish, they had a crowd out there—”
“Damn right, they haven’t a right!” came from the back.
“It was Stuart’s doing that a crowd gathered,” Yeats shouted, “and it was Stuart’s fault! If Stuart had a sane thought left, he should have got the hell all the way out of Shamesey fields when he knew he was losing his hold. But he doesn’t want out of Shamesey district, does he? That’s why he’s stayed out there!”
“God’s sake, Yeats!” A borderer stood up, wobbly on his feet. “You got his gear and you got his gun—he come back after his gear, you damn fool!”
“I got the floor! I’m saying we got excitable townsmen all over, we got horses upset, we got riders upset—it shows clear enough what we’ve been saying for three years, now: boss-man, you got to thin the camp down—”
Riders hooted, from all over the assembly.
“Yeah, you go first, Yeats!” somebody yelled from back in the crowd, then the drunk borderer was yelling something, not sitting down, and Wesson banged on the porch with his cane. Dart started imaging <Still water. Still grass,> until at last Yeats and the borderer sat down, and the silence was thick enough you could breathe it.
Yeats was off on a different issue: the number of riders gathered at Shamesey—and Shamesey riders had argued before against letting the camp get as large, and consequently as unstable, as it was—but the riders that came from outside said it was just Shamesey riders wanting exclusivity on the best jobs and the comforts of the biggest town there was.
“Jim,” Wesson said, “keep to the Stuart business.”
“It isthe Stuart business,” Yeats said. “This is what we’re going to get more of if we don’t thin down the winter-camp and put some restrictions on how many out-of-district riders we’re going to camp here! Shamesey valley’s big enough—build a camp down at the end of the valley! Build it up on the foothills! There’s no way the snows are going to cut off valley roads!”
“Yeah, on whose land?” somebody yelled. “The town Council isn’t going to give up a foot of pasture!”
Yeats was right, in Da
Unfortunately so was the rider right when he yelled out about the council not giving up any land: rich people decided everything, and the rich people in Shamesey didn’t feel the dreams that came through the camp walls on an uneasy, stormy night, didn’t lose sleep the night through with the autumn urges—only people like his family did, old and young alike, and girls got pregnant and godly folk prayed and sweated and prayed to send the devils away. It was the lowtown folk who’d come out with guns. People like his family. It was people like his father and his mother and his brothers who’d gone stark crazy and shot at Stuart.
People of the same town-bound, mind-blind sort that he’d used to be, before Cloud called him in his dreams.
He hoped Denis hadn’t gotten swept up in the crowd that was shooting; he desperately wanted to know where his family was and that they were safe. But he couldn’t go into town tonight. Maybe not for a lot of nights. Couldn’t—a lump formed in his throat—so much as offer his help to his father to keep him safe, when he could do as much for any trucker in the outback.
“All that’s beside the point,” a borderer stood up to say. “What Shamesey is, Shamesey chose to be. It can’t ever go back to being a small town. We get your trucks through and we got our right to camp here. And the whole damn valley had better get off Stuart’s back. This town had better hope Stuart goes up to Tarmin and finds what’s up there before winter falls, or you’re losing Anveney province, Shamesey boss. That thing that got Aby Dale won’t stay away from the villages up there. And maybe if it gets a village or two, it might come down to Shamesey to hunt around spring melt. When a horse goes bad, it wantshuman company, and there’s nothing but a bullet through the brain can stop it. So you better quit arguing about how many riders we have in this camp and Stuart and your piddlin’ rules—and start worrying about that rogue horse up there!”