There was a phone line near them—they were making the fire near a telephone pole, so he knew they were on a main road, maybe the Tarmin road itself, and definitely, in that case, not far from real shelter. He hadn’t seen phone lines all the way up, and he remembered the Anveney road was the one—

But he didn’t want to think about that road. He just wasn’t sure what road they’d picked up, but there were the phone lines, and it did go off into Wild in either direction.

Stuart might be real near. But he didn’t want to think about Stuart at all, except he hoped Stuart had met up with Jonas and they were all out there in the bushes this very moment setting up to blow Harper and his friends to hell in a crossfire.

He really, really hoped Jonas wasn’t too mad at him.

He cast a furtive look at Harper, wondering that nobody had heard him, himself and Watt being in body contact at the moment. Maybe they were all thinking about the fire. Maybe everybody was too busy. Maybe Cloud was too cold to image. He hoped Cloud was all right out there in the cold.

But certainly he’d gotten away with more than he had this afternoon on the trail when Quig had elbowed him for thinking Quig was stupid.

Quig wasstupid.

Quig was reallystupid.

Still no notice.

Maybe they were just all too tired.

Maybe God was going to freeze them to death for punishment. He was in what his mother called bad company, he’d had no question of that, and it wasn’t God’s fault—stupidity had gotten him here.

Papa would be disgusted. Papa would have no respect for any of these men if they walked into his shop, loud and obnoxious, let alone the fact that they were riders. The men with Harper were scum. Nobodies, real nobodies. The Hallanslakers—who Harper was (by what Danny could gather) somehow kin to, or leader of, or both—thought a lot of things were funny that weren’t—and they were stupid.

Just damn-all mean, papa would call it. Anybody who was an outsider to them, like him, was a target, the way Stuart would have been a target when he’d worked with them. He understood now how that long ago knife-fight could have started. Stuart wouldn’t have backed down.

He didn’t want to know what they’d think up to do to himnow if there wasn’t Harper’s glum influence, and if there wasn’t Harper to knock heads when things got too rough. He couldn’t figure what hold Harper had over these men, except they’d wantedto go up that mountain: they’d egged each other on until they were blind, stupid tired and the weather turned on them. They’d challenged each other up that mountain because there was mischief to do, and they thought it was fun. They were men on the outside, but inside they were a nest of willy-wisps, all fangs and claws, all mean—he’d known boys like them in town, and he’d avoided them even before his father’d yanked him sideways, knocked him on the side of his head and said he expected brains in his sons and he expected his sons not to die stupid.

He’d never heard his father talk like that before and never since. But he’d remembered.

Then he’d gone to be a rider and his father didn’t talk to him about virtues at all now.

He’d not known everything before he left home—but, damn, he knew his father would have had the insight to have pitched any of the Hallanslakers and probably Harper out of the shop on first sight. He didn’t know where his father had learned about people like the boys his father had found him with, but his father had had them pegged, all right, and he’d gotten the measure of the Hallanslakers in the same way: eager to go up that mountain to do all the harm they could to Stuart, who’d, by all he could figure, never done any harm to them personally. About Harper’s motives—he didn’t want to think.

They just had to have a target for their meanness, he guessed, because if they didn’t have one, they just had each other to pick on.

And that wasn’t much fun, since they were too damn stupid to feel pain.

He could think that, with his knee right against Quig’s. That was really odd. He thought: Quig’s a pig, just to see—not wanting another elbow in the ribs.

But he was quiet and secret now—mad; but he’d grown far more canny in the passing hours. He’d had to be hit a couple of times, like with papa and the boys—and then, damn, yes, he did learn. He could keep his thoughts quiet.

Or Cloud wasn’t paying real close attention right now.

He stole a glance sidelong, saw Cloud about his own business, nibbling the weeds that still poked up above the snow at road’s edge.

But Cloud didn’t look up.

<Cloud,> he thought.

But he didn’t move his elbows when he thought it, and Cloud still didn’t look up—didn’t seem to notice at all.

Maybe he had a lot better luck being quiet if he wasn’t right in Cloud’s convenient view, attracting Cloud’s attention. There were trees in the way. He’d made himself ever so quiet, even wrestling with the tarp.

And that led him suddenly, while Watt was swearing at the tarp and Quig was a slightly less bearlike mass beside him, to the basic fact that he’d heard a hundred times but never, somehow, gotten through his head in reality—that he could think anything he liked if Cloud wasn’t in range, and he suddenly realized—astonished— that the fact that he heard uncommonly far wasn’t necessarily all Cloud’s doing. Cloud certainly didn’t seem to hear him right now.

And with that, he acquired a notion of howhe got a constant flow of images from farther than he was supposed to—dimbrained kid that he was, he naturally assumed when people called him noisy that it was some marvelous special gift he and Cloud had that nobody else did.

Special, hell. He fell off his horse and Cloud got into fights: it wasn’t exactly a shining performance on this trek. He’d annoyed two groups of seniors and nearly gotten shot on the last set-to because he couldn’t calm Cloud down.

Noise wasn’t exactly an advantage if you hadn’t any choice about it.

And Jonas had said that kids did it—and seniors didn’t—except Wesson, who needed to because of who he was.

So it wasn’t exactly a special gift, it was a special problem kids tended to have.

And if it ever was useful, this getting Cloud’s attention at a range at which most people didn’t have constant talk with their horses, it wasn’t alwaysuseful, witness the situation with Harper this afternoon.

When he was on the outs with people, he wanted Cloud’s attention; he just—wasn’t comfortable with people the way he was with Cloud, not even with his friends anymore, since the new had worn off him being a rider. Cloud was his friend. Cloud didn’t carp and criticize—

Maybe Cloud ought to criticize. Maybe somebody should have done what his father did and what Jonas did and what Quig had done—like tell him he was fouling up, mad as it made him. He was doing wrong with Cloud. Jonas had tried to tell him, but he’d been too righteous then to believe it.

Elbows still, Jonas had said. Knees still. Quit lookingat Cloud, which he began to realize was almost impossible for him—every two seconds he was reaching for Cloud, wanting to know where Cloud was, like a toddler running after his mother.

Which kept Cloud’s attention all the time on him and nervous. Other riders had seen it. He’d been the only one not to see it—and it turned out so damn simple: if he could just hold his body still and not demand Cloud’s constant attention, he could hate the sons of bitches as hard as he wanted. Horses could hear humans, just barely, but humans didn’t hear well enough to hear each other— he’d known that, sort of, as a townsman kid knew anything, even before Wesson had told him. And what that reallymeant had just slid off him as one of those details like long division, which he never liked so he never bothered to think about.