Now it was Roland’s turn to be surprised. “Are you sure? I did not come to take what belongs to you and yours, Old Mother.”

“I’m sure as sure can be. I’ve worn this day and night for over a hundred years, gunslinger. Now you shall wear it, and lay it at the foot of the Dark Tower, and speak the name of Talitha Unwin at the far end of the earth.” She slipped the chain over his head. The cross dropped into the open neck of his deerskin shirt as if it belonged there. “Go now. We have broken bread, we have held palaver, we have your blessing, and you have ours. Go your course in safety. Stand and be true.” Her voice trembled and broke on the last word.

Roland rose to his feet, then bowed and tapped his throat three times. “Thankee-sai.”

She bowed back, but did not speak. Now there were tears coursing down her cheeks.

“Ready?” Roland asked.

Eddie nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”

They walked down what remained of the town’s high street, Jake pushing Susannah’s wheelchair. As they passed the last building (TRADE amp; CHANGE, the faded sign read), he looked back. The old people were still gathered about the stone marker, a forlorn cluster of humanity in the middle of this wide, empty plain. Jake raised his hand. Up to this point he had managed to hold himself in, but when several of the old folks-Si, Bill, and Till among them-raised their own hands in return, Jake burst into tears himself.

Eddie put an arm around his shoulders. “Just keep walking, sport,” he said in an uneasy voice. “That’s the only way to do it.”

“They’re so old!” Jake sobbed. “How can we just leave them like this? It’s not right!”

“It’s ka,” Eddie said without thinking.

“Is it? Well ka suh-suh-sucks!”

“Yeah, hard,” Eddie agreed… but he kept walking. So did Jake, and he didn’t look back again. He was afraid they would still be there, standing at the center of their forgotten town, watching until Roland and his friends were out of view. And he would have been right.

14

THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.

“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practically waddling.”

Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and leisurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”

“Is your middle name really Cantor?”

“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”

“I won’t. Why didn’t we stay, Eddie?”

Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”

“Huh?”

“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on-oh, not to the front of the town, that’d be dangerous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what’s a few days, right?”

Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.

“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”

“So what would have been wrong with that?” Jake- asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”

“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I’m starting to sound just like him, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. “Maybe we’d see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn’t be polite to go until we’d dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They’re old, and have no more foot.” He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. “I tell you what-when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers.”

“They’ve been doing it a long time,” Roland said, “and I imagine they could show us a thing or two. They’ll manage. Meantime, let’s get that wood-it’s going to be a chilly night.”

But Jake wasn’t done with it yet. He was looking closely-almost sternly-at Eddie. “You’re saying we could never do enough for them, aren’t you?”

Eddie stuck out his lower lip and blew hair off his forehead. “Not exactly. I’m saving it would never be any easier to leave than it was today. Harder, maybe, but no easier.”

“It still doesn’t seem right.”

They reached the place that would become, once the fire was lit, just another campsite on the road to the Dark Tower. Susannah had eased herself out of her chair and was lying on her back with her hands behind her head, looking up at the stars. Now she sat up and began to arrange the wood in the way Roland had shown her months ago.

“Right is what all this is about,” Roland said. “But if you look too long at the small rights, Jake-the ones that lie close at hand- it’s easy to lose sight of the big ones that stand farther off. Things are out of joint-going wrong and getting worse. We see it all around us, but the answers are still ahead. While we were helping the twenty or thirty people left in River Crossing, twenty or thirty thousand more might be suffering or dying somewhere else. And if there is any place in the universe where these things can be set right, it’s at the Dark Tower.”

“Why? How?” Jake asked. “What is this Tower, anyway?”

Roland squatted beside the fire Susannah had built, produced his flint and steel, and began to flash sparks into the kindling. Soon small flames were growing amid the twigs and dried handfuls of grass. “I can’t answer those questions,” he said. “I wish I could.”

That, Eddie thought, was an exceedingly clever reply. Roland had said I can’t answer… but that wasn’t the same thing as I don’t know. Far from it.

15

SUPPER CONSISTED OF WATER and greens. They were all still recovering from the heavy meal they’d eaten in River Crossing; even Oy refused the scraps Jake offered him after the first one or two.

“How come you wouldn’t talk back there?” Jake scolded the bum-bier. “You made me look like an idiot!”

“Id-yit!” Oy said, and put his muzzle on Jake’s ankle.

“He’s talking better all the time,” Roland remarked. “He’s even starting to sound like you, Jake.”

“Ake,” Oy agreed, not lifting his muzzle. Jake was fascinated by the gold rings in Oy’s eyes; in the flickering light of the fire, they seemed to revolve slowly.

“But he wouldn’t talk to the old people.”

“Bumblers are choosy about that sort of thing,” Roland said. “They’re odd creatures. If I had to guess, I’d say this one was driven away by its own pack.”

“Why do you think so?”

Roland pointed at Oy’s flank. Jake had cleaned off the blood (Oy hadn’t enjoyed this, but had stood for it) and the bite was healing, although the bumbler still limped a little. “I’d bet an eagle that’s the bite of another bumbler.”