He considered the idea, then shook hishead. “We’ll load the ones that are left into the Ho Fat Tack-see, I think,along with some of the meat and chunks of ice from the stream to keep it cooland good.”

“The Taxi won’t be any good when we come tothe snow, will it?”

“No,” he admitted, “but by then the rest ofthe hides will be clothing and the meat will be eaten.”

“You just can’t stay here any longer,that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? You hear it calling. The Tower.”

Roland looked into the snapping fire andsaid nothing. Nor had to.

“What’ll we do about hauling our gunna whenwe come to the white lands?”

“Make a travois. And there’ll be plenty ofgame.”

She nodded and started to lie down. He tookher shoulders and turned her toward the fire, instead. His face came close tohers, and for a moment Susannah thought he meant to kiss her goodnight. Helooked long and hard at the crusted sore beside her mouth, instead.

“Well?” she finally asked. She could havesaid more, but he would have heard the tremor in her voice.

“I think it’s a little smaller. Once weleave the Badlands behind, it may heal on its own.”

“Do you really say so?”

The gunslinger shook his head at once. “Isay may. Now lie over, Susannah. Take your rest.”

“All right, but don’t you let me sleep latethis time. I want to watch my share.”

“Yes. Now lie over.”

She did as he said, and was asleep evenbefore her eyes closed.

Ten

She’s in Central Park and it’s coldenough to see her breath. The sky overhead is white from side to side, asnow-sky, but she’s not cold. No, not in her new deerskin coat, leggings, vest,and funny deerskin mittens. There’s something on her head, too, pulled downover her ears and keeping them as toasty as the rest of her. She takes the capoff, curious, and sees it’s not deerskin like the rest of her new clothing, buta red-and-green stocking cap. Written across the front is MERRY CHRISTMAS.

She looks at it, startled. Can you havedéjà vu in a dream? Apparently so. She looks around and thereare Eddie and Jake, grinning at her. Their heads are bare and she realizes shehas in her hands a combination of the caps they were wearing in some otherdream. She feels a great, soaring burst of joy, as if she has just solved somesupposedly insoluble problem: squaring the circle, let us say, or finding theUltimate Prime Number (take that, Blaine, may it bust ya brain, ya crazychoochoo train).

Eddie is wearing a sweatshirt that saysI DRINK NOZZ-A-LA!

Jake is wearing one that says I DRIVETHE TAKURO SPIRIT!

Both have cups of hot chocolate, theperfect kind mit schlag on top and little sprinkles of nutmeg dottingthe cream.

“What world is this?” she asks them, andrealizes that somewhere nearby carolers are singing “What Child Is This.”

“You must let him go his course alone,”says Eddie.

“Yar, and you must beware of Dandelo,”says Jake.

“I don’t understand,” Susannah says, andholds out her stocking cap to them. “Wasn’t this yours? Didn’t you share it?”

“It could be your hat, if you want it,”says Eddie, and then holds out his cup. “Here, I brought you hot chocolate.”

“No more twins,” says Jake. “There’sonly one hat, do ya not see.”

Before she can reply, a voice speaks outof the air and the dream begins to unravel. “NINETEEN,” says the voice.“This is NINETEEN, this is CHASSIT.”

With each word the world becomes moreunreal. She can see through Eddie and Jake. The good smell of hot chocolate isfading, being replaced by the smell of ash

(wednesday)

and leather. She sees Eddie’s lipsmoving and she thinks he’s saying a name, and then

Eleven

“Time to get up, Susannah,” Roland said.“It’s your watch.”

She sat up, looking around. The campfirehad burned low.

“I heard him moving out there,” Rolandsaid, “but that was some time ago. Susannah, are you all right? Were youdreaming?”

“Yes,” she said. “There was only one hat inthis dream, and I was wearing it.”

“I don’t understand you.”

Nor did she understand herself. The dreamwas already fading, as dreams do. All she knew for sure was that the name onEddie’s lips just before he faded away for good had been that of PatrickDanville.

Chapter V:

Joe Collins of Odd’sLane

One

Three weeks after the dream of one hat,three figures (two large, one small) emerged from a tract of upland forest andbegan to move slowly across a great open field toward more woods below. One ofthe large figures was pulling the other on a contraption that was more sledthan travois.

Oy raced back and forth between Roland andSusannah, as if keeping a constant watch. His fur was thick and sleek from coldweather and a constant diet of deermeat. The land the three of them werecurrently covering might have been a meadow in the warmer seasons, but now theground was buried under five feet of snow. The pulling was easier, becausetheir way was finally leading downward. Roland actually dared hope the worstwas over. And crossing the White Lands had not been too bad—at least, notyet. There was plenty of game, there was plenty of wood for their nightly fire,and on the four occasions when the weather turned nasty and blizzards blew,they had simply laid up and waited for the storms to wear themselves out on thewooded ridges that marched southeast. Eventually they did, although theangriest of these blizzards lasted two full days, and when they once more tookto the Path of the Beam, they found another three feet of new snow on theground. In the open places where the shrieking nor’east wind had been able torage fully, there were drifts like ocean waves. Some of these had buried tallpines almost to their tops.

After their first day in the White Lands,with Roland struggling to pull her (and then the snow had been less than a footdeep), Susannah saw that they were apt to spend months crossing those high,forested ridges unless Roland had a pair of snowshoes, so that first nightshe’d set out to make him a pair. It was a trial-and-error process (“By guessand by gosh” was how Susannah put it), but the gunslinger pronounced her thirdeffort a success. The frames were made of limber birch branches, the centers ofwoven, overlapping deerskin strips. To Roland they looked like teardrops.

“How did you know to do this?” he asked herafter his first day of wearing them. The increase in distance covered wasnothing short of amazing, especially once he had learned to walk with a kind ofrolling, shipboard stride that kept the snow from accumulating on the latticedsurfaces.

“Television,” Susannah said. “There used tobe this program I watched when I was a kid, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon.Sergeant Preston didn’t have a billy-bumbler to keep him company, but he didhave his faithful dog, King. Anyway, I closed my eyes and tried to rememberwhat the guy’s snowshoes looked like.” She pointed to the ones Roland waswearing. “That’s the best I could do.”

“You did fine,” he said, and the sincerityshe heard in his simple compliment made her tingle all over. This was notnecessarily the way she wanted Roland (or any other man, for that matter) tomake her feel, but she seemed stuck with it. She wondered if that was nature ornurture, and wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

“They’ll be all right as long as they don’tfall apart,” she allowed. Her first effort had done just that.

“I don’t feel the strips loosening,” hetold her. “Stretching a little, maybe, but that’s all.”