The gunslinger came down the hill slowly, leading the donkey on which his waterskins sloshed. He paused by the edge of the lifeless-looking cornpatch, drew a drink from one of his skins to start the saliva, and spatinto the arid soil.

“Life for your crop.”

“Life for your own,” the dweller answered and stood up. His back popped audibly. He surveyed the gunslinger without fear. The little of his face visible between beard and hair seemed unmarked by the rot, and his eyes, while a bit wild, seemed sane.

“I don’t have anything but corn and beans,” he said. “Corn’s free, but you’ll have to kick something in for the

beans. A man brings them out once in a while. He don’t stay long.” The dweller laughed shortly. “Afraid of spirits.”

“I expect he thinks you’re one.”

“I expect he does.”

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. The dweller put out his hand. “Brown is my name.” The gunslinger shook his hand. As he did so, a scrawny

raven croaked from the low peak of the sod roof. The dwell er gestured at it briefly:

“That’s Zoltan.”

At the sound of its name the raven croaked again and flew across to Brown. It landed on the dweller’s head and roosted, talons firmly twined in the wild thatch of hair.

“Screw you,” Zoltan croaked brightly. “Screw you and the horse you rode in on.”

The gunslinger nodded amiably.

“Beans, beans, the musical fruit,” the raven recited, inspired. “The more you eat, the more you toot”

“You teach him that?”

“That’s all he wants to learn, I guess,” Brown said. “Tried to teach him The Lord’s Prayer once.” His eyes traveled out beyond the hut for a moment, toward the gritty, featureless hardpan. “Guess this ain’t Lord’s Prayer country. You’re a gunslinger. That right?”

“Yes.” He hunkered down and brought out his makings. Zoltan launched himself from Brown’s head and landed, flittering, on the gunslinger’s shoulder.

“After the other one, I guess.”

“Yes.” The inevitable question formed in his mouth:

“How long since he passed by?”

Brown shrugged. “I don’t know. Time’s funny out here. More than two weeks. Less than two months. The bean man’s been twice since he passed. I’d guess six weeks. That’s probably wrong.”

“The more you eat, the more you toot,” Zoltan said.

“Did he stop off?” the gunslinger asked.

Brown nodded. “He stayed supper, same as you will, I guess. We passed the time.”

The gunslinger stood up and the bird flew back to the roof, squawking. He felt an odd, trembling eagerness. “What did he talk about?”

Brown cocked an eyebrow at him. “Not much. Did it ever rain and when did I come here and had I buried my wife. I did most of the talking, which ain’t usual.” He paused. and the only sound was the stark wind. “He’s a sorcerer, ain’t he?”

“Yes.”

Brown nodded slowly. “I knew. Are you?”

“I’m just a man.”

“You’ll never catch him.”

“I’ll catch him.”

They looked at each other, a sudden depth of feeling between them, the dweller upon his dust-puff-dry ground, the gunslinger on the hardpan that shelved down to the desert. He reached for his flint.

“Here.” Brown produced a sulfur-headed match and struck it with a grimed nail. The gunslinger pushed the tip of his smoke into the flame and drew.

“Thanks.”

“You’ll want to fill your skins,” the dweller said, turning away. “Spring’s under the eaves in back. I’ll start dinner.”

The gunslinger stepped gingerly over the rows of corn and went around back. The spring was at the bottom of a hand-dug well, lined with stones to keep the powdery earth from caving. As he descended the rickety ladder, the gunslinger reflected that the stones must represent two years’ work easily – hauling, dragging, laying. The water was clear but slow-moving, and filling the skins was a long chore.

While he was topping the second, Zoltan perched on the lip of the well.

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” he advised.

He looked up, startled. The shaft was about fifteen feet deep: easy enough for Brown to drop a rock on him, break his head, and steal everything on him. A crazy or a rotter wouldn’t do it; Brown was neither. Yet he liked Brown, and so he pushed the thought out of his mind and got the rest of his water. What came, came.

When he came through the hut’s door and walked down the steps (the hovel proper was set below ground level, de signed to catch and hold the coolness of the nights), Brown was poking ears of corn into the embers of a tiny fire with a hardwood spatula. Two ragged plates had been set at op posite ends of a dun blanket. Water for the beans was just beginning to bubble in a pot hung over the fire.

“I’ll pay for the water, too.”

Brown did not look up. “The water’s a gift from God. Pappa Doc brings the beans.”

The gunslinger grunted a laugh and sat down with his back against one rude wall, folded his arms and closed his eyes. After a little, the smell of roasting corn came to his nose. There was a pebbly rattle as Brown dumped a paper of dry beans into the pot An occasional tak-tak-tak as Zoltan walked restlessly on the roof. He was tired; he had been going sixteen and sometimes eighteen hours a day between here and the horror that had occurred in Tull, the last vil lage. And he had been afoot for the last twelve days; the mule was at the end of its endurance.

Tak-tak-tak.

Two weeks, Brown had said, or as much as six. Didn’t matter. There had been calendars in Tull, and they had remembered the man in black because of the old man he had healed on his way through. Just an old man dying with

the weed. An old man of thirty-five. And if Brown was right, the man in black had lost ground since then. But the desert was next. And the desert would be hell.

Tak-tak-tak.

– Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.

He slept

Brown woke him up five hours later. It was dark. The only light was the dull cherry glare of the banked embers.

“Your mule has passed on,” Brown said. “Dinner’s ready.”

“How?”

Brown shrugged. “Roasted and boiled, how else? You picky?”

“No, the mule.”

“It just laid over, that’s all. It looked like an old mule.” And with a touch of apology: “Zoltan et the eyes.”

“Oh.” He might have expected it “All right”

Brown surprised him again when they sat down to the blanket that served as a table by asking a brief blessing: Rain, health, expansion to the spirit

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” The gunslinger asked him as Brown dropped three ears of hot corn onto his plate.

Brown nodded. “I think this is it.”

The beans were like bullets, the corn tough. Outside, the prevailing wind snuffled and whined around the ground-level eaves. He ate quickly, ravenously, drinking four cups of water with the meal. Halfway through, there

was a machine-gun rapping at the door. Brown got up and let Zoltan in. The bird flew across the room and hunched moodily in the corner.

“Musical fruit,” he muttered.

After dinner, the gunslinger offered his tobacco.

– Now. Now the questions will come.

But Brown asked no questions. He smoked and looked at the dying embers of the fire. It was already noticeably cooler in the hovel.

“Lead us not into temptation,” Zoltan said suddenly, apocalyptically.

The gunslinger started as if he had been shot at. He was suddenly sure that it was an illusion, all of it (not a dream, no; an enchantment), that the man in black had spun a spell and was trying to tell him something in a maddeningly obtuse, symbolic way.

“Have you been through Tull?” he asked suddenly.

Brown nodded. “Coming here, and once to sell corn. It rained that year. Lasted maybe fifteen minutes. The ground just seemed to open and suck it up. An hour later it was just as white and dry as ever. But the corn – God, the corn. You could see it grow. That wasn’t so bad. But you could hear it, as if the rain had given it a mouth. It wasn’t a happy sound. It seemed to be sighing and groaning its way out of the earth.” He paused. “I had extra, so I took it and sold it. Pappa Doc said he’d do it, but he would have cheated me. So I went.”