"If you please," Susannah said, thinking how wonderful all this was. How wonderful, how strange. Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

Up the road about forty feet from the others, the three men stood together. Overholser appeared to be doing all the talking, sometimes gesturing violently to punctuate a point. He spoke as if Roland were no more than some gunbunny hobo who happened to come drifting down the road with a few no-account friends riding drogue behind him. He explained to Roland that Tian Jaffords was a fool (albeit a well-meaning one) who did not understand the facts of life. He told Roland that Jaffords had to be restrained, cooled off, not only in his best interests but in those of the entire Calla. He insisted to Roland that if anything could be done, Wayne Overholser, son of Alan, would be first in line to do it; he'd never shirked a chore in his life, but to go against the Wolves was madness. And, he added, lowering his voice, speaking of madness, there was the Old Fella. When he kept to his church and his rituals, he was fine. In such things, a little madness made a fine sauce. This, however, was summat different. Aye, and by a long hike.

Roland listened to it all, nodding occasionally. He said almost nothing. And when Overholser was finally finished, Calla Bryn Sturgis's big farmer simply looked with a kind of fixed fascination at the gunman who stood before him. Mostly at those faded blue eyes.

"Are ye what ye say?" he asked finally. "Tell me true, sai."

"I'm Roland of Gilead," the gunslinger said.

"From the line of Eld? Ye do say it?"

"By watch and by warrant," Roland said.

"But Gilead…" Overholser paused. "Gilead's long gone."

"I," Roland said, "am not."

"Would ye kill us all, or cause us to be killed? Tell me, I beg."

"What would you, sai Overholser? Not later; not a day or a week or a moon from now, but at this minute?"

Overholser stood a long time, looking from Roland to Eddie and then back to Roland again. Here was a man not used to changing his mind; if he did so, it would hurt him like a rupture. From down the road came the laughter of the boys as Oy fetched something Benny had thrown-a stick almost as big as the bumbler was himself.

"I'd listen," Overholser said at last. "I'd do that much, gods help me, and say thankee."

"In other words he explained all the reasons why it was a fool's errand," Eddie told her later, "and then did exactly what Roland wanted him to do. It was like magic."

"Sometimes Roland is magic," she said.

The Calla's party had camped in a pleasant hilltop clearing not far south of the road but just enough off the Path of the Beam so that the clouds hung still and moveless in the sky, seemingly close enough to touch. The way there through the woods had been carefully marked; some of the blazes Susannah saw were as big as her palm. These people might be crackerjack farmers and stockmen, but it was clear the woods made them uneasy.

"May I spell ye on that chair a bit, young man?" Overholser asked Eddie as they began the final push upslope. Susannah could smell roasting meat and wondered who was tending to the cooking if the entire Callahan-Overholser party had come out to meet them. Had the woman mentioned someone named Andy? A servant, perhaps? She had. Overholser's personal? Perhaps. Surely a man who could afford a Stetson as grand as the one now tipped back on his head could afford a personal.

"Do ya," Eddie said. He didn't quite dare to add "I beg" (still sounds phony to him, Susannah thought), but he moved aside and gave over the wheelchair's push-handles to Overholser. The farmer was a big man, it was a fair slope, and now he was pushing a woman who weighed close on to a hundred and thirty pounds, but his breathing, although heavy, remained regular.

"Might I ask you a question, sai Overholser?" Eddie asked.

"Of course," Overholser replied.

"What's your middle name?"

There was a momentary slackening of forward motion; Susannah put this down to mere surprise. "That's an odd 'un, young fella; why d'ye ask?"

"Oh, it's a kind of hobby of mine," Eddie said. "In fact, I tell fortunes by em."

Careful, Eddie, careful, Susannah thought, but she was amused in spite of herself.

"Oh, aye?"

"Yes," Eddie said. "You, now. I'll bet your middle name begins with"-he seemed to calculate-"with the letter D." Only he pronounced it Deh, in the fashion of the Great Letters in the High Speech. "And I'd say it's short. Five letters? Maybe only four?"

The slackening of forward push came again. "Devil say please!" Overholser exclaimed. "How'd you know? Tell me!"

Eddie shrugged. "It's no more than counting and guessing, really. In truth, I'm wrong almost as often as I'm right."

"More often," Susannah said.

"Tell ya my middle name's Dale," Overholser said, "although if anyone ever explained me why, it's slipped my mind. I lost my folks when I was young."

"Sorry for your loss," Susannah said, happy to see that Eddie was moving away. Probably to tell Jake she'd been right about the middle name: Wayne Dale Overholser. Equals nineteen.

"Is that young man trig or a fool?" Overholser asked Susannah. "Tell me, I beg, for I canna' tell myself."

"A little of both," she said.

"No question about this push-chair, though, would you say? It's trig as a compass."

"Say thankya," she said, then gave a small inward sigh of relief. It had come out sounding all right, probably because she hadn't exactly planned on saying it.

"Where did it come from?"

"Back on our way a good distance," she said. This turn of the conversation did not please her much. She thought it was Roland's job to tell their history (or not tell it). He was their dinh. Besides, what was told by only one could not be contradicted. Still, she thought she could say a little more. "There's a thinny. We came from the other side of that, where things are much different." She craned around to look at him. His cheeks and neck had flushed, but really, she thought, he was doing very well for a man who had to be deep into his fifties. "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yar," he said, hawked, and spat off to the left. "Not that I've seen or heard it myself, you understand. I never wander far; too much to do on the farm. Those of the Calla aren't woodsy people as a rule, anyway, do ya kennit."

Oh yes, I think I kennit, Susannah thought, spying another blaze roughly the size of a dinner plate. The unfortunate tree so marked would be lucky to survive the coming winter.

"Andy's told of the thinny many and many-a. Makes a sound, he says, but can't tell what it is."

"Who's Andy?"

"Ye'll meet him for y'self soon enough, sai. Are'ee from this Calla York, like yer friends?"

"Yes," she said, again on her guard. He swung her wheelchair around a hoary old ironwood. The trees were sparser now, and the smell of cooking much stronger. Meat… and coffee. Her stomach rumbled.

"And they be not gunslingers," Overholser said, nodding at Jake and Eddie. "You'll not tell me so, surely."

"You must decide that for yourself when the time comes," Susannah said.

He made no reply for a few moments. The wheelchair rumbled over a rock outcropping. Ahead of them, Oy padded along between Jake and Benny Slightman, who had made friends with boyhood's eerie speed. She wondered if it was a good idea. For the two boys were different. Time might show them how much, and to their sorrow.

"He scared me," Overholser said. He spoke in a voice almost too low to hear. As if to himself. " 'Twere his eyes, I think. Mostly his eyes."