It was ten minutes or so after he heard the first of their buzzing cries when he looked up and saw the evening star glowing calmly against the dark blue velvet of the sky.

Heavenly shades of night are falling . . . it’s twilight time . . .

Let her be safe. His legs were already aching, his breath too hot and heavy in his lungs, and there was still a third trip to make, this time with the gunslinger as his passenger, and although he guessed Roland must outweigh Odetta by a full hundred pounds and knew he should conserve his strength, Eddie kept running anyway. Let her be safe, that’s my wish, let my beloved be safe.

And, like an ill omen, a wildcat screeched somewhere in the tortured ravines that cut through the hills . . . only this wildcat sounded as big as a lion roaring in an African jungle.

Eddie ran faster, pushing the untenanted gantry of the wheelchair before him. Soon the wind began to make a thin, ghastly whine through the freely turning spokes of the raised front wheels.

11

The gunslinger heard a reedy wailing sound approaching him, tensed for a moment, then heard panting breath and relaxed. It was Eddie. Even without opening his eyes he knew that.

When the wailing sound faded and the running footsteps slowed, Roland opened his eyes. Eddie stood panting before him with sweat running down the sides of his face. His shirt was plastered against his chest in a single dark blotch. Any last vestiges of the college-boy look Jack Andolini had insisted upon were gone. His hair hung over his forehead. He had split his pants at the crotch. The bluish-purple crescents under his eyes completed the picture. Eddie Dean was a mess.

“I made it,” he said. “I’m here.” He looked around, then back at the gunslinger, as if he could not believe it. “Jesus Christ, I’m really here.”

“You gave her the gun.”

Eddie thought the gunslinger looked bad—as bad as he’d looked before the first abbreviated round of Keflex, maybe a trifle worse. Fever-heat seemed to be coming off him in waves, and he knew he should have felt sorry for him, but for the moment all he could seem to feel was mad as hell.

“I bust my ass getting back here in record time and all you can say is ‘You gave her the gun.’ Thanks, man. I mean, I expected some expression of gratitude, but this is just over-fucking-whelming.”

“I think I said the only thing that matters.”

“Well, now that you mention it, I did,” Eddie said, putting his hands on his hips and staring truculently down at the gunslinger. “Now you have your choice. You can get in this chair or I can fold it and try to jam it up your ass. Which do you prefer, mawster?”

“Neither.” Roland was smiling a little, the smile of a man who doesn’t want to smile but can’t help it. “First you’re going to take some sleep, Eddie. We’ll see what we’ll see when the time for seeing comes, but for now you need sleep. You’re done in.”