“I want to get back to her.”

“I do, too. But if you don’t rest, you’re going to fall down in the traces. Simple as that. Bad for you, worse for me, and worst of all for her.”

Eddie stood for a moment, undecided.

“You made good time,” the gunslinger conceded. He squinted at the sun. “It’s four, maybe a quarter-past. You sleep five, maybe seven hours, and it’ll be full dark—”

“Four. Four hours.”

“All right. Until after dark; I think that’s the important thing. Then you eat. Then we move.”

“You eat, too.”

That faint smile again. “I’ll try.” He looked at Eddie calmly. “Your life is in my hands now; I suppose you know that.”

“Yes.”

“I kidnapped you.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to kill me? If you do, do it now rather than subject any of us to . . .” His breath whistled out softly. Eddie heard his chest rattling and cared very little for the sound. “. . . to any further discomfort,” he finished.

“I don’t want to kill you.”

“Then—” he was interrupted by a sudden harsh burst of coughing “—lie down,” he finished.

Eddie did. Sleep did not drift upon him as it sometimes did but seized him with the rough hands of a lover who is awkward in her eagerness. He heard (or perhaps this was only a dream) Roland saying, But you shouldn’t have given her the gun, and then he was simply in the dark for an unknown time and then Roland was shaking him awake and when he finally sat up all there seemed to be in his body was pain: pain and weight. His muscles had turned into rusty winches and pullies in a deserted building. His first effort to get to his feet didn’t work. He thumped heavily back to the sand. He managed it on the second try, but he felt as if it might take him twenty minutes just to perform such a simple act as turning around. And it would hurt to do it.

Roland’s eyes were on him, questioning. “Are you ready?”

Eddie nodded. “Yes. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Can you?”

“Yes.”

So they ate . . . and then Eddie began his third and last trip along this cursed stretch of beach.

12

They rolled a good stretch that night, but Eddie was still dully disappointed when the gunslinger called a halt. He offered no disagreement because he was simply too weary to go on without rest, but he had hoped to get further. The weight. That was the big problem. Compared to Odetta, pushing Roland was like pushing a load of iron bars. Eddie slept four more hours before dawn, woke with the sun coming over the eroding hills which were all that remained of the mountains, and listened to the gunslinger coughing. It was a weak cough, full of rales, the cough of an old man who may be coming down with pneumonia.

Their eyes met. Roland’s coughing spasm turned into a laugh.