But she was jerked from the rat-run of her thoughts by a sound that came to her clearly in spite of the surf and wind: the heavy crack of a pistol-shot.

15

“I think you understand better than you let on,” Eddie said. “A whole hell of a lot better. You’d like for me to get in grabbing distance, that’s what I think.” He jerked his head toward the door without taking his eyes from Roland’s face. Unaware that not far away someone was thinking exactly the same thing, he added: “I know you’re sick, all right, but it could be you’re pretending to be a lot weaker than you really are. Could be you’re laying back in the tall grass just a little bit.”

“Could be I am,” Roland said, unsmiling, and added: “But I’m not.”

He was, though . . . a little.

“A few more steps wouldn’t hurt, though, would it? I’m not going to be able to shout much longer.” The last syllable turned into a frog’s croak as if to prove his point. “And I need to make you think about what you’re doing—planning to do. If I can’t persuade you to come with me, maybe I can at least put you on your guard . . . again.”

“For your precious Tower,” Eddie sneered, but he did come skidding halfway down the slope of ground he had climbed, his tattered tennies kicking up listless clouds of maroon dust.

“For my precious Tower and your precious health,” the gunslinger said. “Not to mention your precious life.”

He slipped the remaining revolver from the left holster and looked at it with an expression both sad and strange.

“If you think you can scare me with that—”

“I don’t. You know I can’t shoot you, Eddie. But I think you do need an object lesson in how things have changed. How much things have changed.” Roland lifted the gun, its muzzle pointing not toward Eddie but toward the empty surging ocean, and thumbed the hammer. Eddie steeled himself against the gun’s heavy crack.

No such thing. Only a dull click.

Roland thumbed the hammer back again. The cylinder rotated. He squeezed the trigger, and again there was nothing but a dull click.

“Never mind,” Eddie said. “Where I come from, the Defense Department would have hired you after the first misfire. You might as well qui—”

But the heavy KA-BLAM of the revolver cut off the word’s end as neatly as Roland had cut small branches from trees as a target-shooting exercise when he had been a student. Eddie jumped. The gunshot momentarily silenced the constant riiiiii of the insects in the hills. They only began to tune up again slowly, cautiously, after Roland had put the gun in his lap.

“What in hell does that prove?”

“I suppose that all depends on what you’ll listen to and what you refuse to hear,” Roland said a trifle sharply. “It’s supposed to prove that not all the shells are duds. Furthermore, it suggests—strongly suggests—that some, maybe even all, of the shells in the gun you gave Odetta may be live.”