“Bullshit!” Eddie paused. “Why?”

“Because I loaded the gun I just fired with shells from the backs of my gunbelts—with shells that took the worst wetting, in other words. I did it just to pass the time while you were gone. Not that it takes much time to load a gun, even shy a pair of fingers, you understand!” Roland laughed a little, and the laugh turned into a cough he muzzled with an abridged fist. When the cough had subsided he went on: “But after you’ve tried to fire wets, you have to break the machine and clean the machine. Break the machine, clean the machine, you maggots—it was the first thing Cort, our teacher, drummed into us. I didn’t know how long it would take me to break down my gun, clean it, and put it back together with only a hand and a half, but I thought that if I intended to go on living—and I do, Eddie, I do—I’d better find out. Find out and then learn to do it faster, don’t you think so? Come a little closer, Eddie! Come a little closer for your father’s sake!”

“All the better to see you with, my child,” Eddie said, but did take a couple of steps closer to Roland. Only a couple.

“When the first slug I pulled the trigger on fired, I almost filled my pants,” the gunslinger said. He laughed again. Shocked, Eddie realized the gunslinger had reached the edge of delirium. “The first slug, but believe me when I say it was the last thing I had expected.”

Eddie tried to decide if the gunslinger was lying, lying about the gun, and lying about his condition as well. Cat was sick, yeah. But was he really this sick? Eddie didn’t know. If Roland was acting, he was doing a great job; as for guns, Eddie had no way of telling because he had no experience with them. He had shot a pistol maybe three times in his life before suddenly finding himself in a firefight at Balazar’s place. Henry might have known, but Henry was dead—a thought which had a way of constantly surprising Eddie into grief.

“None of the others fired,” the gunslinger said, “so I cleaned the machine, re-loaded, and fired around the chamber again. This time I used shells a little further toward the belt buckles. Ones which would have taken even less of a wetting. The loads we used to kill our food, the dry loads, were the ones closest to the buckles.”

He paused to cough dryly into his hand, then went on.

“Second time around I hit two live rounds. I broke my gun down again, cleaned it again, then loaded a third time. You just watched me drop the trigger on the first three chambers of that third loading.” He smiled faintly. “You know, after the first two clicks I thought it would be my damned luck to have filled the cylinder with nothing but wets. That wouldn’t have been very convincing, would it? Can you come a little closer, Eddie?”