“Not very convincing at all,” Eddie said, “and I think I’m just as close to you as I’m going to come, thanks. What lesson am I supposed to take from all this, Roland?”

Roland looked at him as one might look at an imbecile. “I didn’t send you out here to die, you know. I didn’t send either of you out here to die. Great gods, Eddie, where are your brains? She’s packing live iron!” His eyes regarded Eddie closely. “She’s someplace up in those hills. Maybe you think you can track her, but you’re not going to have any luck if the ground is as stony as it looks from here. She’s lying up there, Eddie, not Odetta but Detta, lying up there with live iron in her hand. If I leave you and you go after her, she’ll blow your guts out of your asshole.”

Another spasm of coughing set in.

Eddie stared at the coughing man in the wheelchair and the waves pounded and the wind blew its steady idiot’s note.

At last he heard his voice say, “You could have held back one shell you knew was live. I wouldn’t put it past you.” And with that said he knew it to be true: he wouldn’t put that or anything else past Roland.

His Tower.

His goddamned Tower.

And the slyness of putting the saved shell in the third cylinder! It provided just the right touch of reality, didn’t it? Made it hard not to believe.

“We’ve got a saying in my world,” Eddie said.

“ ‘That guy could sell Frigidaires to the Eskimos.’ That’s the saying.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means go pound sand.”

The gunslinger looked at him for a long time and then nodded. “You mean to stay. All right. As Detta she’s safer from . . . from whatever wildlife there may be around here . . . than she would have been as Odetta, and you’d be safer away from her—at least for the time being—but I can see how it is. I don’t like it, but I’ve no time to argue with a fool.”

“Does that mean,” Eddie asked politely, “that no one ever tried to argue with you about this Dark Tower you’re so set on getting to?”

Roland smiled tiredly. “A great many did, as a matter of fact. I suppose that’s why I recognize you’ll not be moved. One fool knows another. At any rate, I’m too weak to catch you, you’re obviously too wary to let me coax you close enough to grab you, and time’s grown too short to argue. All I can do is go and hope for the best. I’m going to tell you one last time before I do go, and hear me, Eddie: Be on your guard.”

Then Roland did something that made Eddie ashamed of all his doubts (although no less solidly set in his own decision): he flicked open the cylinder of the revolver with a practiced flick of his wrist, dumped all the loads, and replaced them with fresh loads from the loops closest to the buckles. He snapped the cylinder back into place with another flick of his wrist.