“Oh yeah?” she breathed. “That so?”

“It is. Now say your lesson, Susannah Dean, and be true.”

This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice. Her right hand trembled lightly on the arm of her wheelchair like an idling engine.

“ ‘I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.

“ ‘I aim with my eye.’ ”

“Good.”

“ ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.

“ ‘I shoot with my mind.’ ”

“So it has ever been, Susannah Dean.”

“ ‘I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.

“ ‘I kill with my heart.’ ”

“Then KILL them, for your father’s sake!” Roland shouted. “KILL THEM ALL!”

Her right hand was a blur between the arm of the chair and the butt of Roland’s sixgun. It was out in a second, her left hand descending, fanning at the hammer in flutters almost as swift and delicate as the wing of a hummingbird. Six flat cracks pealed off across the valley, and five of the six chips of stone set atop the boulder blinked out of existence.

For a moment neither of them spoke—did not even breathe, it seemed—as the echoes rolled back and forth, dimming. Even the crows were silent, at least for the time being.

The gunslinger broke the silence with four toneless yet oddly emphatic words: “It is very well.”

Susannah looked at the gun in her hand as if she had never seen it before. A tendril of smoke rose from the barrel, perfectly straight in the windless silence. Then, slowly, she returned it to the holster below her bosom.

“Good, but not perfect,” she said at last. “I missed one.”

“Did you?” He walked over to the boulder and picked up the remaining chip of stone. He glanced at it, then tossed it to her.

She caught it with her left; her right stayed near the holstered gun, he saw with approval. She shot better and more naturally than Eddie, but had not learned this particular lesson as swiftly as Eddie had done. If she had been with them during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub, she might have. Now, Roland saw, she was at last learning that, too. She looked at the stone and saw the notch, barely a sixteenth of an inch deep, in its upper corner.

“You only clipped it,” Roland said, returning to her, “but in a shooting scrape, sometimes that’s all you need. If you clip a fellow, throw his aim off . . .” He paused. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

“You don’t know, do you? You really don’t?”

“No. Your mind is often closed to me, Susannah.”

There was no defensiveness in his voice, and Susannah shook her head in exasperation. The rapid turn-and-turn-about dance of her personality sometimes unnerved him; his seeming inability to say anything other than exactly what was on his mind never failed to do the same to her. He was the most literal man she had ever met.