“All right,” she said, “I’ll tell you why I’m looking at you that way, Roland. Because what you did was a mean trick. You said you wouldn’t slap me, couldn’t slap me, even if I cut up rough . . . but either you lied or you’re very stupid, and I know you ain’t stupid. People don’t always slap with their hands, as every man and woman of my race could testify. We have a little rhyme where I come from: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones—’ ”

“ ‘—yet taunts shall never wound me,’ ” Roland finished.

“Well, that’s not exactly the way we say it, but I guess it’s close enough. It’s bullshit no matter how you say it. They don’t call what you did a tongue-lashing for nothing. Your words hurt me, Roland—are you gonna stand there and say you didn’t know they would?”

She sat in her chair, looking up at him with bright, stern curiosity, and Roland thought—not for the first time—that the honk mahfahs of Susannah’s land must have been either very brave or very stupid to cross her, wheelchair or no wheelchair. And, having walked among them, he didn’t think bravery was the answer.

“I did not think or care about your hurt,” he said patiently. “I saw you show your teeth and knew you meant to bite, so I put a stick in your jaws. And it worked . . . didn’t it?”

Her expression was now one of hurt astonishment. “You bastard!”

Instead of replying, he took the gun from her holster, fumbled the cylinder open with the remaining two fingers on his right hand, and began to reload the chambers with his left hand.

“Of all the high-handed, arrogant—”

“You needed to bite,” he said in that same patient tone. “Had you not, you would have shot all wrong—with your hand and your gun instead of your eye and mind and heart. Was that a trick? Was it arrogant? I think not. I think, Susannah, that you were the one with arrogance in her heart. I think you were the one with a mind to get up to tricks. That doesn’t distress me. Quite the opposite. A gunslinger without teeth is no gunslinger.”

“Damn it, I’m not a gunslinger!”

He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler. “If we were playing a game, I might have behaved differently. But this is no game. It . . .”

His good hand went to his forehead for a moment and paused there, fingers tented just above the left temple. The tips of the fingers, she saw, were trembling minutely.

“Roland, what’s ailing you?” she asked quietly.

The hand lowered slowly. He rolled the cylinder back into place and replaced the revolver in the holster she wore. “Nothing.”

“Yes there is. I’ve seen it. Eddie has, too. It started almost as soon as we left the beach. It’s something wrong, and it’s getting worse.”