5

JAKE FELT SOMETHING FURRY against his ankle and looked down. Oy was crouched beside him, looking more anxious than ever. Jake reached down and cautiously stroked his head, as much to receive comfort as to give it. Its fur was silky, incredibly soft. For a moment he thought the bumbler was going to run, but it only looked up at him, licked his hand, and then looked back at the two new people. The man was trying to help the woman to her feet and not succeeding very well. Her head craned this way and that in avid confusion.

The man named Si had cut his palms on the cobblestones, but he took no notice. He gave up trying to help the woman, swept off his sombrero, and held it over his chest. To Jake the hat looked as big as a bushel basket. “We bid ye welcome, gunslinger!” he cried. “Welcome indeed! I thought all your kind had perished from the earth, so I did!”

“I thank you for your welcome,” Roland said in the High Speech. He put his hands gently on the blind woman’s upper arms. She cringed for a moment, then relaxed and allowed him to help her up. “Put on your hat, old-timer. The sun is hot.”

He did, then just stood there, looking at Roland with shining eyes. After a moment or two, Jake realized what that shine was. Si was crying.

“A gunslinger! I told you, Mercy! I seen the shooting-iron and told you!”

“No harriers?” she asked, as if unable to believe it. “Are you sure they ain’t harriers, Si?”

Roland turned to Eddie. “Make sure of the safety and then give her Jake’s gun.”

Eddie pulled the Ruger from his waistband, checked the safety, and then put it gingerly in the blind woman’s hands. She gasped, almost dropped it, then ran her hands over it wonderingly. She turned the empty sockets where her eyes had been up to the man. “A gun!” she whispered. “My sainted hat!”

“Ay, some kind,” the old man replied dismissively, taking it from her and giving it back to Eddie, “but the gunslinger’s got a real one, and there’s a woman got another. She’s got a brown skin, too, like my da’ said the people of Garlan had.”

Oy gave his shrill, whistling bark. Jake turned and saw more people coming up the street—five or six in all. Like Si and Mercy, they were all old, and one of them, a woman hobbling over a cane like a witch in a fairy-tale, looked positively ancient. As they neared, Jake realized that two of the men were identical twins. Long white hair spilled over the shoulders of their patched homespun shirts. Their skin was as white as fine linen, and their eyes were pink. Albinos, he thought.

The crone appeared to be their leader. She hobbled toward Roland’s party on her cane, staring at them with gimlet eyes as green as emeralds. Her toothless mouth was tucked deeply into itself. The hem of the old shawl she wore fluttered in the prairie breeze. Her eyes settled upon Roland.