“Hail, gunslinger! Well met!” She spoke the High Speech herself, and, like Eddie and Susannah, Jake understood the words perfectly, although he guessed they would have been gibberish to him in his own world. “Welcome to River Crossing!”

The gunslinger had removed his own hat, and now he bowed to her, tapping his throat three times, rapidly, with his diminished right hand. “Thankee-sai, Old Mother.”

She cackled freely at this and Eddie suddenly realized Roland had at the same time made a joke and paid a compliment. The thought which had already occurred to Susannah now came to him: This is how he was... and this is what he did. Part of it, anyway.

“Gunslinger ye may be, but below your clothes you’re but another foolish man,” she said, lapsing into low speech.

Roland bowed again. “Beauty has always made me foolish, Mother.”

This time she positively cawed laughter. Oy shrank against Jake’s leg. One of the albino twins rushed forward to catch the ancient as she rocked backward within her dusty cracked shoes. She caught her balance on her own, however, and made an imperious shooing gesture with one hand. The albino retreated.

“Be ye on a quest, gunslinger?” Her green eyes gleamed shrewdly at him; the puckered pocket of her mouth worked in and out.

“Ay,” Roland said. “We go in search of the Dark Tower.”

The others only looked puzzled, but the old woman recoiled and forked the sign of the evil eye—not at them, Jake realized, but to the southeast, along the path of the Beam.

“I’m sorry to hear it!” she cried. “For no one who ever went in search of that black dog ever came back! So said my grandfather, and his grandfather before him! Not ary one!”

“Ka,” the gunslinger said patiently, as if this explained everything... and, Jake was coming to realize, to Roland it did.

“Ay,” she agreed, “black dog ka! Well-a-well; ye’ll do as ye’re called, and live along your path, and die when it comes to the clearing in the trees. Will ye break bread with us before you push on, gunslinger? You and your band of knights?”

Roland bowed again. “It has been long and long since we have broken bread in company other than our own, Old Mother. We cannot stay long, but yes—we’ll eat your food with thanks and pleasure.”

The old woman turned to the others. She spoke in a cracked and ringing voice—yet it was the words she spoke and not the tone in which they were spoken that sent chills racing down Jake’s back: “Behold ye, the return of the White! After evil ways and evil days, the White comes again! Be of good heart and hold up your heads, for ye have lived to see the wheel of ka begin to turn once more!”

6

THE OLD WOMAN, WHOSE name was Aunt Talitha, led them through the town square and to the church with the leaning spire—it was The Church of the Blood Everlasting, according to the faded board on the run-to-riot lawn. Written over the words, in green paint that had faded to a ghost, was another message: DEATH TO GRAYS.