14

THEY HAD MADE LESS than seven miles before the sky began to darken and sunset colored the western horizon blaze orange. There was a grove of Susannah’s eucalyptus trees nearby; Jake and Eddie foraged there for wood.

“I just don’t see why we didn’t stay,” Jake said. “The blind lady invited us, and we didn’t get very far, anyway. I’m still so full I’m practically waddling.”

Eddie smiled. “Me, too. And I can tell you something else: your good friend Edward Cantor Dean is looking forward to a long and leisurely squat in this grove of trees first thing tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how tired I am of eating deermeat and crapping rabbit-turds. If you’d told me a year ago that a good dump would be the high point of my day, I would have laughed in your face.”

“Is your middle name really Cantor?”

“Yes, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around.”

“I won’t. Why didn’t we stay, Eddie?”

Eddie sighed. “Because we would have found out they needed firewood.”

“Huh?”

“And after we got the firewood, we would’ve found they also needed fresh meat, because they served us the last of what they had. And we’d be real creeps not to replace what we ate, right? Especially when we’re packing guns and the best they can probably do is a bunch of bows and arrows fifty or a hundred years old. So we would have gone hunting for them. By then it would be night again, and when we got up the next day, Susannah would be saying we ought to at least make a few repairs before we moved on—oh, not to the front of the town, that’d be dangerous, but maybe in the hotel or wherever it is they live. Only a few days, and what’s a few days, right?”

Roland materialized out of the gloom. He moved as quietly as ever, but he looked tired and preoccupied. “I thought maybe you two fell into a quickpit,” he said.

“Nope. I’ve just been telling Jake the facts as I see them.”

“So what would have been wrong with that?” Jake asked. “This Dark Tower thingy has been wherever it is for a long time, right? It’s not going anywhere, is it?”

“A few days, then a few more, then a few more.” Eddie looked at the branch he had just picked up and threw it aside disgustedly. I’m starting to sound just like him, he thought. And yet he knew that he was only speaking the truth. “Maybe we’d see that their spring is getting silted up, and it wouldn’t be polite to go until we’d dug it out for them. But why stop there when we could take another couple of weeks and build a jackleg waterwheel, right? They’re old, and have no more foot.” He glanced at Roland, and his voice was tinged with reproach. “I tell you what—when I think of Bill and Till there stalking a herd of wild buffalo, I get the shivers.”