“Do you have any ideas?” Susannah asked. Her eyes were wide and wet with tears. “Maybe we should wake him up?”

“I don’t know.” Eddie saw the gunslinger’s revolver, the one he wore on his left hip. It had been placed, in its holster, on a neatly folded square of hide within easy reach of the place where Roland lay. “I don’t think I dare,” he added at last.

“It’s driving him crazy.”

Eddie nodded.

“What do we do about it? Eddie, what do we do?”

Eddie didn’t know. An antibiotic had stopped the infection caused by the bite of the lobster-thing; now Roland was burning with infection again, but Eddie didn’t think there was an antibiotic in the world that would cure what was wrong with him this time.

“I don’t know. Lie down with me, Suze.”

Eddie threw a hide over both of them, and after a while her trembling quieted.

“If he goes insane, he may hurt us,” she said.

“Don’t I know it.” This unpleasant idea had occurred to him in terms of the bear—its red, hate-filled eyes (and had there not been bewilderment as well, lurking deep in those red depths?) and its deadly slashing claws. Eddie’s eyes moved to the revolver, lying so close to the gunslinger’s good left hand, and he remembered again how fast Roland had been when he’d seen the mechanical bat swooping down toward them. So fast his hand had seemed to disappear. If the gunslinger went mad, and if he and Susannah became the focus of that madness, they would have no chance. No chance at all.

He pressed his face into the warm hollow of Susannah’s neck and closed his eyes.

Not long after, Roland ceased his babbling. Eddie raised his head and looked over. The gunslinger appeared to be sleeping naturally again. Eddie looked at Susannah and saw that she had also gone to sleep. He lay down beside her, gently kissed the swell of her breast, and closed his own eyes.

Not you, buddy; you’re gonna be awake a long, long time.

But they had been on the move for two days and Eddie was bone-tired. He drifted off... drifted down.

Back to the dream, he thought as he went. I want to go back to Second Avenue... back to Tom and Gerry’s. That’s what I want.

The dream did not return that night, however.

30

THEY ATE A QUICK breakfast as the sun came up, repacked and redistributed the gear, and then returned to the wedge-shaped clearing. It didn’t look quite so spooky in the clear light of morning, but all three of them were still at pains to keep well away from the metal box with its warning slashes of black and yellow. If Roland had any recollection of the bad dreams which had haunted him in the night, he gave no sign. He had gone about the morning chores as he always did, in thoughtful, stolid silence.

“How do you plan to keep to a straight-line course from here?” Susannah asked the gunslinger.