Susannah heard him, but it was Blaine she was thinking of—Blaine who had gone away and left them alone, like the kid who’s been chosen “it” obediently covering his eyes while his playmates hide. And wasn’t that what they were? Blaine’s playmates? The thought was somehow worse than the image she’d had of trying the escape hatch and having her head torn off.

“So what do we do?” Eddie asked. “You must have an idea, or you never would have sent him away.”

“His great intelligence—coupled with his long period of loneliness and forced inactivity—may have combined to make him more human than he knows. That’s my hope, anyway. First, we must establish a kind of geography. We must tell, if we can, where he is weak and where he is strong, where he is sure of the game and where not so sure. Riddles are not just about the cleverness of the riddler, never think it. They are also about the blind spots of he who is riddled.”

“Does he have blind spots?” Eddie asked.

“If he doesn’t,” Roland said calmly, “we’re going to die on this train.”

“I like the way you kind of ease us over the rough spots,” Eddie said with a thin smile. “It’s one of your many charms.”

“We will riddle him four times to begin with,” Roland said. “Easy, not so easy, quite hard, very hard. He’ll answer all four, of that I am confident, but we will be listening for how he answers.”

Eddie was nodding, and Susannah felt a small, almost reluctant glimmer of hope. It sounded like the right approach, all right.

“Then we’ll send him away again and hold palaver,” the gunslinger said. “Mayhap we’ll get an idea of what direction to send our horses. These first riddles can come from anywhere, but”—he nodded gravely toward the book—“based on Jake’s story of the bookstore, the answer we really need should be in there, not in any memories I have of Fair-Day riddlings. Must be in there.”

“Question,” Susannah said.

Roland looked at her, eyebrows raised over his faded, dangerous eyes.

“It’s a question we’re looking for, not an answer,” she said. “This time it’s the answers that are apt to get us killed.”

The gunslinger nodded. He looked puzzled—frustrated, even—and this was not an expression Susannah liked seeing on his face. But this time when Jake held out the book, Roland took it. He held it for a moment (its faded but still gay red cover looked very strange in his big sunburned hands... especially in the right one, with its essential reduction of two fingers), then passed it on to Eddie.

“You’re easy,” Roland said, turning to Susannah.

“Perhaps,” she replied, with a trace of a smile, “but it’s still not a very polite thing to say to a lady, Roland.”