“I don’t want to smoke,” he said, standing up and stretching. His back made small crackling sounds. “I’m crazy to smoke at this hour of the morning. Too many cigarettes are apt to keep an old man like me awake.”

He walked toward the stairs, squeezing Pettie’s bare leg as he went by, also as Reynolds had done. At the foot of the stairs he looked back.

“I don’t want to kill them. Things are delicate enough without that. I’ll smell quite a little wrong on them and not lift a finger, no, not a single finger of my hand. But... I’d like to make them clear on their place in the great scheme o’ things.”

“Give them a sore paw.”

Jonas brightened. “Yessir, partner, maybe a sore paw’s just what I’d like to give them. Make them think twice about tangling with the Big Coffin Hunters later on, when it matters. Make them swing wide around us when they see us in their road. Yessir, that’s something to think about. It really is.”

He started up the stairs, chuckling a little, his limp quite pronounced—it got worse late at night. It was a limp Roland’s old teacher, Cort, might have recognized, for Cort had seen the blow which caused it. Cort’s own father had dealt it with an ironwood club, breaking Eldred Jonas’s leg in the yard behind the Great Hall of Gilead before taking the boy’s weapon and sending him west, gunless, into exile.

Eventually, the man the boy had become had found a gun, of course; the exiles always did, if they looked hard enough. That such guns could never be quite the same as the big ones with the sandalwood grips might haunt them for the rest of their lives, but those who needed guns could still find them, even in this world.

Reynolds watched until he was gone, then took his seat at Coral Thorin’s desk, shuffled the cards, and continued the game which Jonas had left half-finished.

Outside, the sun was coming up.

Chapter V

WELCOME TO TOWN

1

Two nights after arriving in the Barony of Mejis, Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain rode their mounts beneath an adobe arch with the words COME IN PEACE inscribed above it. Beyond was a cobblestone courtyard lit with torches. The resin which coated these had been doctored somehow so that the torches glowed different colors: green, orangey-red, a kind of sputtery pink that made Roland think of fireworks. He could hear the sound of guitars, the murmur of voices, the laughter of women. The air was redolent of those smells which would always remind him of Mejis: sea-salt, oil, and pine.