Twice, early on in those delirious weeks, they used the red rock in the wall at the back of the pavillion to arrange meetings, and then some deep voice spoke inside Roland’s head, telling him there must be no more of it—the rock might have been just the thing for children playing at secrets, but he and his love were no longer children; if they were discovered, banishment would be the luckiest punishment they could hope for. The red rock was too conspicuous, and writing things down—even messages that were unsigned and deliberately vague—was horribly dangerous.

Using Sheemie felt safer to both of them. Beneath his smiling light-mindedness there was a surprising depth of... well, discretion. Roland had thought long and hard before settling on that word, and it was the right word: an ability to keep silent that was more dignified than mere cunning. Cunning was out of Sheemie’s reach in any case, and always would be—a man who couldn’t tell a lie without shifting his eyes away from yours was a man who would never be considered cunning.

They used Sheemie half a dozen times over the five weeks when their physical love burned at its hottest—three of those times were to make meetings, two were to change meeting-places, and one was to cancel a tryst when Susan spied riders from the Piano Ranch sweeping for strays near the shack in the Bad Grass.

That deep, warning voice never spoke to Roland about Sheemie as it had about the dangers of the red rock... but his conscience spoke to him, and when he finally mentioned this to Susan (the two of them wrapped in a saddle-blanket and lying naked in each other’s arms), he found that her conscience had been troubling her, as well. It wasn’t fair to put the boy in the way of their possible trouble. After coming to that conclusion, Roland and Susan arranged their meetings strictly between the two of them. If she could not meet him, Susan said, she would hang a red shirt over the sill of her window, as if to dry. If he could not meet her, he was to leave a white stone in the northeast corner of the yard, diagonally across the road from Hookey’s Livery, where the town pump stood. As a last resort, they would use the red rock in the pavillion, risky or not, rather than bringing Sheemie into their affairs—their affair—again.