“Son of a bitch, oh you little sister-fucking son of a bitch!” Depape howled. He tried to draw and his revolver got caught in his serape. He was still trying to pull it free when a bullet from Roland’s gun opened his mouth in a red scream almost all the way down to his adam’s apple.

This can’t be happening, Jonas thought stupidly. It can’t, there are too many of us.

But it was happening. The In-World boys had struck unerringly at the fracture-line; were performing what amounted to a textbook example of how gunslingers were supposed to attack when the odds were bad. And Jonas’s coalition of ranchers, cowboys, and town tough-boys had shattered. Those not dead were fleeing to every point of the compass, spurring their horses as if a hundred devils paroled from hell were in pursuit. They were far from a hundred, but they fought like a hundred. Bodies were scattered in the dust everywhere, and as Jonas watched, he saw the one serving as their back door—Stockworth—ride down another man, bump him out of his saddle, and put a bullet in his head as he fell. Gods of the earth, he thought, that was Croydon, him that owns the Piano Ranch!

Except he didn’t own it anymore.

And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.

Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.

“Come any closer and I’ll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you are!”

Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror... or a wizard’s glass.

Jonas thought: Gods, it’s him! It’s Arthur Eld himself come to take me!

And as the barrel of Roland’s gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.

I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But surely he won’t risk the ball... he can’t risk the ball, he’s the dinh of this ka-tet and he can’t risk it...

“To me!” Jonas screamed. “To me, boys! They’re only three, for gods’ sake! To me, you cowards!”

But he was alone—Lengyll killed with his idiotic machine-gun lying by his side, Roy a corpse glaring up at the bitter sky, Quint fled, Hookey dead, the ranchers who had ridden with them gone. Only Clay still lived, and he was miles from here.

“I’ll smash it!” he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like death’s sleekest engine. “Before all the gods, I’ll—”