Roland stirred. The pink sockets where his eyes had been seemed to grow. His mouth flattened into the line of bitter determination they both knew well.

“No! It will not stand!” he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland’s voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man.

“No,” Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert sat up before the campfire. “That was the voice of a king.”

Now, however, the two of them only looked at their absent, roaring friend, paralyzed with fright.

“When I come here in my body, it will not stand! I swear on my father’s name, IT WILL NOT STAND!”

Then, as Roland’s unnaturally pink face contorted, like the face of a man who confronts some unimaginable horror, Cuthbert and Alain lunged forward. It was no longer a question of perhaps destroying him in an effort to save him; if they didn’t do something, the glass would kill him as they watched.

In the dooryard of the Bar K, it had been Cuthbert who clipped Roland; this time Alain did the honors, administering a hard right to the center of the gunslinger’s forehead. Roland tumbled backward, the ball spilling out of his loosening hands and the terrible pink light leaving his face. Cuthbert caught the boy and Alain caught the ball. Its heavy pink glow was weirdly insistent, beating at his eyes and pulling at his mind, but Alain stuffed it resolutely into the drawstring bag again without looking at it... and as he pulled the cord, yanking the bag’s mouth shut, he saw the pink light wink out, as if it knew it had lost. For the time being, at least.

He turned back, and winced at the sight of the bruise puffing up from the middle of Roland’s brow. “Is he—”

“Out cold,” Cuthbert said.

“He better come to soon.”

Cuthbert looked at him grimly, with not a trace of his usual amiability. “Yes,” he said, “you’re certainly right about that.”

7