He drank what happened to go in his mouth—the others could see his adam’s apple working as he lay back in the breakdown lane, still pouring—but drinking didn’t seem to be his primary purpose. Water streamed down his deeply lined forehead and bounced off his closed eyelids. It pooled in the triangular hollow at the base of his throat and ran back from his temples, wetting his hair and turning it darker.

At last he put the waterskin aside and only lay there, eyes closed, arms stretched out high above his head, like a man surrendering in his sleep. Steam rose in delicate tendrils from his wet face.

“Ahhh,” he said.

“Feel better?” Eddie asked.

The gunslinger’s lids rose, disclosing those faded yet somehow alarming blue eyes. “Yes. I do. I don’t understand how that can be, as much as I dreaded this telling... but I do.”

“An ologist-of-the-psyche could probably explain it to you,” Susannah said, “but I doubt you’d listen.” She put her hands in the small of her back, stretched and winced... but the wince was only reflex. The pain and stiffness she’d expected weren’t there, and although there was one small creak near the base of her spine, she didn’t get the satisfying series of snaps, crackles, and pops she had expected.

“Tell you one thing,” Eddie said, “this gives a whole new meaning to ‘Get it off your chest.’ How long have we been here, Roland?”

“Just one night.”

“‘The spirits have done it all in a single night,’” Jake said in a dreamy voice. His legs were crossed at the ankles; Oy sat in the diamond shape made by the boy’s bent knees, looking at him with his bright gold-black eyes.

Roland sat up, wiping at his wet cheeks with his neckerchief and looking at Jake sharply. “What is it you say?”

“Not me. A guy named Charles Dickens wrote that. In a story called A Christmas Carol. All in a single night, huh?”

“Does any part of your body say it was longer?”

Jake shook his head. No, he felt pretty much the way he did any morning—better than on some. He had to take a leak, but his back teeth weren’t exactly floating, or anything like that.

“Eddie? Susannah?”

“I feel good,” Susannah said. “Surely not as if I stayed up all night, let alone many of em.”

Eddie said, “It reminds me of the time I spent as a junkie, in a way—”

“Doesn’t everything?” Roland asked dryly.