“That was a bad one,” Eddie said. His voice sounded clogged and weepy. She looked around at him and saw his cheeks were wet, his eyes red. “Take it easy, Suzie-pie,” he said. “It’s my sinuses, that’s all. That sound kills em.”

“Me, too,” Susannah said.

“My sinuses are okay, but my head aches,” Jake said. “Roland, do you have any more aspirin?”

Roland stopped, rummaged, and found the bottle.

“Did you ever see Clay Reynolds again?” Jake asked, after swallowing the pills with water from the skin he carried.

“No, but I know what happened to him. He got a bunch together, some of them deserters from Farson’s army, went to robbing banks... in toward our part of the world, this was, but by then bank-thieves and stage-robbers didn’t have much to fear from gunslingers.”

“The gunslingers were busy with Farson,” Eddie said.

“Yes. But Reynolds and his men were trapped by a smart sheriff who turned the main street of a town called Oakley into a killing-zone. Six of the ten in the gang were killed outright. The rest were hung. Reynolds was one of those. This was less than a year later, during the time of Wide Earth.” He paused, then said: “One of those shot dead in the killing-zone was Coral Thorin. She had become Reynolds’s woman; rode and killed with the rest of them.”

They went on in silence for a bit. In the distance, the thinny warbled its endless song. Jake suddenly ran ahead to a parked camper. A note had been left under the wiper blade on the driver’s side. By standing on his toes, he was just able to reach it. He scanned it, frowning.

“What does it say?” Eddie asked.

Jake handed it over. Eddie looked, then passed it to Susannah, who read it in turn and gave it to Roland. He looked, then shook his head. “I can make out only a few words—old woman, dark man. What does the rest say? Read it to me.”

Jake took it back. “‘The old woman from the dreams is in Nebraska. Her name is Abagail.’” He paused. “Then, down here, it says, ‘The dark man is in the west. Maybe Vegas.’”

Jake looked up at the gunslinger, the note fluttering in his hand, his face puzzled and uneasy. But Roland was looking toward the palace which shimmered across the highway—the palace that was not in the west but in the east, the palace that was light, not dark.

“In the west,” Roland said. “Dark man, Dark Tower, and always in the west.”

“Nebraska’s west of here, too,” Susannah said hesitantly. “I don’t know if that matters, this Abagail person, but...”

“I think she’s part of another story,” Roland said.

“But a story close to this one,” Eddie put in. “Next door, maybe. Close enough to swap sugar for salt... or start arguments.”