“No question about this push-chair, though, would you say? It’s trig as a compass.”

“Say thankya,” she said, then gave a small inward sigh of relief. It had come out sounding all right, probably because she hadn’t exactly planned on saying it.

“Where did it come from?”

“Back on our way a good distance,” she said. This turn of the conversation did not please her much. She thought it was Roland’s job to tell their history (or not tell it). He was their dinh. Besides, what was told by only one could not be contradicted. Still, she thought she could say a little more. “There’s a thinny. We came from the other side of that, where things are much different.” She craned around to look at him. His cheeks and neck had flushed, but really, she thought, he was doing very well for a man who had to be deep into his fifties. “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yar,” he said, hawked, and spat off to the left. “Not that I’ve seen or heard it myself, you understand. I never wander far; too much to do on the farm. Those of the Calla aren’t woodsy people as a rule, anyway, do ya kennit.”

Oh yes, I think I kennit,Susannah thought, spying another blaze roughly the size of a dinner plate. The unfortunate tree so marked would be lucky to survive the coming winter.

“Andy’s told of the thinny many and many-a. Makes a sound, he says, but can’t tell what it is.”

“Who’s Andy?”

“Ye’ll meet him for y’self soon enough, sai. Are’ee from this Calla York, like yer friends?”

“Yes,” she said, again on her guard. He swung her wheelchair around a hoary old ironwood. The trees were sparser now, and the smell of cooking much stronger. Meat…and coffee. Her stomach rumbled.

“And they be not gunslingers,” Overholser said, nodding at Jake and Eddie. “You’ll not tell me so, surely.”

“You must decide that for yourself when the time comes,” Susannah said.

He made no reply for a few moments. The wheelchair rumbled over a rock outcropping. Ahead of them, Oy padded along between Jake and Benny Slightman, who had made friends with boyhood’s eerie speed. She wondered if it was a good idea. For the two boys were different. Time might show them how much, and to their sorrow.

“He scared me,” Overholser said. He spoke in a voice almost too low to hear. As if to himself. “ ’Twere his eyes, I think. Mostly his eyes.”

“Would you go on as you have, then?” Susannah asked. The question was far from as idle as she hoped it sounded, but she was still startled by the fury of his response.