“Then I and my friends will thank you for your hospitality and ride on,” Roland said, “for we have our own business farther along the Path of the Beam.” He observed Tian’s and Zalia’s crestfallen faces for a moment, then said: “I don’t think that’s likely, you know. There’s usually a way.”

“May the meeting receive your judgment favorably,” Overholser said.

Roland hesitated. This was the point where he could hammer the truth home, should he want to. If these people still believed a tet of gunslingers would be bound by what farmers and ranchers decided in a public meeting, they really had lost the shape of the world as it once was. But was that so bad? In the end, matters would play out and become part of his long history. Or not. If not, he would finish his history and his quest in Calla Bryn Sturgis, moldering beneath a stone. Perhaps not even that; perhaps he’d finish in a dead heap somewhere east of town, he and his friends with him, so much rotting meat to be picked over by the crows and the rusties. Ka would tell. It always did.

Meanwhile, they were looking at him.

Roland stood up, wincing at a hard flare of pain in his right hip as he did so. Taking their cues from him, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake also rose.

“We’re well-met,” Roland said. “As for what lies ahead, there will be water if God wills it.”

Callahan said, “Amen.”

Chapter VII

Todash

One

“Gray horses,” Eddie said.

“Aye,” Roland agreed.

“Fifty or sixty of them, all on gray horses.”

“Aye, so they did say.”

“And didn’t think it the least bit strange,” Eddie mused.

“No. They didn’t seem to.”

“Is it?”

“Fifty or sixty horses, all the same color? I’d say so, yes.”

“These Calla-folk raise horses themselves.”

“Aye.”

“Brought some for us to ride.” Eddie, who had never ridden a horse in his life, was grateful that at least had been put off, but didn’t say so.

“Aye, tethered over the hill.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“Smelled em. I imagine the robot had the keeping of them.”

“Why would these folks take fifty or sixty horses, all the same shade, as a matter of course?”

“Because they don’t really think about the Wolves or anything to do with them,” Roland said. “They’re too busy being afraid, I think.”

Eddie whistled five notes that didn’t quite make a melody. Then he said, “Gray horses.”

Roland nodded. “Gray horses.”

They looked at each other for a moment, then laughed. Eddie loved it when Roland laughed. The sound was dry, as ugly as the calls of those giant blackbirds he called rusties…but he loved it. Maybe it was just that Roland laughed so seldom.