The boy’s cheeks flushed thin red. “Well, what I thought is that if you guys were in town with the Old Fella and I was out in the country—south of town, you ken—then we’d get two different pictures of the place. My Dad says you don’t see anything very well if you only look at it from one viewpoint.”

“True enough,” Roland said, and hoped neither his voice nor his face would give away any of the sorrow and regret he suddenly felt. Here was a boy who was now ashamed of being a boy. He had made a friend and the friend had invited him to stay over, as friends sometimes do. Benny had undoubtedly promised that Jake could help him feed the animals, and perhaps shoot his bow (or his bah, if it shot bolts instead of arrows). There would be places Benny would want to share, secret places he might have gone to with his twin in other times. A platform in a tree, mayhap, or a fishpond in the reeds special to him, or a stretch of riverbank where pirates of eld were reputed to have buried gold and jewels. Such places as boys go. But a large part of Jake Chambers was now ashamed to want to do such things. This was the part that had been despoiled by the doorkeeper in Dutch Hill, by Gasher, by the Tick-Tock Man. And by Roland himself, of course. Were he to say no to Jake’s request now, the boy would very likely never ask again. And never resent him for it, which was even worse. Were he to say yes in the wrong way—with even the slightest trace of indulgence in his voice, for instance—the boy would change his mind.

The boy. The gunslinger realized how much he wanted to be able to go on calling Jake that, and how short the time to do so was apt to be. He had a bad feeling about Calla Bryn Sturgis.

“Go with them after they dine us in the Pavilion tonight,” Roland said. “Go and do ya fine, as they say here.”

“Are you sure? Because if you think you might need me—”

“Your father’s saying is a good one. My old teacher—”

“Cort or Vannay?”

“Cort. He used to tell us that a one-eyed man sees flat. It takes two eyes, set a little apart from each other, to see things as they really are. So aye. Go with them. Make the boy your friend, if that seems natural. He seems likely enough.”

Four

“Yeah,” Jake said briefly. But the color was going down in his cheeks again. Roland was pleased to see this.

“Spend tomorrow with him. And his friends, if he has a gang he goes about with.”