Roland didn’t ask it. He said merely, “We’d go our way for tonight, and put down our heads, for we’re tired. But I’d give’ee one final song and a little step-toe before we leave, so I would, for I believe you know both.”

A jubilant roar of agreement met this. They knew it, all right.

“I know it myself, and love it,” said Roland of Gilead. “I know it of old, and never expected to hear ‘The Rice Song’ again from any lips, least of all from my own. I am older now, so I am, and not so limber as I once was. Cry your pardon for the steps I get wrong—”

“Gunslinger, we say thankee!” a woman called. “Such joy we feel, aye!”

“And do I not feel the same?” the gunslinger asked gently. “Do I not give you joy from my joy, and water I carried with the strength of my arm and my heart?”

“Give you to eat of the green-crop,”they chanted as one, and Eddie felt his back prickle and his eyes tear up.

“Oh my God,” Jake sighed. “He knows so much …”

“Give you joy of the rice,” Roland said.

He stood for a moment longer in the orange glow, as if gathering his strength, and then he began to dance something that was caught between a jig and a tap routine. It was slow at first, very slow, heel and toe, heel and toe. Again and again his bootheels made that fist-on-coffintop sound, but now it had rhythm. Just rhythm at first, and then, as the gunslinger’s feet began to pick up speed, it was more than rhythm: it became a kind of jive. That was the only word Eddie could think of, the only one that seemed to fit.

Susannah rolled up to them. Her eyes were huge, her smile amazed. She clasped her hands tightly between her breasts. “Oh, Eddie!” she breathed. “Did you know he could do this? Did you have any slightest idea?”

“No,” Eddie said. “No idea.”

Ten

Faster moved the gunslinger’s feet in their battered and broken old boots. Then faster still. The rhythm becoming clearer and clearer, and Jake suddenly realized he knew that beat. Knew it from the first time he’d gone todash in New York. Before meeting Eddie, a young black man with Walkman earphones on his head had strolled past him, bopping his sandaled feet and going “Cha-da-ba, cha-da- bow!” under his breath. And that was the rhythm Roland was beating out on the bandstand, each Bow! accomplished by a forward kick of the leg and a hard skip of the heel on wood.