“Hate to hear you speak so,” Eisenhart said. “These were from my Da’ and his Da’ before him and on back at least this many.” He raised seven fingers and one thumb. “That’s back to before the Wolves, ye ken. They was always kept together and passed to the likeliest son by dead-letter. When I got em instead of my elder brother, I was some pleased.”

“Did you have a twin?” Roland asked.

“Aye, Verna,” Eisenhart said. He smiled easily and often and did so now beneath his great graying bush of a mustache, but it was painful—the smile of a man who doesn’t want you to know he’s bleeding somewhere inside his clothes. “She was lovely as dawn, so she was. Passed on these ten year or more. Went painful early, as the roont ones often do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say thankya.”

The sun was going down red in the southwest, turning the yard the color of blood. There was a line of rockers on the porch. Eisenhart was settled in one of them. Roland sat cross-legged on the boards, housekeeping Eisenhart’s inheritance. That the pistols would probably never fire meant nothing to the gunslinger’s hands, which had been trained to this work long ago and still found it soothing.

Now, with a speed that made the rancher blink, Roland put the weapons back together in a rapid series of clicks and clacks. He set them aside on a square of sheepskin, wiped his fingers on a rag, and sat in the rocker next to Eisenhart’s. He guessed that on more ordinary evenings, Eisenhart and his wife sat out here side by side, watching the sun abandon the day.

Roland rummaged through his purse for his tobacco pouch, found it, and built himself a cigarette with Callahan’s fresh, sweet tobacco. Rosalita had added her own present, a little stack of delicate cornshuck wraps she called “pulls.” Roland thought they wrapped as good as any cigarette paper, and he paused a moment to admire the finished product before tipping the end into the match Eisenhart had popped alight with one horny thumbnail. The gunslinger dragged deep and exhaled a long plume that rose but slowly in the evening air, which was still and surprisingly muggy for summer’s end. “Good,” he said, and nodded.

“Aye? May it do ya fine. I never got the taste for it myself.”