“Have it as you like,” she said. Roland saw she was actually pleased, that she wanted an audience, and his hope grew. He thought it increasingly likely that this pretty middle-aged wife with her small breasts and salt-and-pepper hair had a hunter’s heart. Not a gunslinger’s heart, but at this point he would settle for a few hunters—a few killers —male or female.

She marched toward the barn. When they were fifty yards from the stuffy-guys flanking the barn door, Roland touched her shoulder and made her stop.

“Nay,” she said, “this is too far.”

“I’ve seen you fling as far and half again,” her husband said, and stood firm in the face of her angry look. “So I have.”

“Not with a gunslinger from the Line of Eld standing by my right elbow, you haven’t,” she said, but she stood where she was.

Roland went to the barn door and took the grinning sharproot head from the stuffy on the left side. He went into the barn. Here was a stall filled with freshly picked sharproot, and beside it one of potatoes. He took one of the potatoes and set it atop the stuffy-guy’s shoulders, where the sharproot had been. It was a good-sized spud, but the contrast was still comic; the stuffy-guy now looked like Mr. Tinyhead in a carnival show or street-fair.

“Oh, Roland, no!” she cried, sounding genuinely shocked.

“I could never!”

“I don’t believe you,” he said, and stood aside. “Throw.”

For a moment he thought she wouldn’t. She looked around for her husband. If Eisenhart had still been standing beside her, Roland thought, she would have thrust the plate into his hands and run for the house and never mind if he cut himself on it, either. But Vaughn Eisenhart had withdrawn to the foot of the steps. The boys stood above him, Benny Slightman watching with mere interest, Jake with closer attention, his brows drawn together and the smile now gone from his face.

“Roland, I—”

“None of it, missus, I beg. Your talk of leaping was all very fine, but now I’d see you do it. Throw .”

She recoiled a little, eyes widening, as if she had been slapped. Then she turned to face the barn door and drew her right hand above her left shoulder. The plate glimmered in the late light, which was now more pink than red. Her lips had thinned to a white line. For a moment all the world held still.

“Riza!”she cried in a shrill, furious voice, and cast her arm forward. Her hand opened, the index finger pointing precisely along the path the plate would take. Of all of them in the yard (the cowpokes had also stopped to watch), only Roland’s eyes were sharp enough to follow the flight of the dish.

True!he exulted. True as ever was!