“If you find them, you’ll want to talk mostly to Mr. Deepneau,” Jake said. He flushed when they all turned to him, but kept his eyes trained on Callahan’s. “Mr. Tower might be stubborn—”

“That’s the understatement of the century,” Eddie said. “By the time you get there, he’ll probably have found twelve used bookstores and God knows how many first editions of Indiana Jones’s Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown .”

“—but Mr. Deepneau will listen,” Jake went on.

“Issen, Ake,” Oy said, and rolled over onto his back. “Issen kiyet!”

Scratching Oy’s belly, Jake said: “If anyone can convince Mr. Tower to do something, it’ll be Mr. Deepneau.”

“Okay,” Callahan replied, nodding. “I hear you well.”

The singing children were closer now. Susannah turned but couldn’t see them yet; she assumed they were coming up River Street. If so, they’d be in view once they cleared the livery and turned down the high street at Took’s General Store. Some of the folken on the porch over there were already getting up to look.

Roland, meanwhile, was studying Eddie with a small smile. “Once when I used the word assume, you told me a saying about it from your world. I’d hear it again, if you remember.”

Eddie grinned. “ Assumemakes an ass out of u and me—is that the one you mean?”

Roland nodded. “It’s a good saying. All the same, I’m going to make an assumption now—pound it like a nail—then hang all our hopes of coming out of this alive on it. I don’t like it but see no choice. The assumption is that only Ben Slightman and Andy are working against us. That if we take care of them when the time comes, we can move in secrecy.”

“Don’t kill him,” Jake said in a voice almost too low to hear. He had drawn Oy close and was petting the top of his head and his long neck with a kind of compulsive, darting speed. Oy bore this patiently.

“Cry pardon, Jake,” Susannah said, leaning forward and tipping a hand behind one ear. “I didn’t—”

“Don’t kill him!” This time his voice was hoarse and wavering and close to tears. “Don’t kill Benny’s Da’. Please .”

Eddie reached out and cupped the nape of the boy’s neck gently. “Jake, Benny Slightman’s Da’ is willing to send a hundred kids off into Thunderclap with the Wolves, just to spare his own. And you know how they’d come back.”

“Yeah, but in his eyes he doesn’t have any choice because—”

“His choice could have been to stand with us,” Roland said. His voice was dull and dreadful. Almost dead.

“But—”