Spray flew in the morning light as the Wolves plunged into the Whye and began galloping across on their gray horses. Roland could see them clearly now, coming in waves of five and six, spurring their mounts. He put the number at sixty. On the far side of the river, they’d disappear beneath the shoulder of a grass-covered bluff. Then they’d reappear, less than a mile away. They would disappear one last time, behind one final hill—all of them, if they stayed bunched up as they were now—and that would be the last chance for Jake to come, for all of them to get under cover.

He stared up the path, willing the children to appear—willing Jake to appear—but the path remained empty.

Wolves streaming up the west bank of the river now, their horses casting off showers of droplets which glittered in the morning sun like gold. Clods of earth and sprays of sand flew. Now the hoofbeats were an approaching thunder.

Eleven

Jake took one shoulder, Benny the other. They carried Frank Tavery down the path that way, plunging ahead with reckless speed, hardly even looking down at the tumbles of rock. Francine ran just behind them.

They came around the final curve, and Jake felt a surge of gladness when he saw Roland in the ditch opposite, still Roland, standing watch with his good left hand on the butt of his gun and his hat tipped back from his brow.

“It’s my brother!” Francine was shouting at him. “He fell down! He got his foot caught in a hole!”

Roland suddenly dropped out of sight.

Francine looked around, not frightened, exactly, but uncomprehending. “What—?”

“Wait,” Jake said, because that was all he knew to say. He had no other ideas. If that was true of the gunslinger as well, they’d probably die here.

“My ankle…burning,” Frank Tavery gasped.

“Shut up,” Jake said.

Benny laughed. It was shock-laughter, but it was also real laughter. Jake looked at him around the sobbing, bleeding Frank Tavery…and winked. Benny winked back. And, just like that, they were friends again.

Twelve

As she lay in the darkness of the hide with Eddie on her left and the acrid smell of leaves in her nose, Susannah felt a sudden cramp seize her belly. She had just time to register it before an icepick of pain, blue and savage, plunged into the left side of her brain, seeming to numb that entire side of her face and neck. At the same instant the image of a great banquet hall filled her mind: steaming roasts, stuffed fish, smoking steaks, magnums of champagne, frigates filled with gravy, rivers of red wine. She heard a piano, and a singing voice. That voice was charged with an awful sadness. “Someone saved, someone saved, someone saved my li-iife tonight,” it sang.