“If you please,” Susannah said, thinking how wonderful all this was. How wonderful, how strange. Potentially deadly as well, of course, but she had come to learn that also had its charms. It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

Five

Up the road about forty feet from the others, the three men stood together. Overholser appeared to be doing all the talking, sometimes gesturing violently to punctuate a point. He spoke as if Roland were no more than some gunbunny hobo who happened to come drifting down the road with a few no-account friends riding drogue behind him. He explained to Roland that Tian Jaffords was a fool (albeit a well-meaning one) who did not understand the facts of life. He told Roland that Jaffords had to be restrained, cooled off, not only in his best interests but in those of the entire Calla. He insisted to Roland that if anything could be done, Wayne Overholser, son of Alan, would be first in line to do it; he’d never shirked a chore in his life, but to go against the Wolves was madness. And, he added, lowering his voice, speaking of madness, there was the Old Fella. When he kept to his church and his rituals, he was fine. In such things, a little madness made a fine sauce. This, however, was summat different. Aye, and by a long hike.

Roland listened to it all, nodding occasionally. He said almost nothing. And when Overholser was finally finished, Calla Bryn Sturgis’s big farmer simply looked with a kind of fixed fascination at the gunman who stood before him. Mostly at those faded blue eyes.

“Are ye what ye say?” he asked finally. “Tell me true, sai.”

“I’m Roland of Gilead,” the gunslinger said.

“From the line of Eld? Ye do say it?”

“By watch and by warrant,” Roland said.

“But Gilead…” Overholser paused. “Gilead’s long gone.”

“I,” Roland said, “am not.”

“Would ye kill us all, or cause us to be killed? Tell me, I beg.”

“What would you, sai Overholser? Not later; not a day or a week or a moon from now, but at this minute?”

Overholser stood a long time, looking from Roland to Eddie and then back to Roland again. Here was a man not used to changing his mind; if he did so, it would hurt him like a rupture. From down the road came the laughter of the boys as Oy fetched something Benny had thrown—a stick almost as big as the bumbler was himself.

“I’d listen,” Overholser said at last. “I’d do that much, gods help me, and say thankee.”

“In other words he explained all the reasons why it was a fool’s errand,” Eddie told her later, “and then did exactly what Roland wanted him to do. It was like magic.”

“Sometimes Roland is magic,” she said.

Six