“Thee’ll hear the explosions when the tankers go, and smell the smoke,” Roland said. “Even with the wind the wrong way, I think thee’ll smell it. Then, no more than an hour later, more smoke. There.” He pointed. “That’ll be the brush piled in front of the canyon’s mouth.”
“And if we don’t see those things?”
“Into the west. But thee will, Sue. I swear thee will.”
She stepped forward, put her hands on his thigh, and looked up at him in the latening moonlight. He bent; put his hand lightly against the back of her head; put his mouth on her mouth.
“Go thy course in safety,” Susan said as she drew back from him.
“Aye,” Sheemie added suddenly. “Stand and be true, all three.” He came forward himself and shyly touched Cuthbert’s boot.
Cuthbert reached down, took Sheemie’s hand, and shook it. “Take care of her, old boy.”
Sheemie nodded seriously. “I will.”
“Come on,” Roland said. He felt that if he looked at her solemn, upturned face again, he would cry. “Let’s go.”
They rode slowly away from the hut. Before the grass closed behind them, hiding it from view, he looked back a final time.
“Sue, I love thee.”
She smiled. It was a beautiful smile. “Bird and bear and hare and fish,” she said.
The next time Roland saw her, she was caught inside the Wizard’s glass.
8
What Roland and his friends saw west of the Bad Grass had a harsh, lonely beauty. The wind was lifting great sheets of sand across the stony desert floor; the moonlight turned these into foot racing phantoms. At moments Hanging Rock was visible some two wheels distant, and the mouth of Eyebolt Canyon two wheels farther on. Sometimes both were gone, hidden by the dust. Behind them, the tall grass made a soughing, singing sound.
“How do you boys feel?” Roland asked. “All’s well?”
They nodded.
“There’s going to be a lot of shooting, I think.”
“We’ll remember the faces of our fathers,” Cuthbert said.
“Yes,” Roland agreed, almost absently. “We’ll remember them very well.” He stretched in the saddle. “The wind’s in our favor, not theirs— that’s one good thing. We’ll hear them coming. We must judge the size of the group. All right?”
They both nodded.
“If Jonas has still got his confidence, he’ll come soon, in a small party—whatever gunnies he can put together on short notice—and he’ll have the ball. In that case, we’ll ambush them, kill them all, and take the Wizard’s Rainbow.”
Alain and Cuthbert sat quiet, listening intently. The wind gusted, and Roland clapped a hand to his hat to keep it from flying off. “If he fears more trouble from us, I think he’s apt to come later on, and with a bigger party of riders. If that happens, we’ll let them pass . . . then, if the wind is our friend and keeps up, we’ll fall in behind them.”
Cuthbert began to grin. “Oh Roland,” he said. “Your father would be proud. Only fourteen, but cozy as the devil!”
“Fifteen come next moonrise,” Roland said seriously. “If we do it this way, we may have to kill their drogue riders. Watch my signals, all right?”
“We’re going to cross to Hanging Rock as part of their party?” Alain asked. He had always been a step or two behind Cuthbert, but Roland didn’t mind; sometimes reliability was better than quickness. “Is that it?”
“If the cards fall that way, yes.”
“If they’ve got the pink ball with em, you’d better hope it doesn’t give us away,”
Alain said.
Cuthbert looked surprised. Roland bit his lip, thinking that sometimes Alain was plenty quick. Certainly he had come up with this unpleasant little idea ahead of Bert . . . ahead of Roland, too.
“We’ve got a lot to hope for this morning, but we’ll play our cards as they come off the top of the pack.”
They dismounted and sat by their horses there on the edge of the grass, saying little. Roland watched the silver clouds of dust racing each other across the desert floor and thought of Susan. He imagined them married, living in a freehold somewhere south of Gilead. By then Farson would have been defeated, the world’s strange decline reversed (the childish part of him simply assumed that making an end to John Farson would somehow see to that), and his gunslinging days would be over. Less than a year it had been since he had won the right to carry the six-shooters he wore on his hips—and to carry his father’s great revolvers when Steven Deschain decided to pass them on—and already he was tired of them.
Susan’s kisses had softened his heart and quickened him, somehow; had made another life possible. A better one, perhaps. One with a house, and kiddies, and—
“They’re coming,” Alain said, snapping Roland out of his reverie.
The gunslinger stood up, Rusher’s reins in one fist. Cuthbert stood tensely nearby.
“Large party or small? Does thee … do you know?”
Alain stood facing southeast, hands held out with the palms up. Beyond his shoulder, Roland saw Old Star just about to slip below the horizon. Only an hour until dawn, then.
“I can’t tell yet,” Alain said.
“Can you at least tell if the ball—”
“No. Shut up, Roland, let me listen!”
Roland and Cuthbert stood and watched Alain anxiously, at the same time straining their ears to hear the hooves of horses, the creak of wheels, or the murmur of men on the passing wind. Time spun out. The wind, rather than dropping as Old Star disappeared and dawn approached, blew more fiercely than ever. Roland looked at Cuthbert, who had taken out his slingshot and was playing nervously with the pull. Bert raised one shoulder in a shrug.
“It’s a small party,” Alain said suddenly. “Can either of you touch them?”
They shook their heads.
“No more than ten, maybe only six.”
“Gods!” Roland murmured, and pumped a fist at the sky. He couldn’t help it. “And the ball?”
“I can’t touch it,” Alain said. He sounded almost as though he were sleeping himself. “But it’s with them, don’t you think?”
Roland did. A small party of six or eight, probably travelling with the ball. It was perfect.
“Be ready, boys,” he said. “We’re going to take them.”
9
Jonas’s party made good time down the Drop and into the Bad Grass. The guide-stars were brilliant in the autumn sky, and Renfrew knew them all. He had a click-line to measure between the two he called The Twins, and he stopped the group briefly every twenty minutes or so to use it. Jonas hadn’t the slightest doubt the old cowboy would bring them out of the tall grass pointed straight at Hanging Rock.
Then, about an hour after they’d entered the Bad Grass, Quint rode up beside him.
“That old lady, she want to see you, sai. She say it’s important.”
“Do she, now?” Jonas asked.
“Aye.” Quint lowered his voice. “That ball she got on her lap all glowy.”
“Is that so? I tell you what. Quint—keep my old trail-buddies company while I see what’s what.” He dropped back until he was pacing beside the black cart.
Rhea raised her face to him, and for a moment, washed as it was in the pink light, he thought it the face of a young girl.
“So,” she said. “Here y’are, big boy. I thought ye’d show up pretty smart.” She cackled, and as her face broke into its sour lines of laughter, Jonas again saw her as she really was—all but sucked dry by the thing in her lap. Then he looked down at it himself . . . and was lost. He could feel that pink glow radiating into all the deepest passages and hollows of his mind, lighting them up in a way they’d never been lit up before. Even Coral, at her dirty busiest, couldn’t light him up that way.
“Ye like it, don’t ye?” she half-laughed, half-crooned. “Aye, so ye do, so would anyone, such a pretty glam it is! But what do ye see, sai Jonas?”
Leaning over, holding to the saddle-horn with one hand, his long hair hanging down in a sheaf, Jonas looked deeply into the ball. At first he saw only that luscious, labial pink, and then it began to draw apart. Now he saw a hut surrounded by tall grass. The sort of hut only a hermit could love. The door—it was painted a peeling but still bright red—stood open. And sitting there on the stone stoop with her hands in her lap, her blankets on the ground at her feet, and her unbound hair around her shoulders was …
“I’ll be damned!” Jonas whispered. He had now leaned so far out of the saddle that he looked like a trick rider in a circus show, and his eyes seemed to have disappeared; there were only sockets of pink light where they had been.