“You’re human, you said. No demon. Or did you lie?”
“I didn’t lie.” He felt the grudging admittance in him: he liked Brown. Honestly did. And he hadn’t lied to the dweller in any way. “Who are you, Brown? Really, I mean.”
“Just me,” he said, unperturbed. “Why do you have to think you’re in the middle of such a mystery?”
The gunslinger lit a smoke without replying.
“I think you’re very close to your man in black,” Brown said. “Is he desperate?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you?”
“Not yet,” the gunslinger said. He looked at Brown with a shade of defiance. “I go where I have to go, do what I have to do.”
“That’s good then,” Brown said and turned over and went to sleep.
XIX
The next morning, Brown fed him and sent him on his way. In the daylight he was an amazing figure with his scrawny, sunburnt chest, pencil-like collarbones, and loony shock of red hair. The bird perched on his shoulder.
“The mule?” the gunslinger asked.
“I’ll eat it,” Brown said.
“Okay.”
Brown offered his hand and the gunslinger shook it. The dweller nodded to the southeast. “Walk easy. Long days and pleasant nights.”
“May you have twice the number.”
They nodded at each other and then the man Allie had called Roland walked away, his body festooned with guns and water. He looked back once. Brown was rooting furiously at his little cornbed. The crow was perched on the low roof of his dwelling like a gargoyle.
XX
The fire was down, and the stars had begun to pale off. The wind walked restlessly, told its tale to no one. The gunslinger twitched in his sleep and was still again. He dreamed a thirsty dream. In the darkness the shape of the mountains was invisible. Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out. He found himself thinking more and more about Cort, who had taught him to shoot. Cort had known black from white.
He stirred again and woke. He blinked at the dead fire with its own shape superimposed over the other, more geometrical one. He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously. It was a secret he had shared with only a few over the years. The girl named Susan, the girl from Mejis, had been one of them.
That, of course, made him think of Cort again. Cort was dead. They were all dead, except for him. The world had moved on.
The gunslinger shouldered his gunna and moved on with it.
THE WAY STATION
CHAPTER 2
The Way Station
I
A nursery rhyme had been playing itself through his mind all day, the maddening kind of thing that will not let go, that mockingly ignores all commands of the conscious mind to cease and desist. The rhyme was:
The rain in Spain falls on the plain.
There is joy and also pain
but the rain in Spain falls on the plain.
