They walked out into the steady smash of the sun. Jake, his head as high as the swing of the gunslinger’s elbows, walked to his right and a little ahead, the rawhide-wrapped ends of the waterbag hanging nearly to his shins. The gunslinger had crisscrossed two more waterbags across his shoulders and carried the sling of food in his armpit, his left arm holding it against his body. In his right hand was his pack, his poke, and the rest of his gunna.
They passed through the far gate of the way station and found the blurred ruts of the stage track again. They had walked perhaps fifteen minutes when Jake turned around and waved at the two buildings. They seemed to huddle in the titanic space of the desert.
“Goodbye!” Jake cried. “Goodbye!” Then he turned back to the gunslinger, looking troubled. “I feel like something’s watching us.”
“Something or someone,” the gunslinger agreed.
“Was someone hiding there? Hiding there all along?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Should we go back? Go back and—”
“No. We’re done with that place.”
“Good,” Jake said fervently.
They walked. The stage track breasted a frozen sand drumlin, and when the gunslinger looked around, the way station was gone. Once again there was the desert, and that only.
VII
They were three days out of the way station; the mountains were deceptively clear now. They could see the smooth, stepped rise of the desert into foothills, the first naked slopes, the bedrock bursting through the skin of the earth in sullen, eroded triumph. Further up, the land gentled off briefly again, and for the first time in months or years the gunslinger could see real, living green. Grass, dwarf spruces, perhaps even willows, all fed by snow runoff from further up. Beyond that the rock took over again, rising in cyclopean, tumbled splendor all the way to the blinding snowcaps. Off to the left, a huge slash showed the way to the smaller, eroded sandstone cliffs and mesas and buttes on the far side. This draw was obscured in the almost continual gray membrane of showers. At night, Jake would sit fascinated for the few minutes before he fell into sleep, watching the brilliant swordplay of the far-off lightning, white and purple, startling in the clarity of the night air.
The boy was fine on the trail. He was tough, but more than that, he seemed to fight exhaustion with a calm reservoir of will which the gunslinger appreciated and admired. He didn’t talk much and he didn’t ask questions, not even about the jawbone, which the gunslinger turned over and over in his hands during his evening smoke. He caught a sense that the boy felt highly flattered by the gunslinger’s companionship—perhaps even exalted by it—and this disturbed him. The boy had been placed in his path—While you travel with the boy, the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket—and the fact that Jake was not slowing him down only opened the way to more sinister possibilities.
They passed the symmetrical campfire leavings of the man in black at regular intervals, and it seemed to the gunslinger that these leavings were much fresher now. On the third night, the gunslinger was sure that he could see the distant spark of another campfire, somewhere in the first rising swell of the foothills. This did not please him as much as he once might have believed. One of Cort’s sayings occurred to him:’Ware the man who fakes a limp.
Near two o’clock on the fourth day out from the way station, Jake reeled and almost fell.
“Here, sit down,” the gunslinger said.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Sit down.”
The boy sat obediently. The gunslinger squatted close by, so Jake would be in his shadow.
“Drink.”
“I’m not supposed to until—”
“Drink.”
The boy drank, three swallows. The gunslinger wet the tail of the blanket, which held a good deal less now, and applied the damp fabric to the boy’s wrists and forehead, which were fever-dry.
“From now on we rest every afternoon at this time. Fifteen minutes. Do you want to sleep?”
“No.” The boy looked at him with shame. The gunslinger looked back blandly. In an abstracted way he withdrew one of the bullets from his belt and began to twirl it howken between his fingers. The boy watched, fascinated.
“That’s neat,” he said.
The gunslinger nodded. “Yar!” He paused. “When I was your age, I lived in a walled city, did I tell you that?”
The boy shook his head sleepily.
“Sure. And there was an evil man—”
“The priest?”
