Sorry for your loss.
And now he was alone with that loss. Alone with Jake. For a moment Roland stood surveying the litde grove of trees beside the highway, looking at two of the three who had been drawn to this place: a man, unconscious, and a boy dead. Roland's eyes were dry and hot, throbbing in their sockets, and for a moment he was sure that he had again lost the ability to weep. The idea horrified him. If he was incapable of tears after all of this-after what he'd regained and then lost again-what good was any of it? So it was an immense relief when the tears finally came. They spilled from his eyes, quieting their nearly insane blue glare.
They ran down his dirty cheeks. He cried almost silently, but there was a single sob and Oy heard it. He raised his snout to the corridor of fast-moving clouds and howled a single time at them. Then he too was silent.
SIX
Roland carried Jake deeper into the woods, with Oy padding at his heel. That the bumbler was also weeping no longer surprised Roland; he had seen him cry before. And the days when he had believed Oy's demonstrations of intelligence (and empathy)
might be no more than mimicry had long since passed. Most of what Roland thovight about on that short walk was a prayer for the dead he had heard Cuthbert speak on their last campaign together, the one that had ended at Jericho Hill. He doubted that Jake needed a prayer to send him on, but the gunslinger needed to keep his mind occupied, because it did not feel strong just now; if it went too far in the wrong direction, it would certainly break. Perhaps later he could indulge in hysteria-or even irina, the healing madness-but not now. He would not break now. He would not let the boy's death come to nothing.
The hazy green-gold summerglow that lives only in forests
(and old forests, at that, like the one where the Bear Shardik had rampaged), deepened. It fell through the trees in dusky beams, and the place where Roland finally stopped felt more like a church than a clearing. He had gone roughly two hundred paces from the road on a westerly line. Here he set Jake down and looked about. He saw two rusty beer-cans and a few ejected shell-casings, probably the leavings of hunters. He tossed them further into the woods so the place would be clean. Then he looked at Jake, wiping away his tears so he could see as clearly as possible. The boy's face was as clean as the clearing, Oy had seen to that, but one of Jake's eyes was still open, giving the boy an evil winky look that must not be allowed. Roland rolled the lid closed wiui a finger, and when it sprang back up again (like a balky windowshade, he thought), he licked the ball of his thumb and rolled the lid shut again. This time it stayed closed.
There was dust and blood on Jake's shirt. Roland took it off, then took his own off and put it on Jake, moving him like a doll in order to get it on him. The shirt came almost to Jake's knees, but Roland made no attempt to tuck it in; this way it covered the bloodstains on Jake's pants.
All of this Oy watched, his gold-ringed eyes bright with tears.
Roland had expected the soil to be soft beneath the thick carpet of needles, and it was. He had a good start on Jake's grave when he heard die sound of an engine from the roadside.
Other motor-carriages had passed since he'd carried Jake into the woods, but he recognized the dissonant beat of this one.
The man in the blue vehicle had come back. Roland hadn't been entirely sure he would.
"Stay," he murmured to the bumbler. "Guard your master."
But that was wrong. "Stay and guard your friend."
It wouldn't have been unusual for Oy to repeat the command (S'ay!was about the best he could manage) in the same low voice, but this time he said nothing. Roland watched him lie down beside Jake's head, however, and snap a fly out of the air when it came in for a landing on the boy's nose. Roland nodded, satisfied, then started back the way he had come.
SEVEN
Bryan Smith was out of his motor-carriage and sitting on the rock wall by the time Roland got back in view of him, his cane drawn across his lap. (Roland had no idea if the cane was an affectation or something the man really needed, and didn't care about this, either.) King had regained some soupy version of consciousness, and the two men were talking.
"Please tell me it's just sprained," the writer said in a weak, worried voice.
"Nope! I'd say that leg's broke in six, maybe seven places."
Now that he'd had time to settle down and maybe work out a story, Smith sounded not just calm but almost happy.
"Cheer me up, why don't you," King said. The visible side of his face was very pale, but the flow of blood from the gash on his temple had slowed almost to a stop. "Have you got a cigarette?"
"Nope," Smith said in that same weirdly cheerful voice.