They met in the willow grove, in several of the abandoned boathouses which stood crumbling at the northern hook of the bay, in a herder's hut far out in the desolation of the Coos, in an abandoned squatter's shack hidden in the Bad Grass. The settings were, by and large, as sordid as any of those in which addicts come together to practice their vice, but Susan and Roland didn't see the rotting walls of the shack or the holes in the roof of the hut or smell the mouldering nets in the comers of the old soaked boathouses. They were drugged, stone in love, and to them, every scar on the face of the world was a beauty-mark.
Twice, early on in those delirious weeks, they used the red rock in the wall at the back of the pavilion to arrange meetings, and then some deep voice spoke inside Roland's head, telling him there must be no more of it - the rock might have been just the thing for children playing at secrets, but he and his love were no longer children; if they were discovered, banishment would be the luckiest punishment they could hope for. The red rock was too conspicuous, and writing things down - even messages that were unsigned and deliberately vague - was horribly dangerous.
Using Sheemie felt safer to both of them. Beneath his smiling light-mindedness there was a surprising depth of ... well, discretion. Roland had thought long and hard before settling on that word, and it was the right word: an ability to keep silent that was more dignified than mere cunning. Cunning was out of Sheemie's reach in any case, and always would be - a man who couldn't tell a lie without shifting his eyes away from yours was a man who would never be considered cunning.
They used Sheemie half a dozen times over the five weeks when their physical love burned at its hottest - three of those times were to make meetings, two were to change meeting-places, and one was to cancel a tryst when Susan spied riders from the Piano Ranch sweeping for strays near the shack in the Bad Grass.
That deep, warning voice never spoke to Roland about Sheemie as it had about the dangers of the red rock . . . but his conscience spoke to him, and when he finally mentioned this to Susan (the two of them wrapped in a saddle-blanket and lying naked in each other's arms), he found that her conscience had been troubling her, as well. It wasn't fair to put the boy in the way of their possible trouble. After coming to that conclusion, Roland and Susan arranged their meetings strictly between the two of them. If she could not meet him, Susan said, she would hang a red shirt over the sill of her window, as if to dry. If he could not meet her, he was to leave a white stone in the northeast comer of the yard, diagonally across the road from Hockey's Livery, where the town pump stood. As a last resort, they would use the red rock in the pavilion, risky or not, rather than bringing Sheemie into their affairs - their affair - again.
Cuthbert and Alain watched Roland's descent into addiction first with disbelief, envy, and uneasy amusement, then with a species of silent horror. They had been sent to what was supposed to have been safety and had discovered a place of conspiracy, instead; they had come to take census in a Barony where most of the aristocracy had apparently switched its allegiance to the Affiliation's bitterest enemy; they had made personal enemies of three hard men who had probably killed enough folks to populate a fair-sized graveyard. Yet they had felt equal to the situation, because they had come here under the leadership of their friend, who had attained near-mythic status in their minds by besting Cort - with a hawk as his weapon! - and becoming a gunslinger at the unheard-of age of fourteen. That they had been given guns themselves for this mission had meant a great deal to them when they set out from Gilead, and nothing at all by the time they began to realize the scope of what was going on in Hambry-town and the Barony of which it was a part. When that realization came, Roland was the weapon they counted on. And now -
"He's like a revolver cast into water!" Cuthbert exclaimed one evening, not long after Roland had ridden away to meet Susan. Beyond the bunkhouse porch, Huntress rose in her first quarter. "Gods know if it'll ever fire again, even if it's fished out and dried off."
"Hush, wait," Alain said, and looked toward the porch rail. Hoping to jolly Cuthbert out of his bad temper (a task that was quite easy under ordinary circumstances), Alain said: "Where's the lookout? Gone to bed early for once, has he?"
This only irritated Cuthbert more. He hadn't seen the rook's skull in days - he couldn't exactly say how many - and he took its loss as an ill omen. "Gone, but not to bed," he replied, then looked balefully to the west, where Roland had disappeared aboard his big old galoot of a horse. "Lost, I reckon. Like a certain fellow's mind and heart and good sense."
"He'll be all right," Alain said awkwardly. "You know him as well as I do, Bert - known him our whole lives, we have. He'll be all right."