"Yes, they have it. It makes them easy to touch even though they're going the other way now. Once you find it, it glows like a lamp in a mineshaft."
"Does Rhea still have the keeping of it?"
"I think so. It's awful to touch her."
"Jonas is afraid of us," Roland said. "He wants more men around him when he comes. That's what it is, what it must be." Unaware that he was both right and badly out in his reckoning. Unaware that for one of the few times since they had left Gilead, he had lapsed into a teenager's disastrous certainty.
"What do we do?" Alain asked.
"Sit here. Listen. Wait. They'll bring the ball this way again if they're going to Hanging Rock. They'll have to."
"Susan?" Cuthbert asked. "Susan and Sheemie? What about them? How do we know they're all right?"
"I suppose that we don't." Roland sat down, cross-legged, with Pusher's trailing reins in his lap. "But Jonas and his men will be back soon enough. And when they come, we'll do what we must."
11
Susan hadn't wanted to sleep inside - the hut felt wrong to her without Roland. She had left Sheemie huddled under the old hides in the comer and taken her own blankets outside. She sat in the hut's doorway for a little while, looking up at the stars and praying for Roland in her own fashion. When she began to feel a little better, she lay down on one blanket and pulled the other over her. It seemed an eternity since Maria had shaken her out of her heavy sleep, and the open-mouthed, glottal snores drifting out of the hut didn't bother her much. She slept with her head pillowed on one arm, and didn't wake when, twenty minutes later, Sheemie came to the doorway, blinked at her sleepily, and then walked off into the grass to urinate. The only one to notice him was Caprichoso, who stuck out his long muzzle and took a nip at Sheemie's butt as the boy passed him. Sheemie, still mostly asleep, reached back and pushed the muzzle away. He knew Capi's tricks well enough, so he did.
Susan dreamed of the willow grove - bird and bear and hare and fish - and what woke her wasn't Sheemie's return from his necessary but a cold circle of steel pressing into her neck. There was a loud click that she recognized at once from the Sheriff's office: a pistol being cocked. The willow grove faded from the eye of her mind.
"Shine, little sunbeam," said a voice. For a moment her bewildered, half-waking mind tried to believe it was yesterday, and Maria wanted her to get up and out of Seafront before whoever had killed Mayor Thorin and Chancellor Rimer could come back and kill her, as well.
No good. It wasn't the strong light of midmorning that her eyes opened upon, but the ash-pallid glow of five o'clock. Not a woman's voice but a man's. And not a hand shaking her shoulder but the barrel of a gun against her neck.
She looked up and saw a lined, narrow face framed by white hair. Lips no more than a scar. Eyes the same faded blue as Roland's. Eldred Jonas. The man standing behind him had bought her own da drinks once upon a happier time: Hash Renfrew. A third man, one of Jonas's ka-tet, ducked into the hut. Freezing terror filled her midsection - some for her, some for Sheemie. She wasn't sure the boy would even understand what was happening to them. These are two of the three men who tried to kill him, she thought. He'll understand that much.
"Here you are, Sunbeam, here you come," Jonas said companionably, watching her blink away the sleepfog. "Good! You shouldn't be napping all the way out here on your own, not a pretty sai such as yourself. But don't worry, I'll see you get back to where you belong."
His eyes flicked up as the redhead with the cloak stepped out of the hut. Alone. "What's she got in there. Clay? Anything?"
Reynolds shook his head. "All still on the hoss, I reckon."
Sheemie, Susan thought. Where are you, Sheemie?
Jonas reached out and caressed one of her br**sts briefly. "Nice," he said. "Tender and sweet. No wonder Dearborn likes you."
"Get yer filthy blue-marked hand off me, you bastard."
Smiling, Jonas did as she bid. He turned "his head and regarded the mule. "I know this one; it belongs to my good friend Coral. Along with everything else, you've turned livestock thief! Shameful, shameful, this younger generation. Don't you agree, sai Renfrew?"
But her father's old associate said nothing. His face was carefully blank, and Susan thought he might be just the tiniest tad ashamed of his presence here.
Jonas turned back to her, his thin lips curved in the semblance of a benevolent smile. "Well, after murder I suppose stealing a mule comes easy, don't it?"
She said nothing, only watched as Jonas stroked Capi's muzzle.
"What all were they hauling, those boys, that it took a mule to put it on?"