And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.
Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.
"Come any closer and I'll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you are!"
Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror ... or a wizard's glass.
Jonas thought: Gods, it's him! It's Arthur Eld himself come to take me!
And as the barrel of Roland's gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.
I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But surely he won't risk the ball . . . he can't risk the ball, he's the dinh of this ka-tet and he can't risk it...
"To me!" Jonas screamed. "To me, boys! They're only three, for gods' sake! To me, you cowards!"
But he was alone - Lengyll killed with his idiotic machine-gun lying by his side, Roy a corpse glaring up at the bitter sky, Quint fled, Hookey dead, the ranchers who had ridden with them gone. Only Clay still lived, and he was miles from here.
"I'll smash it!" he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like death's sleekest engine. "Before all the gods, I'll - "
Roland thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and fired. The bullet struck the center of the tattooed hand holding the drawstring cord and vaporized the palm, leaving only fingers that twitched their random way out of a spongy red mass. For just a moment Roland saw the blue coffin, and then it was covered by downspilling blood.
The bag dropped. And, as Rusher collided with Jonas's horse and slewed it tothe side. roland caught the bag deftly in the crook of one arm. Jonas, screaming in dismay as the prize left him, grabbed at Roland, caught his shoulder, and almost succeeded in turning the gunslinger out of his saddle. Jonas's blood rained across Roland's face in hot drops.
"Give it back, you brat!" Jonas clawed under his serape and brought out another gun. "Give it back, it's mine!"
"Not anymore," Roland said. And, as Rusher danced around, quick and delicate for such a large animal, Roland fired two point-blank rounds into Jonas's face. Jonas's horse bolted out from under him and the man with the white hair landed spreadeagled on his back with a thump. His arms and legs spasmed, jerked, trembled, then stilled.
Roland looped the bag's drawstring over his shoulder and rode back toward Alain and Cuthbert, ready to give aid ... but there was no need. They sat their horses side by side in the blowing dust, at the end of a scattered road of dead bodies, their eyes wide and dazed - eyes of boys who have passed through fire for the first time and can hardly believe they have not been burned. Only Alain had been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but left a scar he bore until his dying day. He could not remember who had shot him, he said later on, or at what point of the battle. He had been lost to himself during the shooting, and had only vague memories of what had happened after the charge began. Cuthbert said much the same.
"Roland," Cuthbert said now. He passed a shaky hand down his face. "Hile, gunslinger."
"Hile."
Cuthbert's eyes were red and irritated from the sand, as if he had been crying. He took back the unspent silver slingshot balls when Roland handed them to him without seeming to know what they were. "Roland, we're alive."
"Yes."
Alain was looking around dazedly. "Where did the others go?"
"I'd say at least twenty-five of them are back there," Roland said, gesturing at the road of dead bodies. "The rest - " He waved his hand, still with a revolver in it, in a wide half-circle. "They've gone. Had their fill of Mid-World's wars, I wot."
Roland slipped the drawstring bag off his shoulder, held it before him on the bridge of his saddle for a moment, and then opened it. For a moment the bag's mouth was black, and then it filled with the irregular pulse of a lovely pink light.
It crept up the gunslinger's smooth cheeks like fingers and swam in his eyes.
"Roland," Cuthbert said, suddenly nervous, "I don't think you should play with that. Especially not now. They'll have heard the shooting out at Hanging Rock. If we're going to finish what we started, we don't have time for - "