Is it really ? Roland thought.
He produced the Tavery twins' map, opened it, and tapped an arroyo in the hill country northeast of town. It wound its way deeper and deeper into those hills before ending in one of the Calla's old garnet mines. This one was a shaft that went thirty feet into a hillside and then stopped. The place wasn't really much like Eyebolt Canyon in Mejis (there was no thinny in the arroyo, for one thing), but there was one crucial similarity: both were dead ends. And, Roland knew, a man will try to take service again from that which has served him once. That he should pick this arroyo, this dead-end mineshaft, for his ambush of the Wolves made perfect sense. To Eddie, to Susannah, to the Eisenharts, and now to the Eisenharts' foreman. It would make sense to Sarey Adams and Rosalita Munoz. It would make sense to the Old Fella. He would disclose this much of his plan to others, and it would make sense to them, as well.
And if things were left out? If some of what he said was a lie?
If the Wolves got wind of the lie and believed it?
That would be good, wouldn't it? Good if they lunged and snapped in the right direction, but at the wrong thing?
Yes, but I'll need to trust someone with the whole truth eventually. Who? '
Not Susannah, because Susannah was now two again, and he didn't trust the other one.
Not Eddie, because Eddie might let something crucial slip to Susannah, and then Mia would know.
Not Jake, because Jake had become fast friends with Benny Slightman.
He was on his own again, and this condition had never felt more lonely to him.
"Look," he said, tapping the arroyo. "Here's a place you might think of, Slightman. Easy to get in, not so easy to get back out. Suppose we were to take all the children of a certain age and tuck them away safe in this little bit of a mine?"
He saw understanding begin to dawn in Slightman's eyes. Something else, too. Hope, maybe.
"If we hide the children, they know where," Eisenhart said. "It's as if they smell em, like ogres in a kid's cradle-story."
"So I'm told," Roland said. "What I suggest is that we could use that."
"Make em bait, you mean. Gunslinger, that's hard."
Roland, who had no intention of putting the Calla's children in the abandoned garnet mine - or anywhere near it - nodded his head. "Hard world sometimes, Eisenhart."
"Say thankya," Eisenhart replied, but his face was grim. He touched the map. "Could work. Aye, could work... if ye could suck all the Wolves in."
Wherever the children wind up, I'll need help putting them there , Roland thought. There'll have to be people who know where to go and what to do. A plan. But not yet. For now I can play the game I'm playing. It's like Castles. Because someone's hiding .
Did he know that? He did not.
Did he smell it? Aye, he did.
Now it's twenty-four , Roland thought. Twenty-four days until the Wolves .
It would have to be enough.
Chapter VI: Gran-pere's Tale
ONE
Eddie, a city boy to the core, was almost shocked by how much he liked the Jaffords place on the River Road. I could live in a place like this , he thought. That'd be okay. It'd do me fine .
It was a long log cabin, craftily built and chinked against the winter winds. Along one side there were large windows which gave a view down a long, gentle hill to the rice-fields and the river. On the other side was the barn and the dooryard, beaten dirt that had been prettied up with circular islands of grass and flowers and, to the left of the back porch, a rather exotic little vegetable garden. Half of it was filled with a yellow herb called madrigal, which Tian hoped to grow in quantity the following year.
Susannah asked Zalia how she kept the chickens out of the stuff, and the woman laughed ruefully, blowing hair back from her forehead. "With great effort, that's how," she said. "Yet the madrigal does grow, you see, and where things grow, there's always hope."
What Eddie liked was the way it all seemed to work together and produce a feeling of home. You couldn't exactly say what caused that feeling, because it was no one thing, but -
Yeah, there is one thing. And it doesn't have anything to do with the rustic log-cabin look of the place or the vegetable garden and the pecking chickens or the beds of flowers, either .
It was the kids. At first Eddie had been a little stunned by the number of them, produced for his and Suze's inspection like a platoon of soldiers for the eye of a visiting general. And by God, at first glance there looked like almost enough of them to fill a platoon... or a squad, at least.
"Them on the end're Heddon and Hedda," Zalia said, pointing to the pair of dark blonds. "They're ten. Make your manners, you two."
Heddon sketched a bow, at the same time tapping his grimy forehead with the side of an even grimier fist. Covering all the bases , Eddie thought. The girl curtsied.