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By Root 943 0

took the plates, which hadn’t been rinsed and still gleamed with grease. Then he turned to Jake, where a remarkable change had taken place. Sitting with Benny the Kid, watching Oy do his small clever tricks and grinning with pride, Jake had looked like any other boy of twelve—carefree and full of the old Dick, likely as not. Now the smile had fallen away and it was hard to tell just what his age might have been. His blue eyes looked into Roland’s, which were of almost the same shade. Beneath his shoulder, the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk in another life hung in its docker’s clutch. The trigger was secured with a rawhide loop which Jake now loosened without looking. It took only a single tug.

“Say your lesson, Jake, son of Elmer, and be true.”

Roland half-expected either Eddie or Susannah to interfere, but neither did. He looked at them. Their faces were as cold and grave as Jake’s. Good.

Jake’s voice was also without expression, but the words came out hard and sure.

“I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand—”

“I don’t see what this—” Overholser began.

“Shut up,” Susannah said, and pointed a finger at him.

Jake seemed not to have heard. His eyes never left Roland’s. The boy’s right hand lay on his upper chest, the fingers spread. “He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I shoot with my mind. I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.”

Jake paused. Drew in breath. And let it out speaking.

“I kill with my heart.”

“Kill these,” Roland remarked, and with no more warning than that, slung all four of the plates high into the air. They rose, spinning and separating, black shapes against the white sky.

Jake’s hand, the one resting on his chest, became a blur. It pulled the Ruger from the docker’s clutch, swung it up, and began pulling the trigger while Roland’s hand was still in the air. The plates did not seem to explode one after the other but rather all at once. The pieces rained down on the clearing. A few fell into the fire, puffing up ash and sparks. One or two clanged off Andy’s steel head.

Roland snatched upward, open hands moving in a blur. Although he had given them no command, Eddie and Susannah did the same, did it even while the visitors from Calla Bryn Sturgis cringed, shocked by the loudness of the gunfire. And the speed of the shots.

“Look here at us, do ya, and say thankee,” Roland said. He held out his hands. Eddie and Susannah did the same. Eddie had caught three pottery shards. Susannah had five (and a shallow cut on the pad of one finger). Roland had snatched a full dozen pieces of falling shrapnel. It looked like almost enough to make a whole plate, were the pieces glued back together.

The six from the Calla stared, unbelieving. Benny the Kid still had his hands over his ears; now he lowered them slowly. He was looking at Jake as one might look at a ghost or an apparition from the sky.

“My…God,” Callahan said. “It’s like a trick in some old Wild West show.”

“It’s no trick,” Roland said, “never think it. It’s the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya. And now I’ll tell you what we will do.” His eyes sought Overholser’s. “What we will do, I say, for no man bids us. Yet I think nothing I say will discomfort you too badly. If mayhap it does—” Roland shrugged. If it does, too bad, that shrug said.

He dropped the pottery shards between his boots and dusted his hands.

“If those had been Wolves,” he said, “there would have been fifty-six left to trouble you instead of sixty. Four of them lying dead on the ground before you could draw a breath. Killed by a boy.” He gazed at Jake. “What you would call a boy, mayhap.” Roland paused. “We’re used to long odds.”

“The young fella’s a breathtaking shot, I’d grant ye,” said Slightman the Elder. “But there’s a difference between clay dishes and Wolves on horseback.”

“For you, sai, perhaps. Not for us. Not once the shooting