did, Roland squatted on his hunkers. Eddie and Jake did the same (and to Susannah, hunkers were almost a
way of life). The gunslinger spoke almost curtly.
"Time is short, so tell me, each of you, and don't shillyshally: honest or not?"
"Honest," Susannah said at once, then gave another little wince and rubbed beneath her left breast.
"Honest," said Jake.
"Onnes," said Oy, although he had not been asked.
"Honest," Eddie agreed, "but look." He took an unburned twig from the edge of the campfire, brushed away a
patch of pine-duff, and wrote in the black earth underneath:
Calla Callahan
"Live or Memorex?" Eddie said. Then, seeing Susannah's confusion: "Is it a coincidence, or does it mean
something?"
"Who knows?" Jake asked. They were all speaking in low tones, heads together over the writing in the dirt.
"It's like nineteen."
"I think it's only a coincidence," Susannah said. "Surely not everything we encounter on our path is ka, is it? I
mean, these don't even sound the same." And she pronounced them, Calla with the tongue up, making the
broad-a sound, Callahan with the tongue down, making a much sharper a-sound. " Calla's Spanish in our
world… like many of the words you remember from Mejis, Roland. It means street or square, I think… don't
hold me to it, because high school Spanish is far behind me now. But if I'm right, using the word as a prefix
for the name of a town—or a whole series of them, as seems to be the case in these parts—makes pretty good
sense. Not perfect, but pretty good. Callahan, on the other hand…" She shrugged. "What is it? Irish?
English?"
"It's sure not Spanish," Jake said. "But the nineteen thing—"
"Piss on nineteen," Roland said rudely. "This isn't the time for number games. He'll be back here with his
friends in short order, and I would speak to you an-tet of another matter before he does."
"Do you think he could possibly be right about Black Thirteen?" Jake asked.
"Yes," Roland said. "Based just on what happened to you and Eddie last night, I think the answer is yes.
Dangerous for us to have such a thing if he is right, but have it we must. I fear these Wolves out of
Thunderclap will if we don't. Never mind, that need not trouble us now."
Yet Roland looked very troubled indeed. He turned his regard toward Jake.
"You started when you heard the big farmer's name. So did you, Eddie, although you concealed it better."
"Sorry," Jake said. "I have forgotten the face of—"
"Not even a bit have you," Roland said. "Unless I have, as well. Because I've heard the name myself, and
recently. I just can't remember where." Then, reluctantly: "I'm getting old."
"It was in the bookstore," Jake said. He took his pack, fiddled nervously with the straps, undid them. He
flipped the pack open as he spoke. It was as if he had to make sure Charlie the Choo-Chooand Riddle-De-
Dumwere still there, still real. "The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind. It's so weird. Once it happened to me
and once I watched it happen to me. That'd make a pretty good riddle all by itself."
Roland made a rapid rotating gesture with his diminished right hand, telling him to go on and be quick.
"Mr. Tower introduced himself," Jake said, "and then I did the same. Jake Chambers, I said. And he said—"
" 'Good handle, partner,'" Eddie broke in. "That's what he said. Then he said Jake Chambers sounded like the
name of the hero in a Western novel."
" 'The guy who blows into Black Fork, Arizona, cleans up the town, then moves on,'"Jake quoted. "And then
he said, 'Something by Wayne D. Overholser, maybe.' " He looked at Susannah and repeated it. "Wayne D.
Overholser. And if you tell me that's a coincidence, Susannah…" He broke into a sunny, sudden grin. "I'll tell
you to kiss my white-boy ass."
Susannah laughed. "No need of that, sass-box. I don't believe it's a coincidence. And when we meet
Callahan's farmer friend, I intend to ask him what his middle name is. I set my warrant that it'll not only
begin with D, it'll be something like Dean or Dane, just four letters—" Her hand went back to the place
below her breast. "This gas! My! What I wouldn't give for a roll of Tums or even a bottle of—" She broke off
again. "Jake, what is it? What's wrong?"
Jake was holding Charlie the Choo-Choo in his hands, and his face had gone dead white. His eyes were
huge, shocked. Beside him, Oy whined uneasily. Roland leaned over to look, and his eyes also widened.
"Good gods," he said.
Eddie and Susannah looked. The title was the same. The picture was the same: an anthropomorphic
locomotive puffing up a hill, its cowcatcher wearing a grin, its headlight a cheerful eye.
But the yellow letters across the bottom, Story and Pictures by Beryl Evans, were gone. There was no credit
line there at all.
Jake turned the book and looked at the spine. It said Charlie the Choo-Choo and McCauley House,
Publishers. Nothing else.
South of them now, the sound of voices. Callahan and his friends, approaching. Callahan from the Calla.
Callahan of the Lot, he had also called himself.
"Title page, sugar," Susannah said. "Look there, quick."
Jake did. Once again there was only the title of the story and the publisher's name, this time with a colophon.
"Look at the copyright page," Eddie said.
Jake turned the page. Here, on the verso of the title page and beside the recto where the story began, was the
copyright information. Except there was no information, not really.
Copyright 1936, it said. Numbers which added up to nineteen. The rest was blank.
Contents -Prev / Next
Chapter V: OVERHOLSER
ONE
Susannah was able to observe a good deal on that long and interesting day, because Roland gave her the
chance and because, after her morning's sickness passed off, she felt wholly herself again.
Just before Callahan and his party drew within earshot, Roland murmured to her, "Stay close to me, and not a
word from you unless I prompt it. If they take you for my sh'veen, let it be so."
Under other circumstances, she might have had something pert to say about the idea of being Roland's quiet
little side-wife, his nudge in the night, but there was no time this morning, and in any case, it was far from a
joking matter; the seriousness in his face made that clear. Also, the part of the faithful, quiet second appealed
to her. In truth, any part appealed to her. Even as a child, she had rarely been so happy as when pretending to
be someone else.
Which probably explains all there is about you worth knowing, sugar, she thought.
"Susannah?" Roland asked. "Do you hear me?"
"Hear you well," she told him. "Don't you worry about me."
"If it goes as I want, they'll see you little and you'll see them much."
As a woman who'd grown up black in mid-twentieth-century America (Odetta had laughed and applauded
her way through Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, often rocking back and forth in her seat like one who has
been visited by a revelation), Susannah knew exactly what he wanted. And would give it to him. There was a
part of her—a spiteful Detta Walker part—that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and
mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.
TWO
Watching Roland make the introductions (Susannah was presented dead last, after Jake, and almost
negligendy), she had time to reflect on how fine she felt now that the nagging gas-pains in her left side had
departed. Hell, even the lingering headache had gone its way, and that sucker had been hanging around—
sometimes in the back of her head, sometimes at one temple or the other, sometimes just above her left eye,
like a migraine waiting to hatch—for a week or more. And of course there were the mornings. Every one
found her feeling nauseated and with a bad case of jelly-leg for the first hour or so. She never vomited, but
for that first hour she always felt on the verge of it. She wasn't stupid enough to mistake such symptoms, but
had reason to know they meant nothing. She just hoped she wouldn't embarrass herself by swelling up as her
Mama's friend Jessica had done, not once but twice. Two false pregnancies, and in both cases that woman
had looked ready to bust out twins. Triplets, even. But of course Jessica Beasley's periods had stopped, and
that made it all too easy for a woman to believe she was with child. Susannah knew she wasn't pregnant for
the simplest of reasons: she was still menstruating. She had begun a period on the very day they had
awakened back on the Path of the Beam, with the Green Palace twenty-five or thirty miles behind them.
She'd had another since then. Both courses had been exceptionally heavy, necessitating the use of many rags
to soak up the dark flow, and before then her menses had always been light, some months no more than a few
of the spots her mother called "a lady's roses." Yet she didn't complain, because before her arrival in this
world, her periods had usually been painful and sometimes excruciating. The two she'd had since returning to
the Path of the Beam hadn't hurt at all. If not for the soaked rags she'd carefully buried to one side of their
path or the other, she wouldn't have had a clue that it was her time of the month. Maybe it was the purity of
the water.
Of course she knew what all this was about; it didn't take a rocket scientist, as Eddie sometimes said. The
crazy, scrambled dreams she couldn't recall, the weakness and nausea in the mornings, the transient
headaches, the strangely fierce gas attacks and occasional cramps all came down to the same thing: she
wanted his baby. More than anything else in the world, she wanted Eddie Dean's chap growing in her belly.
What she didn't want was to puff up in a humiliating false pregnancy.
Never mind all that now, she thought as Callahan approached with the others. Right now you've got to watch.
Got to see what Roland and Eddie and Jake don't see. That way nothing gets dropped. And she felt she could
do that job very well.
Really, she had never felt finer in her life.
THREE
Callahan came first. Behind him were two men, one who looked about thirty and another who looked to
Susannah nearly twice that. The older man had heavy cheeks that would be jowls in another five years or so,
and lines carving their courses from the sides of his nose down to his chin. "I-want lines," her father would
have called them (and Dan Holmes had had a pretty good set of his own). The younger man wore a battered
sombrero, the older a clean white Stetson that made Susannah want to smile—it looked like the kind of hat
the good guy would wear in an old black-and-white Western movie. Still, she guessed a lid like that didn't
come cheap, and she thought the man wearing it had to be Wayne Overholser. "The big farmer," Roland had
called him. The one that had to be convinced, according to Callahan.
But not by us, Susannah thought, which was sort of a relief. The tight mouth, the shrewd eyes, and most of all
those deep-carved lines (there was another slashed vertically into his brow, just above the eyes) suggested sai
Overholser would be a pain in the ass when it came to convincing.
Just behind these two—specifically behind the younger of the two—there came a tall, handsome woman,
probably not black but nonetheless nearly as dark-skinned as Susannah herself. Bringing up the rear was an
earnest-looking man in spectacles and farmer's clothes and a likely-looking boy probably two or three years
older than Jake. The resemblance between this pair was impossible to miss; they had to be Slightman the
Elder and Younger.
Boy may be older than Jake in years, she thought, but he's got a soft bok about him, all the same. True, but
not necessarily a bad thing. Jake had seen far too much for a boy not yet in his teens. Done too much, as well.
Overholser looked at their guns (Roland and Eddie each wore one of the big revolvers with the sandalwood
grips; the .44 Ruger from New York City hung under Jake's arm in what Roland called a docker's clutch),
then at Roland. He made a perfunctory salute, his half-closed fist skimming somewhere at least close to his
forehead. There was no bow. If Roland was offended by this, it didn't show on his face. Nothing showed on
his face but polite interest.
"Hile, gunslinger," the man who had been walking beside Overholser said, and this one actually dropped to
one knee, with his head down and his brow resting on his fist. "I am Tian Jaffords, son of Luke. This lady is
my wife, Zalia."
"Hile," Roland said. "Let me be Roland to you, if it suits. May your days be long upon the earth, sai
Jaffords."
"Tian. Please. And may you and your friends have twice the—"
"I'm Overholser," the man in the white Stetson broke in brusquely. "We've come to meet you—you and your
friends— at the request of Callahan and young Jaffords. I'd pass the formalities and get down to business as
soon as possible, do ya take no offense, I beg."
"Ask pardon but that's not quite how it is," Jaffords said. "There was a meeting, and the men of the Calla
voted—"
Overholser broke in again. He was, Susannah thought, just that kind of man. She doubted he was even aware
he was doing it. "The town, yes. The Calla. I've come along with every wish to do right by my town and my
neighbors, but this is a busy time for me, none busier—"
"Charyou tree," Roland said mildly, and although Susannah knew a deeper meaning for this phrase, one that
